Talk of the Bay, August 29th 2019
“There is no we who feed the world. The world is mainly fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers who grow 70 percent of developing countries’s food.”
—from Eating Tomorrow
How will we feed the world under current agricultural practices?
You might have heard experts worrying over how to feed future populations. The response to this worry in the past has been to push small farmers in developing countries to convert to using more fertilizer and more monocropping to maximize yields. Our guests on program are Brise Tenser, Executive Director of the Organic farming Research Foundation, based here in Santa Cruz, and author, Timothy Wise, who just published Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food.
Brise Tencer brings 20 years of leadership experience working on organic food policy, farming, and research issues to OFRF. Ms. Tencer most previously served as Director of Policy and Programs for California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), where she managed the government affairs and grower education program, coordinated their regional chapters of members, and ran a grant-making program. Prior to that, she served as lead lobbyist on food and agriculture issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists. There she developed legislative campaigns on a range of agriculture issues, including organic (focusing on the connection between organic practices and climate change), USDA research priorities, and food safety. She also worked on a successful campaign to end overuse of antibiotics in livestock production.
Timothy A. Wise is a Senior Research Fellow with GDAE’s Globalization and Sustainable Development Program, which he directed from 2000-2016. He now directs the Land and Food Rights Program at Small Planet Institute and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
With a background as an economic journalist and an international development practitioner, Wise’s research and writing have focused on the global food crisis, including U.S. farm policies, trade and agricultural development, the lessons from NAFTA, agricultural biodiversity, biofuels and food prices, and Mexico’s maize economy. With a prestigious fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, Wise conducted research for a book tentatively titled Feeding Illusions: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Future of Food.
