June 2013

In December 2012, I received an email from Frances (Frankie) Moore Lappé, a woman whose name I had known since I was a teenager interested in hunger and poverty issues and reading all I could on the subject. I was honored. Frankie was reaching out to organizations and individuals who work to end hunger to ask if we had read the FAO’s 2012 State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) report and if so, what we had made of it. Frankie was concerned about a number of things, including that the report presented too rosy a view on how the world’s governments were doing in their ambition to eliminate hunger, and too rosy a view on what economic growth could do about the problem.

It did not take Frankie long to persuade a group of us, including IATP, to take notice and formalize our concerns. Those concerns include:

As I dream of real summer weather, one of the things I look forward to most is picking strawberries with my little cousins at a pick-your-own farm near our family cabin up in Aitkin County. The first time we tried it, the kids were so excited we had to go back two times in one day and filled five ice cream gallon buckets with ruby red fruit, sweet and sun-warmed as we relished in harvesting that evening’s dessert.

Not every child gets to experience the wonder of connecting with our local food system in such a direct way, but this year’s issue of the Minnesota Grown Directory is here to help families make that connection.

Minnesota Grown is a partnership between the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and producers of specialty crops and livestock. Their annual directory of local producers is always a huge hit with our vibrant local foods community. This year’s issue, just published last week, lists nearly 1,000—a record number!—local farmers, markets and businesses where consumers can buy directly from the producer. It also boasts a strong family-friendly focus. IATP worked with Minnesota Grown to include information on Farm to Childcare programs, fun farm facts, kid-friendly activities like farm tours, and other techniques families with young children can use to engage with locally grown foods. The family-centered content is a great supplement to the detailed information on local producers the Minnesota Grown Directory always provides, and makes this year’s issue a wonderful resource for parents, teachers, childcare facilities and anyone interested in engaging with kids on local agriculture.

Today, 795 health professionals from across the country sent a joint letter to President Obama urging his leadership in getting the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to jumpstart its now-stalled policies to help protect the future effectiveness of antibiotics by reducing their overuse in food animal production. The letter was delivered by IATP's Healthy Food Action, Health Care Without Harm and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Close to 30 million pounds of the antibiotics are sold for use in U.S. food animals each year.  Many of them are identical, or nearly so, to antibiotics used in human medicine. Most are used for non-sick animals, to promote their faster growth and compensate for the risks created by raising such animals in overcrowded and often unhygienic conditions.

“In our hospitals, and in our communities, antibiotics increasingly are failing to treat drug resistant superbugs,” says David Wallinga, MD of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy  and Healthy Food Action. “The huge overuse of these antibiotics on our farms, in meat production, is an important—and unaddressed—contributor to the problem.”

What this letter shows is this superbug epidemic is too important for FDA and the White House to sit on the sidelines. We need President Obama to make sure his administration leads in the fight to protect antibiotis.”