agriculture definition

The August issue of National Geographic Magazine has a fascinating article titled, Sugar Love: A Not So Sweet Tale .  It's a fascinating article. In the beginning, on the island of New Guinea, where sugarcane was domesticated some 10,000 years ago, people picked cane and ate it raw, chewing a stem until the taste hit their tongue like a starburst. A kind of elixir, a cure for every ailment, an answer for every mood, sugar featured prominently in ancient New Guinean myths. In one the first man makes love to a stalk of cane, yielding the human race. At religious ceremonies priests sipped sugar water from coconut shells, a beverage since replaced in sacred ceremonies with cans of Coke. Our love of sugar is traced back through the centuries, chronicling its rise from a "luxury spice" to a "staple, first for the middle class and then for the poor."  The need for sugar has fueled colonialism, slavery, and widespread environmental devastation.  Yet we always seem to wa...

The House of Representative's decision to strip the Nutrition Title from the Farm Bill before passage and the targeting of the food assistance programs for drastic budget cuts prompt me to offer my perspectives.  Much of the discussion has been misleading. First, clarification of the problem. �Food security� means �access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members.�  According to the well-document USDA Economic Research Service Report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2011 , almost 15% of Americans were food insecure at some time during 2011, with �5.7 percent with very low food security�meaning that the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food.� In Arkansas, where I live and work, the rate is even higher, with a food insecurity rate of 18.6%. Even more alarming -  28.6% of A...

From Al Jazeera, comes this video on how roughly � two million farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have ditched chemical pesticides in favour of natural repellants and fertilisers, as part of a growing eco-agriculture movement. � This represents, I think, agricultural production (pardon the pun) �on the ground ,� in a literal and figurative sense in contrast to hyper-industrialized capitalist agriculture, as an eminently rational process of political economy and ecology (thus, political ecology) beyond the impoverished assumptions of Malthusian Social Darwinism, the political premises of messianic neo-imperialism, and the Promethean promises of bio-technology (recall, for instance, the extent to which America �s export[1] of plant-breeding science was an integral part of the Cold War �s defense of capitalist political economics and economy and the �battle for freedom �). In other words, the original Green Revolution, as John H. Perkins argued in Geopolitics and the Green ...