Jill Richardson, author of Recipe for America and activist for organic farming, will be on campus Thursday, October 1 to give several talks. Her public address, “The Global Food Crisis,,” is at 7 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium. She will also be talking with students from 11:10-12:20 in Science 102.
According to the poster I saw, one of her messages is that the world is not short of food, but that the inequitable distribution of food is fundamentally a political problem. This should be a familiar message to economics students, as ag policies are classroom favorites for demonstrating the perversities of government price controls and subsidies. Her solution advocates industry disintegration and decentralization, which should make for some very tasty discussion, so to speak.
For those interested in further reading, Pasour and Rucker provide a (very) critical history in Plowshares and Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture.