Eco-Israel

Tom Philpott:

Thus to break the stranglehold of industrial food over the American diet, we need to find new ways to connect consumers with mid-sized farmers. The infrastructure for doing so — locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries — has withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades. And farmers themselves, with their razor-thin if not negative profit margins, don’t have the resources to make those investments. Closing the gap between mid-sized farmers and their nearby communities counts, I think, as the major challenge of the sustainable-food movement going forward.

So far, the most promising efforts to meet that challenge have come at the local level. Last fall, I wrote about one such effort in Woodbury County, Iowa. There, farmers and consumers have worked hard to raise money to create a farmer-owned restaurant, processing center, distribution business, and grocery store — explicitly to give the area’s remaining mid-sized farms a viable market other than the one for corn and soy. All over the country, similar initiatives are bubbling up, and I’ll continue highlighting them.

…

Click to see a slideshow of Woodbury County’s sustainable-food revolution. 

Compiled in October of 2010 this list details some of the accomplishments of the top environmentalists in Israel.  Who else would you include in this list?

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.

Sunday March 13th at 2pm Eastern time, we are hosting an information session. During the session we’ll discuss the various aspects of the Eco-Israel experience and you’ll be able to ask questions.  To register for the session follow the link.