Matt Kelly – Meet This Third-Generation Farmer Who Converted His 1,400 Acres to Growing Organic Food

In the U.S., corn is our big crop: 94 million acres farmed in 2012. It’s followed by soybeans (76 million acres) and wheat (49 million acres). There’s also the 55 million acres used to grow hay for livestock. And keep in mind that the majority of this corn is being used to feed animals; the remainder is used to manufacture starch, …

Colin Todhunter – Fast Food Nations: Selling Out to Junk Food, Illness and Food Insecurity

Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA) and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture …

Josh Schlossberg – The Bio-Massters: If You Build It, They Will Cut and Cut and Cut B

Generating biomass energy doesn’t result in more logging, according to the biomass industry, whose spokespersons claim facilities only make use of “waste” wood already coming from existing logging operations. Ron Kotrba, Senior Editor for Pellet Mill Magazine, wrote in the May/June 2015 issue that biomass is the “most unlikely of the forest products to drive the general practice of forestry …

No growth boost from developing economies says World Bank By Nick Beams

In the years immediately following the global financial crisis of 2008, the claim was frequently advanced that, while the major capitalist economies were severely impacted, the so-called developing economies would provide a new base for world growth. This upbeat assessment has looked increasingly fragile in the recent period. It has now been officially buried in the latest report on the …

US Economy Collapses Again – JACK RASMUS

Data released last week by the U.S. government showed the U.S. economy came to a near halt in the first three months of 2015, falling to nearly zero – i.e. a mere 0.2 percent annual growth rate for the January-March quarter. The collapse was the fourth time that the U.S. economy in the past four years either came to a …

Obama’s Big Trade Failure – DEAN BAKER

The Obama administration is doing its full court press, pulling out all the stops to get Congress to approve the fast-track authority that is almost certainly necessary to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. One of the biggest remaining stumbling blocks is that the deal will almost certainly not include provisions on currency. This means that parties to the …

Still Leading Pack, US Arms Exporters Extract Increasing Profits From Foreign Conflict Zones

As the number-one exporter of major arms world-wide, the United States is extracting ever-increasing profits from the global rise in war and military escalation, a new study by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) finds. Between 2010 and 2014, global conventional weapons transfers jumped 16 percent as compared to 2005-2009, the researchers found. The U.S. alone accounted for 31 percent of international …