Reposted from Alternet –
Award-winning food journalist Michael Pollan was invited to speak on October 15 at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo but after pressure from a university donor who is chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co., the university changed his speech to a panel discussion.
Pollan, whose works include The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is the Knight Professor of Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s also no stranger to attacks from …

From ABC News -
Walmart and the Kroger supermarket chain have severed ties with one of the country’s major blueberry growers after an ABC News investigation found children, including one as young as five-years-old, working in its fields.
The children were discovered at the Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, in South Haven, Michigan, this summer by graduate school students working with ABC News as fellows with the Carnegie Corporation.
A five-year-old girl, named Suli, was seen lugging two heavy buckets of blueberries picked by her parents and brothers, aged seven and eight.
An 11-year-old …

from The Nation –
Over the years, The Nation and I have closely tracked the heroic work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as they have fought to protect agriculture workers in the fields of Florida from exploitation. CIW has exposed cases of slavery and worked with the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute them. It has carried out a Campaign for Fair Food to raise wages and improve working conditions. In short, it has led a movement that recognizes the dignity of the people who harvest the food …

Jonathan Blundell just posted an exchange he had with the PR people at Chipotle regarding the wages they pay to the farmers who pick their produce. Chipotle has been under much pressure recently to ensure that it’s workers are paid a fair wage. They say they are working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to attempts to bring better wages to the farmers. Agreements have been made to increase the wages of farm workers – most of who get paid nearly nothing and work in near slave-like …

From National Geographic News -
August 5, 2009—Talk about a sea change.
From 2006 through 2009, Central Asia’s vast Aral Sea dramatically retreated, with its eastern section losing about 80 percent of its water in just four years (above, newly released NASA satellite images are animated to show the regression).
The immense body of water, which straddles Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (see map), was once the world’s fourth largest freshwater lake.
But in the past 30 years, 60 percent of the lake has disintegrated, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
In the 1960s farmers in this arid …