Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

(as we were saying, there are millions of people now who need to learn to
grow their own - between the economy and misuse of land and the hardships
of the working poor)

"America's obsession with energy independence from Middle East oil may be
to
blame. The country's farmers have brought in the greatest corn harvest
since the Second World War, but their surpluses which once were bought by
the government and sent to food banks are no longer available. Instead the
corn is turned into heavily subsidised ethanol and less land is available
to grow food."


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3182337.ece
Plight of the huddled masses: A hard time for Thanksgiving

As America celebrates its great national holiday, millions of poor families
face a cold and hungry festive season. By Leonard Doyle
Published: 22 November 2007

Gertrude Winter, a char lady in her sixties who works at a government
office, will have a turkey after all this Thanksgiving. At one stage
yesterday, it seemed a close run thing. As she sat in the hallway of the
Bread for the City charity a rumour swept the place that they were out of
turkeys.

Agitated, another woman said: "The lady says there are no turkeys left,
what are we going to do?" In fact the turkeys were already on their way
from another warehouse and what might have degenerated into a mini-riot,
reverted instead to the good-natured banter of strangers.

Thrown together by poverty and the pinched generosity of the United States,
they waited to be interviewed to see if they were eligible for a free
turkey and a bag of groceries. Mobile soup kitchens are keeping the
homeless on the streets fed, but it is the working poor and those with
young and old dependants who patiently line up at Bread for the City. Even
with the help of government food stamps, most earn less than $7,000
(£3,400) a year, not nearly enough to survive on. They have long overcome
the shame of queuing up every week in public for free food

"I used to come here all the time when my kids were growing up," said Ms
Winter, "and now I'm back because everything is so expensive out there".

Today as millions of Americans sit down to their turkey dinners with all
the trimmings, the safety net of hundreds of food banks and pantries that
put food on the table of the nation's poor is creaking and torn as a result
of sharply reduced donations. From New England to California warehouses
that should be groaning with surplus foodstuffs are going half empty.

"We're bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home
heating fuel prices at record highs in the north-east," said Mark Quandt of
the regional food bank in New York. "People living in poverty or near
poverty just can't sustain those types of increases."

America's obsession with energy independence from Middle East oil may be to
blame. The country's farmers have brought in the greatest corn harvest
since the Second World War, but their surpluses which once were bought by
the government and sent to food banks are no longer available. Instead the
corn is turned into heavily subsidised ethanol and less land is available
to grow food.

And the corn syrup that turns up in almost every product found on a US
supermarket shelf is in short supply. A cheap dollar means that food
exports are booming and a crippling two-year drought in the south has left
fruit and vegetables withered and useless.

Unnoticed by most Americans, as they drop off their old canned goods and
surplus food at schools and church halls for the Thanksgiving food drives,
the entire system may be heading for collapse.

A visit to three of Washington's largest charities – a shelter for 300
men, a community kitchen that feeds 4,000 every day and a food bank that
supplies the basic needs of 108,000 people a year – revealed sharply
reduced donations and a sense of desperation for the future. In the
gleaming workspaces of DC Central Kitchen, half a mile from the White
House, fresh vegetables were being chopped by volunteers from Georgetown
University Law School. DC Central's culinary institute turns homeless drug
addicts into professional chefs and provides hot meals for thousands of
homeless people in shelters all over the city. Mike Curtain, its executive
director, could pass muster as a US version of Jamie Oliver. "I don't think
as a nation we are who we think we are," he says. "When I see the money
wasted overseas in Iraq and knowing what it could do here, it makes me
sick. I think Bush is a criminal for what he is doing.

"People in the world hate us, and rightly so, because of the way we treat
our own people," he continued, "poverty would soon disappear if we invested
some of that money on a living wage, healthcare and education. "

For now he is looking to the future by diversifying the DC Kitchen's food
sources away from hotels and restaurants by negotiating directly with
farmers. "I know donors that look at us as a way to keep their trash
hauling costs down," he said. "Of the 80 trays of food we received from the
company, 60 went into the dumpster."

In the south-east of the city, where the murder rate is rising and
substance abuse seems uncontrollable, Jarval Green runs a homeless shelter
for 300 people that focuses on addicts. It is funded by a Catholic charity
and the numbers seeking emergency shelter keep growing.

"Now we are seeing veterans from the war showing up," he said, " the real
problem here is poverty especially among men who are substance abusers."

Part of the reason food banks are running low on supplies is the absence of
direct government spending. There is a political culture in the America
that abhors spending taxpayers' money on the poor, even as the amount
president Bush is spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approaches a
trillion dollars.

