You Can Stop Violence Against Women

Vermonters were witness to a brutal murder in 2005 - Laura Kate Winterbottom was abducted and killed in Burlington. The next year Michelle Gardner-Quinn, a University of Vermont student, was abducted and killed. This year, eleven-year-old Brooke Bennett was kidnapped and murdered. Violence against women is on the rise in the state.

As a Vermonter myself, I'm attending Laura's March, hosted by the Laura Kate Winterbottom Memorial Fund, an organization trying to stop that statistic from climbing.

This September, LKW Fund will host its second-annual Laura's March, a walk and fund-raiser to be held in Burlington. Proceeds will go to Women Helping Battered Women and the Women's Rape Crisis Center. What's neat about the Fund is that the money goes toward creating activities, programs and initiatives that help women and children.

If you're a Vermont reader, I hope to see you there. If you're a reader from elsewhere, I hope you'll consider giving to this cause, or be a part of a similar activity in your own community. I've started a page on First Giving that you can access here. I hope you'll consider making a contribution -- every little bit counts.

Coffee Crisis

"Less well-known are the damaging effects of these unequal power relations embedded in global coffee networks: threatened livelihoods, greater poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, and out-migration. A "bigger, faster, cheaper" mentality has created a dynamic that exploits the most vulnerable at the bottom of the supply chain."

-John Thackara, Worldchanging.com-

Read the rest of Thackara's "Alternative Trade Networks and the Coffee System" to learn more about the issues facing the coffee industry as well as proposed solutions that would create a fair and equitable situation for the world's 25 million families that grow and produce coffee.

For more reading, check out "Confronting the Coffee Crisis."

Geopolitics of Food

"In the Middle East, water-poor nations are using petrol profits to buy farmland in economically depressed countries like Pakistan and Sudan. China, with its own farmland under pressure from development and pollution, is using some of its vast export income to snap up land in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, Brazil -- the globe's emerging agricultural powerhouse and an increasingly important food supplier to China -- recently threatened to nationalize its fertilizer deposits. Such a move would rankle huge U.S. grain-trading firms like Cargill and Bunge, which dominate Brazil's ever-expanding fertilizer market."

-Tom Philpott, Grist.org-

Read more about Paul Roberts' new book "The End of Food" in Philpott's article "The Locavore's Dilemma."