Displaying items by tag: Agriculture

Cultivation of coca, the base ingredient for cocaine, is booming in Colombia. The government tries to slash production by employing hundreds of people and police officers to destroy crops, but armed gangs and drug traffickers oppose them. People have died in recent clashes over coca; others have been injured by landmines laid to scare people away from destroying coca plants. The minister of foreign affairs blamed coca growth on the scheming of drug-trafficking gangs and peasants planting more coca to take advantage of the new substitution initiatives under the peace accords. However, the government should be offering peasant farmers better incentives to grow alternative crops. After 200 years of reforms and many billions of pesos invested, the same inequality in agriculture persists. There is a lack of political will on the part of the state to make the peasant farmers’ economy viable. See

Brexit could injure food and farming or reform it; depending on whether we adopt, amend, or abolish about 4,500 EU regulations. If Michael Gove can highlight the future of our food and farming in negotiation and not reduce it to a bargaining chip, he could make interventions to change our food system for the better. Using government procurement for schools, hospitals, the military and prisons to favour healthy British food. He could adopt a joined-up policy and target subsidies to increase production of the sort we need for health – more fruit and vegetables, less sugar and intensive meat production. He could ensure new trade deals are built on maintaining welfare and environmental standards, not lowering them to compete in new markets. He could insist that continued access to foreign labour is tied to the industry, improving what are often appalling working conditions and pay so that British workers are drawn back to jobs they now shun. See also the Bishop of St Albans comments on ‘Food Security’ at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/09/food-security-has-to-be-a-brexit-priority?CMP=twt_gu