"The number of Americans that have trouble putting food on the table shot up last year in an unprecedented spike to a record 17 million households, the government reported on Monday. The Department of Agriculture report, which has been released annually since 1995, said the number of Americans that were hungry rose to 14.6%. In 2007, 13 million households or 11.1% of Americans had trouble getting enough food. The one-year jump is all the more significant, given the number of hungry Americans had never been higher than 11.9% since these surveys began."

It is well-planned — one, two, three strikes for destruction of the country: 1) Bill Clinton outsourced our industry under NAFTA (how did Hillary get a single vote in Ohio?). Since then, the US has been stripped of virtually all its industrial base; 2)George W. Bush “outsourced” our economy, setting up the bailout that funded international banking interests. Obama followed, even signing an agreement in May with the G-20 arranging that the US has only one vote in its own banking system now; 3) And now the final grab, one which puts the loss of jobs and money into pale comparison – corporations are going after control of the US food supply.

Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors’ perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.

The global food crisis has prompted various rich countries to start buying up land in the poorer world to secure their food supplies. As well as affecting domestic food supplies in the countries affected, Sue Branford says it could be a time bomb for the world’s ability to cope with climate change. -- The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. At present, there are more than a billion people going hungry even though there is no shortage of food. The very poor don’t eat enough because they don’t have enough money. The underlying problem is one of social inequality, of the highly skewed distribution of financial resources in the world. -- Over the next century much worse food shortages may emerge. The climate crisis is already arriving far more quickly than scientists expected and proving far more dangerous. For a while, many scientists believed that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be partly compensated for by an increase in plant growth, caused by the greater availability of CO2. But now it seems that carbon fertilization, as it is called, will not happen or will happen far less reliably than was once imagined. --- And the world destroys its biodiversity at its peril, for it is hugely important to have genetically varied populations and species-rich natural and agricultural ecosystems, particularly at times of environmental stress. - Biodiversity plays a crucial role in supplying the raw materials and the genes that make possible the emergence of the new plant varieties on which we all depend. Such new varieties will be urgently required as the world heats up.

While running for president, Obama promised Iowa voters that Big Ag would not call the shots on his administration's farm policy. "We'll tell ConAgra that it's not the Department of Agribusiness," he proclaimed. Yet agribusiness seems pretty satisfied with Siddiqui's nomination—more than 40 companies and trade groups signed a letter applauding it. Siddiqui is a textbook example of the type of revolving door careerist that Obama promised to shun for key administration posts. Before joining CropLife, he held several jobs in Bill Clinton's Department of Agriculture, including senior agricultural trade adviser and undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs. During that period, he advocated against efforts to label genetically modified foods.

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike. Now it turns out it’s in our food.

Most farmers I know, (not all but most), see organic farming as just another way to farm, curious, perhaps a bit backward, but to most conventional farmers organic farming doesn't even register. With agribusiness however, it's another story. They're not content with just 96.5% of the food system, they want it all. Those who have their priorities confused, need to figure out who their enemies really are.

Federal guidelines currently put the daily upper limit of safe exposure at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight. But that level is based on a handful of experiments done in the 1980s rather than hundreds of more recent animal and laboratory studies indicating that serious health risks could result from much lower doses of BPA. Several animal studies show adverse effects, such as abnormal reproductive development, at exposures of 2.4 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, a dose that could be reached by a child eating one or a few servings daily or an adult daily diet that includes multiple servings of canned foods containing BPA levels comparable to some of the foods Consumer Reports tested. In keeping with established practices that ensure an adequate margin of safety for human exposure, Consumer Reports’ food-safety scientists recommend limiting daily exposure to BPA to one-thousandth of that level (standard safety limit setting practice), or 0.0024 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, significantly lower than FDA’s current safety limit.

Bankruptcy Filings to Match Divorce Filings in 2009: 1.5 Million. 35.8 Million Americans on Food Stamps - 11 Percent of the Population. It is a sobering fact that in 2009, there will be as many people filing for bankruptcy as those filing for a divorce. We are on track to seeing an average of nearly 5,900 bankruptcy filings a day for 2009. While some people use the stock market as their barometer of economic recovery, there are a few other “misery” indicators that show things are still bad for millions of Americans and counter the recovery talks. If you want to track a broader recovery, I would recommend people examine the five indicators of the misery index. Food stamps, bankruptcies, long-term unemployed, foreclosures, and credit card defaults are probably your best gauges to the real economic recovery.

While the USDA's Food Distribution Programs (FDPs)have claimed to prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income populations, that goal would seem difficult to come by when the focus has been more on maintaining government ties with the big agricultural industries than it has been on actually seeking to make Americans healthier. Through its FDPs and under the label of "entitlement commodities" or "bonus commodities", the USDA has managed to redistribute more than a billion pounds of conventional surplus foods each year. Even White House Chef Sam Kass caught on to the government's long-standing loyalties a while ago.

