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Agroforestry in the Amazon
Maria Viera”The two first years, while we cleared the land, we survived on rat, palm heart, the flour from the babassu palm and other wild plants,” Maria Viera says when she receives us in her home in...
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Millennium Villages: the Great Experiment
The Millennium Villages is one of the most prestigious humanitarian aid projects that have been launched in Africa in the past years, and a lot has actually happened. Yet, the project’s central...
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Brown: Full Planet & Empy Plates
“Food is the new oil, land is the new gold” writes Lester R. Brown in Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (Earth Policy Institute).The world food situation is deteriorating....
View ArticleChaotic collapse or long descent?
In the peak-oil/end of growth community there is a general agreement that we have seen the end of “this civilization”, and my post here is about the scenario ahead if you have already accepted the...
View ArticleThe world after money
Blindness to the impact of non-economic factors on economic processes, belief in the infallibility of free markets and the reliance on irrelevant statistics such as the GDP worked reasonably well...
View ArticleGrowing out of poverty or grow poverty?
The poorest farmers in the world are unlikely to farm themselves out of poverty. They simply lack resources to invest in agriculture, and paradoxically they often even lack the labor needed as they are...
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Chicken and fertilizers
Dolly Partons sings:We've got chicken every Sunday and the preacher comes aroundAnd every Saturday morning daddy takes us all to town Today "Sunday Chicken" is no institution. Chicken is everywhere and...
View ArticleTop five
We have now reached 70,000 page views on this blog. I am glad someone is reading my mix of general society rants and agriculture perspectives. I can also announce that I work on a new book which will...
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Development - of what? for what?
A proud farmer with plantains, SamoaA few years ago, I spent a few weeks in Samoa, a paradise Pacific island country. I was part of a World Bank team assisting the government in the development of a...
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How wet is your cucumber?
There are many arguments about the effects of our food consumption. In particular, the consumption of meat is often portrayed as harmful, be it for the climate, for food supply or for our health. What...
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Groundbreaking innovations: the shopping cart and the container
Forget the mobile phone and the computer. Forget television and the Green revolution. The two major game-changers of the 20th century were the shopping cart and the container. The capacity for human...
View ArticleYakuniku - The Emperor's new dish
If you eaten in a Japanese restaurant, chances are big that you devoured Yakiniku, grilled meat. You probably believe it is developed from a long tradition of street vendors selling barbecue. Nothing...
View ArticleEthics for sale?
Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, opened a store in Baltimore 1836 which sold only goods obtained by labor from free people. This is an early example of ethical marketing which continued up to the end of...
View ArticleA new book is emerging
From Extraction to Regeneration: Food and Farming for the 21st Century Industrial food and farming have been very successful in producing more food, and cheaper food. But it has come at a very high...
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A mosaic of regenerative agriculture systems
"The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to an “ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional,...
View ArticleWhy competition is unsustainable
Large farms now dominate crop production in the United States. Although most cropland was operated by farms with less than 600 crop acres in the early 1980s, today most cropland is on farms with at...
View ArticleClean up the cloud
First I deleted a travel blog I kept during an epic bicycle trip from Sweden down to Turkey and back. Then I deleted most of my pictures in the Picasa files on the net. Then I closed down two domains...
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Gain weight with organic!
A few months ago I visited the Yasofman farmers group in the dry Yatta area in Kenya, on the road to Somalia. As customary we started the visit to the farmers by a meeting with selected leaders in...
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Systematic collapse or collapsing systems? Review of Orlov's The Five Stages...
In the parking lot of the guest house where I stay in Banga, Burundi, 105 people were killed in the civil war which ravaged the country from 1995 to 2005. It is a coincidence that I read Orlov’s book...
View ArticleEnergy slaves revisited
"If all the energy we currently derive from fossil fuels alone (i.e. not including nuclear or renewables) was suddenly unavailable, and we had at our disposal a few handy nearby planets populated with...
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