Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

Carlisle-Cummins traces her love of food to the afternoons and evenings of her youth helping her father prepare meals. But it was a study abroad trip to Costa Rica in 2001 that brought her interest in food and agriculture into sharper focus.

"Most natural claims are unregulated and untested, and the minimal regulations that do exist are vague and nearly impossible to enforce," said Lisa Bunin of the Center for Food Safety. Read more

Oxfam, the international nonprofit, issued a report on Tuesday estimating how extreme weather events might affect food prices in the coming decades — forecasting that the prices of a number of food staples could surge far beyond the projected increases. “We will all feel the impact as prices spike but the poorest people will be hit hardest because they often spend up to 75 percent of their income on food,” said Heather Coleman, climate change policy adviser for Oxfam America, in a statement.

Food justice is one of many sustainability dilemmas we will encounter in this century, and Chris Bacon believes that only through understanding and then collective action can we work to create a more ecologically and economically sustainable as well as socially just world.

Certified Greenhouse Farmers and SureHarvest have begun collaboration on a next generation sustainability certification platform based on the principles of performance metrics, technology innovation, continuous improvement and stakeholder engagement. SureHarvest CEO Dr. Jeff Dlott says it will be the first comprehensive performance-based system in agriculture.

"Our society has become more environmentally aware in the last few decades, and that results in our government and scientists asking questions about the safety of new types of chemical ingredients," said senior author Patricia Holden, a professor with the Bren School. "That's reflected by this type of research." Read the full story

Chris fondly remembers chopping wood and picking slugs off the lettuce in his family’s organic garden. He believes practicing his parents’ alternative lifestyle based initially on choice and then on necessity gave him a basic understanding of how to live sustainably, but he didn’t actually hear the term sustainability until he went to college at UC Santa Barbara to study Economics and Environmental Studies. Read the full story

Patrick Archie doesn’t allow pesticides on his plot at the farm and encourages holistic connections with the land. This small corner of campus might as well be a portrait of what most people imagine when they think “organic.” But it’s not—at least, not officially. Organic is more than an attitude or a concept, it’s a legal designation, the rules of which are rarely understood completely by consumers. As the summer season of fresh fruits and vegetables arrives, it’s worth taking a closer look at what the term “organic” really means.

Today the image of that Kona field system lives vividly in the imagination of Noa Kekuewa Lincoln. On a late afternoon at the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in South Kona, Lincoln is striding among the forty-four different cultivars of ko that he helped replant the year before. The planting was done in the traditional Kona drylands style, with kuaiwi on one side of the ko and rows of kalo on the other. Lincoln pauses beside a particularly vibrant clump of cane that has green-andwhite- striped leaves and stalks with stripes of pink, white and pale green. It’s called laukona, he says.