Read 'n' Sead 3: Second Quarter of Hopes Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet

For the second quarter of my book I read chapters 4-6. This put me at a little under halfway through the book. Although I am only halfway through the book it is really interesting so far and I can't wait to finish off the rest of the book.

The chapters that I covered in this reading talked about the countries that the author and her daughter traveled to in order to find out more about what is going on with the food crisis around the world.

First, they started out in Brazil. One of the sad things that I learned from reading about Brazil was that although it is one of the world's leading agricultural exporters and yet still has thousands of people in their country who are starving on a daily basis. Another issue they have is an extreme inequality when it comes to wealth and income. This is due to the fact that in a land of many only a few people there that own most of the land. They are trying to give the land back to the people but the government has privatized everything. Not only that but the landowners are using lawsuits to prevent giving back the land. Once again as we have discussed in class this is just another money and power issue. This is just a continuing problem that we are seeing everywhere. I believe that we need to work harder to take the power away from these companies and give it back to the people.

After Brazil they traveled to Bangladesh next. This country is poor and overcrowded. A man decided to help the people out with microcredit.He developed a bank, named it Grameen and employed the poor people to run it. The idea behind it is to bring life back to the country by giving out small loans to get the people on their feet again. Once they can take care of themselves they pay the money they borrowed back. It's based on a trust system and has worked remarkably well in this country. The motto for this bank is "little loans for little people" and I think it fits perfectly for what they are doing. I really liked what I read about the bank because it was found to be really helpful. He trusted the people with his own money and it really paid off. This just shows that we can still trust people and need to get back to that more I think.

The last chapter and last place that they visited was India. This country is an example of why more food by itself can't stop hunger. People need more than food handouts, they need resources as well. India was sucked into the GMO trend and it has made their diet much into an experiment. I was happy to read that the country is working to get back to organically growing and not using as many chemicals.