Example of Student Work on Sustainable Agriculture
Grassroots Approaches to Development
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After a unit on world hunger, agriculture, and global trade, freshman high school students researched and compared approaches to economic development. The criteria for evaluating policies included the social, economic, and environmental impacts.
This student's research compared Fair Trade initiatives and microcredit with large-scale, export-based agriculture, and decided that grassroots initiatives had more potential to directly benefit farmers, workers, communities, and the environment. |
Some of the Concepts, Standards, and Skills Addressed by this Activity:
- understanding patterns of global trade
- comparing economic systems and their impacts
- describing the effects of export-based development, debt, and structural adjustment programs
Links to the organizations mentioned on the poster:
- www.equalexchange.org: Equal exchange deals directly with farmers to pay them a fair price for coffee.
- www.heifer.org: The Heifer Project provides livestock and chickens to families so that they can start small businesses selling eggs and milk while boosting family nutrition and income.
- www.grameen-info.org: The Grameen Bank offers 'micro' loans to Bangladeshi woman so that they can start small enterprises, such as crafts or food production. The education, training, and community support provided to the women has resulted in a 98% payback rate as well as great strides in literacy, education, and health care.
Suggested curriculum on this topic: From World Hunger to Sustainable Food Systems. From the Sustainability Education Center (NY). (212) 645-9930 http://www.sustainabilityed.org
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