The Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition is a food think tank based in Milan. Their Young Earth Solutions! student contest is open and they are looking for project ideas that make our food system more sustainable.
Deadline: 31st May 2015
Prize: €10,000
See this article from the Food Tank for more details.
Today I gave a Pecha Kucha. A Pecha Kucha is a presentation of 6:20 with a series of 20 slides that change every 20 seconds. It is an unforgiving format that is admittedly probably engaging and potentially energizing for the audience but as a speaker it offers no space to engage with, or respond to, the audience and no room for error in your speech as the slides keep rolling even if you are not quite ready for them to! I get the appeal and the value but for an academic presentation, this is a terrifying format. Indeed, I found it so challenging to frame an academic paper/idea this way that I instead opted to give what amounts to more of a political speech.
I struggled to develop my talk for today, more so than any talk I have given in recent (maybe even distant) memory. I was intimidated by…
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In a campaign (Facebook page) with different activities such as an picket-line at the venue of the annual shareholders meeting Wednesday April 15 (12.00-14.30) an appeal is made to Ahold to join the Fair Food Program just like McDonalds, Burger King and worlds largest retailer Wallmart already did. An open letter to Ahold has been published with an online petition. The letter is signed by a.o. FNV, Fairwork and our Rural Sociology Group. If you have viewed the video above, you can visit the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), initiators of the Fair Food Program, learn about the Fair Food Program, what they ask and sign the petition if you agree Ahold should join the program now.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) Fair Food Program is a unique partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for the workers who pick fruits and vegetables on participating farms. It harnesses the power of consumer demand to give farmworkers a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and to eliminate the longstanding abuses that have plagued agriculture for generations.
Food Chains is a documentary on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Program. Next Thursday April 23, 19.00 (Forum building, room C222), Food Chains will be shown followed by a panel discussion with a member of the CIW. This event is co-organised by the Boerengroep, Otherwise, RUW and the Rural Sociology Group
Vorige week is de ‘omzet en impactmeting multifunctionele landbouw’ aangeboden aan de Staatssecretaris van Landbouw. Deze meting is de vierde in een reeks waarin we de stand van zaken van de multifunctionele landbouw bekijken; wat is de omzet van de sector en wat betekent ze voor de maatschappij? Ik ben sinds de tweede meting bij dit onderzoek betrokken en ben verantwoordelijk voor het meten van de impact van de multifunctionele landbouw.
Terwijl de methoden van de omzetmeting elk jaar zoveel mogelijk gelijk zijn, om de getallen van de verschillende metingen goed te kunnen vergelijken, doen we bij de impactmeting vaak juist iets anders om het beeld dat we hebben completer te maken. Deze keer hebben we gekeken wat de multifunctionele landbouw betekent voor een specifieke regio, in dit geval de regio’s rond Lopik en Woerden. Een interessante en onverwachte bevinding is dat de multifunctionele landbouw vooral veel lijkt te betekenen…
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In this article published in Agrarian South the authors focus on two ways in which smallholders—rural families, the peasantry—are responding to the contemporary neoliberal environment in Turkey by resisting commodification. This comprises the maintenance of non-commodity circuits, but also through engagement in labour relations. The latter emerges through manifold, variegated, and informal linkages structured around kin and community and enabled by mobility and migration. Thus, superseding the rural–urban division of space and going beyond capitalistic relations, these comprise a contemporary form of ‘solidarity-network-based social commons’. Presented in this example from Turkey, therefore, are different ways in which smallholder farming operates as a locus of resilience for extended family and village/locality interconnectivity that offers a distance from markets, even as it utilizes them with novel forms of communally oriented autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the urban and goes beyond capital.
