Another Way to Grow One's Own Food Security

The global crisis in food costs is hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest. Fortunately, there are many eco-friendly, high-yield gardening and farming methods now that can help people, including pregnant and nursing mothers, take their own nutrition and their own food security into their own hands. These methods can be adapted to a wide variety of climates.

The Nonviolent Choice Directory covers some of these methods in our section on Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Food & Nutrition: Nutritious, Nonviolent, Eco-Friendly, and Low-Cost Eating.

In the tiny Southern African nation of Lesotho, "keyhole gardens" are catching on. Residents of the arid highlands cannot afford imported food, yet local conditions make farming very difficult.

Keyhole gardens are a blessing because they yield large amounts of nutrient-rich vegetables. And because they are in raised beds, people who are pregnant, sick, or elderly can easily tend to them. This is very important in Lesotho; it has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS, and many grandparents are raising their grandchildren.

To learn more about keyhole gardening, please check out:

--This BBC World Service Report (mostly text).

--This video from Send a Cow:

http://www.graspr.com/videos/Making-a-Keyhole-Garden

Thwarted: Bush Administration Complicity in Eco-Abortion

Environment News Service brings good news today. Federal court has overturned the Bush administration's 2005 "Clean Air Mercury Rule," terming it a violation of the Clean Air Act.

And indeed the Bush policy attempted to permit ung-dly levels of toxic mercury emissions--and this at a time when an estimated 630,000 children in the US alone are born every year with unhealthy levels of mercury in their bodies.

Pregnant and nursing women and their babies, as well as older, still growing children, are the most vulnerable to mercury pollution. Individuals can of course take steps to reduce their exposure. GotMercury.org and the US Food and Drug Administration advise on how to avoid or reduce mercury exposure through fish and seafood consumption. Vegetarianism is also an option, even during pregnancy, nursing, and beyond.

As important as consumer education is, ultimately the most powerful and enduring safeguard against is a federal government that protects all Americans, born and unborn, against mercury and other toxins, instead of serving industries that care more for their bottom lines than for life and health.

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

Ten Ways to Make a Real Difference for Ten US Dollars or Less

As an American who lives with her family on the economic edge, by US standards, I sometimes struggle, especially during the winter holidays with all their talk and customs of giving, to keep things in global perspective and remember that our economic constraint is unimaginable luxury for someone else. I have a computer, for one, and steady electricity and Internet access, and I sit before my screen fully and well nourished with an unleaky roof, sealed against the cold, over my head. I even have access, however battled-for, to the health care that keeps me alive. And so I am able to research this question that is no doubt close to many people's hearts, even in the wealthiest countries: how to make a difference when you're already squeezed financially?

I found at least 10 ways that people who can afford a ten-dollar bill or less can take part in charitable giving or social action(as the terms are generally understood).

--For $10.00, you can donate one print copy of the new, state-of-the-art Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers to a health care worker in the Two-Thirds World.

--For $10, you can give hundreds or even thousands of organic, open-pollinated seeds that will help empower people in poor countries to sustainably grow their own food security. If you have even a small garden space of your own, you can do this for practically free.

--For $6.00, you may be able to offset one metric half ton of carbon dioxide emissions.

--Check Alternative Gifts International to see the many ways that small US sums make big differences.

--$3.50 gains one months of Tibetan preschool education for a Tibetan refugee child in exile.

--For as little as $2.49 to $3.24 apiece, you can further reduce global warming by purchase of energy-saving Certified "CarbonfreeTM" Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs, which are manufactured through a carbon-neutral process.

--$1.00 can plant one tree to reforest the devastasted nation of Haiti.

--For free, you can learn and pass along these many ways an "ordinary" person can help to prevent and heal child abuse.

--For free, you can sign up and respond to action alert campaigns to save all life on Earth.

--For free, you can learn the whys and how of going veg, one of the most powerful ways you can serve life on Earth, from this Vegetarian Starter Kit.

More Food and Nutrition Resources

Many more resources now appear in the Food & Nutrition section of the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

So many more resources that should be there, but aren't yet...Please forgive us if you needed something on this topic or any other and didn't find it. Please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info to let us know what's missing, and we will try to find it for you. Apologies, but that is about all we can do to atone for our shortfalls....Wish we were capable of so much more.....