?Aye Chihuahua! The sky is falling. Join the colorful desert bird, Chachalaca Chiquita, and her feathered friends in this Southwestern spin on the Chicken Little tale. The story incorporates Spanish vocabulary for un peque?o fun as the amigos set off to tell the jefe that the sky is falling. The story takes a turn when they meet sly Tacito Ocelote.
The Sheppards were an old English family who settled in New England late in the seventeenth century—three brothers, one of which, according to ye olden tyme records, planted the elm trees in front of the meeting house on Dorchester hill; these trees, at the age of sixty or seventy years, being cut down by the British during the Revolutionary War. The descendants of the three brothers were thrifty men, large of physique and of great executive ability, the women the loveliest of the colonies—families of sterling integrity, wealth, and esteem.
The only self-awareness guide tailored to the needs of Hispanic women from high school on--to be published simultaneously in English and Spanish language editions. Flores uses her own positive life experience to show other Hispanic women how they can escape cyclical poverty, large-family conditioning, religious repression, and machismo.
This book provides a comprehensive, updated syntheses of all the information available on Mar Chiquita, covering various aspects of the geography, geological history, biology and ecology of the site, as well as a detailed analysis of the current land-use patterns, environmental threats, and conservation issues. Mar Chiquita, located in the province of Cordoba, Argentina, is a protected wilderness area that includes South America’s largest saline lake and wetland. It has a very rich bird biodiversity, including three of the six species of flamingos that exist in the world, and high numbers of intercontinental migratory shorebirds. For this reason, the area has been declared an International Site by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, and also a Site of Hemispheric Importance by the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserves Network. Largely unknown until very recently, particularly in terms of the English literature, the site is rapidly gaining international visibility, not only in terms of scientific research, but also as site of interest for the nature lovers around the globe. Written in a language accessible to the non-specialists, the book focuses on integrating the dynamic, functional processes in the ecosystem, while at the same time providing the necessary descriptive information. Accordingly, it is of interest to scientists from diverse disciplines interested in saline wetlands, as well as to students, managers, and the general public.
"Award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel navigates across the planet and throughout history, telling the cultural and scientific story of the world's most ubiquitous fruit"--Page 4 of cover.
Sweet but starchy, soft but toothsome—and so easy to peel they just beg to be devoured—bananas are one of our favorite foods, found everywhere from gas station counters to Michelin star restaurants. Yet for as versatile and ubiquitous as this fruit is today, its history is a turbulent one, entangled in colonial domination, capitalist exploitation, sexual politics, and even horrific violence. Delving into the banana’s past, this book traces the complex circumstances of global modernity that perfectly aligned to grant us, often at tremendous costs, a treat we all now take for granted. Beginning with the banana’s origins in New Guinea, Lorna Piatti-Farnell follows its pathways to South East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, binding together a millennium of history into one digestible bunch. Focusing especially on the banana’s recent past, she shows how it rose from a regional staple to a global commodity, on par with coffee and sugar. She examines the ways it has been advertised, sold, and incorporated into popular culture, moving from nineteenth-century medical manuals to cookbooks, songs, slapstick comedy, and problematic figures like Miss Chiquita. Wide-ranging but pocket-sized, Banana is a culinary and cultural account of a peculiar little fruit that is at once the icon of exoticism and one of the most familiar foods we eat.
This book provides a history of the WTO US-EU banana dispute through the lens of a major actor: the US-owned multinational firm, Chiquita Brands International. It documents and explains how Chiquita succeeded in having the Clinton administration pursue a trade policy of forcing the European Union to dismantle its preferential banana import regime for exports from the small English-speaking Caribbean (ESC) countries. The export of bananas was critically important to the social stability and economic viability of these countries and that was in the national security interest of the United States. The experience indicates that succeeding in this goal was detrimental to U.S. national security interest in the Caribbean.
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.
Ethical sourcing, both through fair trade and ethical trade, is increasingly entering the mainstream of food retailing. Large supermarkets have come under pressure to improve the returns to small producers and conditions of employment within their supply chains. But how effective is ethical sourcing? Can it genuinely address the problems facing workers and producers in the global food system? Is it a new form of northern protectionism or can southern initiatives be developed to create a more sustainable approach to ethical sourcing? How can the rights and participation of workers and small producers be enhanced, given the power and dominance of large supermarkets within the global food chain? What role can civil society and multistakeholder initiatives play in ensuring the effectiveness of ethical sourcing? This book brings together a range of academics and practitioners working on issues of ethical sourcing in the global food system. It critically explores the opportunities and challenges in the ethical sourcing of food by combining analysis and case studies that examine a range of approaches. It explores whether ethical sourcing is a cosmetic northern initiative, or can genuinely help to improve the conditions of small producers and workers in the current global food system.
