World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050 is a major report predicting global agricultural trends (Alexandratos & Bruinsma, 2012). It was produced by the economics division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In its abstract the FAO authors make a prominent disclaimer. Its projections, they stress (both on p. i and p. 7), are not to be used for normative purposes; that is, their report is not a prescription of how the global food system should develop.

"I say to the Walton family: Get off welfare," declared Sen. Bernie Sanders in response to the government study he commissioned. "Pay your workers a living wage—at least $15 an hour."

Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too. 

I got an article this week. It appeared in Civil Eats, and it had quotations from Linley Dixon, Kathleen Merrigan, and others about COVID, farm scale, and feeding people. It raised very important questions.

After fires and the coronavirus cut wages for many Central Valley farmworkers, a winter slowdown means families are unable to pay for necessities.

In recent months, meatpacking companies in different parts of the world have been associated with large clusters of COVID-19 infections. The Tönnies meat-processing plant in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, was temporarily closed, and U.S.-based pork processor Smithfield became a major focus of the disease in South Dakota, one of the country’s least-populated states. In Brazil, complaints abound about COVID-19 at slaughterhouses: 20% of the industry’s workers have been infected, according to the National Confederation of Workers in Food and Related-Industries (CNTA).