Lyft, the Ride Sharing Company with a Mission to Do Good! Lyft wants to help people living in food desert communities get access to healthier food, by offering discount rides through their new Grocery Access Program. Lyft has partnered with local nonprofits to give people living in areas without access to healthy food, discounted rides to farmers’ markets and participating grocery stores. So far, the program is being offered in 18 markets, including Washington DC, Chicago, Baltimore and multiple locations in Brooklyn. They plan on adding more communities in the coming months!

Who would think an avocado could be the reason for violence, kidnapping, and murder? In Mexico, that is what’s happening! Small-scale avocado growers have to stand guard with rifles, 24/7, to guard their crops from thieves and drug cartels, looking to cash in on the U.S.’s  avocado boom. In the last 10 years, our growing desire for avocados has raised parts of western Mexico out of poverty, but the smell of money is a new source of revenue for the drug cartels, and is threatening the export of avocados to the U.S.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has it All Wrong!  I know they think they are doing good, when they support efforts to “modernize” African agriculture with high-yield commercial seeds, fertilizers, and other technologies, but that is not what the farmers need. These policies put the small scale farmer out of business, while taking the country down a monoculture path of a few staple crops, reducing biodiversity, and undermining soil fertility. (We can see how poorly it worked in this country!) African farmers want to use sustainable methods that would increase soil fertility, and help them adapt to climate change by diversifying healthy, and culturally appropriate food crops. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) has been working with farmers on Agroecology, growing multiple food crops in the same field, using compost, manure, and biofertilizers, instead of fossil fuel based fertilizers, with excellent results! The Gates Foundation should be promoting this type of agriculture instead of subsidizing commercial seeds and fertilizers, and they should be pressing governments to incorporate agroecology into their mandated Climate Adaptation Plans.