Many people think of agriculture as a tradition-bound occupation. It is far more like information technology, as high-tech companies genetically engineer seeds and a few powerful companies strive to dominate the market. Following a decade of unchecked consolidation, it is time for the Justice Department to take a hard look at potentially anticompetitive behavior. - A good place to start is with Monsanto, which is trying to block DuPont from adding its own genetic traits to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology to produce soybeans that would be resistant to multiple pesticides. Seeds carrying Monsanto’s genes can resist Roundup, the ubiquitous weedkiller. They are the dominant standard in American fields — present in 97 percent of the soybean crops and 79 percent of the corn, akin to Microsoft Windows on computers. - Earlier this year, Monsanto sued DuPont for patent infringement. In response, DuPont accused Monsanto of hindering innovation through restrictive licensing agreements. It also charges that Monsanto is pre-empting competition from generic makers by threatening to revoke seed companies’ licenses if they don’t switch to a new version before Monsanto’s patent expires in 2014. - Agriculture is at the frontier of technological progress. Its innovations will determine, to a large extent, whether and at what cost this country and the world will be able to feed its growing populations. No company should dominate such an essential business.

New labels listing the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production of foods, from whole wheat pasta to fast food burgers, are appearing on some grocery items and restaurant menus around the country. - People who live to eat might dismiss this as silly. - But changing one’s diet can be as effective in reducing emissions of climate-changing gases as changing the car one drives or doing away with the clothes dryer, scientific experts say. - If the new food guidelines were religiously heeded, some experts say, Sweden could cut its emissions from food production by 20 to 50 percent. -- An estimated 25 percent of the emissions produced by people in industrialized nations can be traced to the food they eat, according to recent research here. And foods vary enormously in the emissions released in their production. -- While today’s American or European shoppers may be well versed in checking for nutrients, calories or fat content, they often have little idea of whether eating tomatoes, chicken or rice is good or bad for the climate. - Complicating matters, the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown. - Earlier studies of food emissions focused on the high environmental costs of transporting food and raising cattle. But more nuanced research shows that the emissions depend on many factors; including the type of soil used to grow the food and whether a dairy farmer uses local rapeseed or imported soy for cattle feed. Business groups, farming cooperatives and organic labeling programs as well as the government have gamely come up with coordinated ways to identify food choices.

Brazil and China have been praised, but India criticised, in a new report that evaluates the efforts of developing countries to tackle hunger. ActionAid produced the set of rankings in a report released on Friday, designated World Food Day by the UN. The report also judges the efforts of rich countries, saying Luxembourg is trying hardest to end global hunger. The US and New Zealand rank bottom.

A public health advocacy organization is urging the Senate to grant speedy approval of food safety legislation, citing the 5,000 annual U.S. deaths attributed to foodborne illness.

Chemicals called 'obesogens' are in our food, cars and homes, according to recent scientific studies -- and they may be making us fat. It's hard to escape the image of Americans as slothful and overweight. But what if being fat weren't totally our fault? The narrative we pound into our heads everyday is that we live in a country where fast food rules, where morning coffee drinks can provide nearly one-quarter of your daily calories before you even get to breakfast, and where you can have pizza topped with Oreos. And there's the issue that less than a quarter of us exercise regularly, and on average we spend 142 hours a month lounging on our couches, our eyes glued to a TV. So it's no wonder that the Centers for Disease Control report that more than a staggering 60 percent of adults and 16 percent of children are obese.

"Federal agencies that supply food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a federal audit obtained by USA TODAY finds. The delays raise the risk of children being sickened by contaminated food, according to the audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office. In recent recalls, including one this year in which salmonella-infected peanut butter sickened almost 700 people, the government failed to disseminate 'timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodities program,' the audit says.

Smart is the new cool thing. There's a smart car, cities now tout smart growth, and you can buy a smart refrigerator. Now comes another breakthrough: Even your breakfast cereal has gotten smart. At least that's what we consumers are being told by a group of major food corporations that are hoping to cash-in on the growing public concern about nutrition. Your concern is their concern, they say, so these eager-to-serve marketers have launched a snappy food labeling campaign to guide your nutritional choices. They've designated hundreds of their food products as being not just tasty, zesty and zowie — but also good for you. You'll know which ones to reach for on the supermarket shelf because they'll be labeled with a snappy green checkmark on the front of their packages, along with the phrase, "Smart Choices."

"Food aid is at a 20-year low despite the number of critically hungry people soaring this year to its highest level ever, the United Nations relief agency said Wednesday. The number of hungry people will pass 1 billion this year for the first time, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said, adding that it is facing a serious budget shortfall."

"The War of the Empire has many faces The ‘war on terror’ has become nameless since our administration changed. But it is the same war, it has the same goals and it is as unwinnable as it always was. But certainly there are other ways of conquering the planet, says Washington. And so they impose the huge industries with their humungous profits on the entire world, corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, Dow, Bunge and others, giants that impose their own laws on world-wide agriculture and their goal is to make us eat only what they profit from."

There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates. Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining.