The CBC has an article about how the closure of the Confederation Bridge for two days led to food shortages in PEI supermarkets. Just a quick reminder about how sensitive our current food system can be to disruptions in transportation or energy supply.
I attended the Waterloo Region Food Summit keynote last night and learned quite a bit about food banks and farmers. One speaker was from The Stop, a food bank in Toronto and she talked about a new campaign to make policy change on poverty in Ontario. It’s been a long time that politicians have been talking about reducing poverty, but very little is happening.
The current recession makes the need more urgent, but also makes the decision to spend more to reduce poverty more financially responsible. Economists are quite clear that the best way to get more money into circulation in the economy is to give it to the poorest people you can find, because they will spend it, while those of us who are well-off are more likely to dump it into a savings account. And yet governments are still not putting the money where it is most needed, and food bank use is increasing rapidly.
Research in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine estimates that 50% of American children and 90% of black American children will use food stamps during their childhood, in part due to the current economic problems in the U.S. Those are big numbers.
Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, has a piece in the New York Times arguing that large banks should be broken up.
So you recycle, you turn the lights off when you leave the room, you compost, you don’t idle your car and you take shorter showers. If everyone follows your example, would that fix the environmental problems of the world? Derrick Jensen’s essay makes a convincing case that without political and legal change, personal change means little.