Many Americans are hurting because of the collapse in the sub-prime
mortgage market, but the country has never been wealthier. There has been
an explosion in the number of millionaire American households in recent
years. Those earning $1m, $10m, $100m have more than doubled over the past
decade and the wealthy of America are wealthier than most countries, with
the top one per cent controlling $17trn.

But none of this wealth seems to have trickled down to the poor despite the
promises from supply-side economists that it would.

George Jones, who runs Bread for the City, says the new rich also seem more
interested in donating to the arts and universities than in giving their
fellow Americans a leg up. Bread for the City is finding that law firms
which once gave generously have cut their donations in half.

This week some 35.5 million Americans lined up at soup kitchens and food
stamps offices to feed their families for the holiday. The look of panic
that flashed across Gertrude Winter's face, when she though she was not
getting a turkey, is being seen elsewhere in the country.

Now the homeless poor are having their ranks swelled further by war
veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 200,000 veterans were
homeless on any given night last year and their numbers make up a quarter
of the US homeless population – a figure that has been called "shockingly
disproportionate".

Life below the poverty line is seen almost as boot camp for the shiftless.
But if American taxpayers have been conditioned to reject any form of
social welfare, they seem to accept that they cannot ignore hunger.

As a result a vast and complicated system has grown up over the years –
part private charity, part government aid – to help the neediest get fed.
The US social welfare system is miserly at best. Food stamps – a maximum
of $3 per person a day – are given to the needy. In all it has 15
separate food assistance programmes which go though some $53bn a year,
making it America's largest welfare programme

Now Congress is arguing with President Bush over a farm bill, which both
unlocks cash to buy food for the poor and guarantees million-dollar cheques
for some food producers.

"We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are
hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high, "
Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest
hunger relief group, "One of our food banks in Florida said demand is up 35
per cent over this time last year."

At the Society of St Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, clients now
get three or four days' worth of food instead of six or seven. "We are
trying to stretch our resources to help more people," said Liz Carter,
executive director of the society. "But it's so difficult when you see the
desperation and have to tell them you just don't have enough to give them
what they need."

When George Bush pitched up in southern Virginia this week there was
nothing to indicate that food banks were in trouble. The food bank he
visited, the media were blandly informed, sends millions of pounds of
groceries to needy families each year. Mr Bush walked past stacks of peanut
butter, green beans and tinned soup. Then for the cameras he lifted a few
crates of oranges, potatoes and macaroni and cheese on to a cart, telling
the pastor: " C'mon man, let's go."

Then it was off to the banks of the James river and site of America's first
official Thanksgiving. In 1619 Captain John Woodlief and his crew of 37 men
fell to their knees and read a proclamation stating that the day of their
ship's arrival should be "yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of
thanksgiving to Almighty God".

Presidents typically make light work of the Thanksgiving holiday, but Mr
Bush decided to dedicate an entire speech to it: "Our nation's greatest
strength is the decency and compassion of our people," he said. " As we
count our many blessings, I encourage all Americans to show their thanks by
giving back."

America's working people are increasingly unable to say where their
family's next meal is coming from and demand is so outstripping supply that
many food banks have had to cut back on portions. "I've been doing this for
20 years, and I can't believe how much worse it gets month after month,"
said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, of Second Harvest.

The shortages being experienced indicate a burgeoning crisis in feeding the
poor, caught in a vice of rising food prices, rent, healthcare and petrol.
Another problem, says Mr Curtain of DC Central Kitchen, is that food
manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are getting better at managing
their surplus food and are donating less to charity.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, says many dump unwanted
inedible food on shelters. He recalls his days running a food bank when "no
food donation was too small, too strange or too nutritionally unsound to be
refused".

"I remember the load of nearly rotten potatoes that we gratefully accepted
at the warehouse loading dock and then shovelled into the dumpster once the
donor was safely out of sight."

At this time of the year Americans are at their most giving. The annual
Thanksgiving turkey drive at a food bank Mr Winne founded in Connecticut
has had its annual appeal for "A turkey and a 20 (dollar bill)". It
collected 14,000 turkeys and $400,000 from the public in the richest state
in the union. "At least at this time of the year they are prepared to give
generously but the worry is that a system based on charity will mean that
the supply of donated food will always ebb and flow," he said. " We may be
entering one of those perfect storms where everything goes wrong but if we
depend on food charity rather than ending poverty, this is what is bound to
occur."