Student Work Example: Global Agriculture and Trade
Summary: After an in-depth exploration of agriculture and global trade guided by Creative Change curricula, freshman high school students researched and compared approaches to global agriculture and economic development. The criteria for evaluating policies included the social, economic, and environmental impacts on different stakeholders: small farmers, farmers in the US, businesses, the environment, and local communities.
The project shown here 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. (See links below.) The students presented their work at a public forum aimed at educating parents and community members about agricultural issues.
Some of the concepts and skills addressed by this project:
- Understanding patterns of global trade
- Comparing economic systems and their impacts
- Describing the effects of export-based development, debt, and structural adjustment programs
- Evaluating policies based on democratic values and sustainability principles
- Developing strategies to support sustainability
- Researching national and global organizations and evaluating the impacts of their work
Learn more about our programs on food systems and economics, and how to engage your students in effective learning about these issues.
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.