Good opinion piece in the Irish Times from Talamh Beo’s Manchán Magan, explaining the benefits of Community Supported Agriculture: “This localised, diverse farming was how food was always produced until international seed and chemical fertiliser behemoths began luring farmers towards new soil-depleting practices, with the promise of increased profits – not admitting that it was at the expense of the health of the soil and the surrounding environment”.…
local economy
Cap and Share in India (from Sharing for Survival)
Should the funds from Cap and Share be distributed equally to individuals or are there better ways of using them? Indians are even more in need of financial help than those suffering from austerity programmes in the west, but James Bruges explains why he believes it would be better to distribute to community organisations in India. He starts his chapter of Sharing for Survival with some comments on climate and also covers related economic issues.
The Lot of the Currency Designer
This paper was prepared by Graham Barnes for the International Social Transformation Conference in Split, Croatia, He argues that "once we realise that currency - nay, money in general - can be designed to fulfill or support specific objectives, it sets us free. Free from the constraints of the broken pseudo-science that is mainstream economics; free to recognise that not all transactions are of equal importance; and potentially free to redesign ourselves away from our existing pervasive elite monetary hegemony and reclaim the monetary commons."
The nutritional resilience approach to food security
by Bruce Darrell, from Fleeing Vesuvius. This paper describes practices for ensuring that we can continue to feed ourselves adequately in the future, with a focus on the need to ensure that the soil contains an optimal mix of nutrients. Very few soils have a perfect balance of minerals. As a result, their fertility is limited and the crops grown on them cannot provide all the nutrients people need. As people can get food from elsewhere at present, these local deficiencies do not matter too much. But this situation is likely to change.
