April 21, 2017
Imagine for a moment that you’re in New York City on a breezy afternoon. You’re hurrying down the street to grab lunch, when you suddenly come across a cardboard bulldozer, a group of people holding signs, and a human-sized orangutan. What would you do?
Perhaps you’d do a double-take and keep walking. Perhaps you’d stop and see what’s going on. Or perhaps you wouldn’t even notice because you were on your phone. I saw all of these reactions on Thursday as I joined my colleagues to deliver our letter to TIAA, one of the largest investors in farmland globally and the retirement company of which ActionAid USA is a
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October 31, 2016
Biofuels have a new booster: your pension and retirement fund. Retirement funds are buying millions of acres of farmland in the United States, Brazil, Australia, and elsewhere, citing the world’s growing need for food and raw materials. But these retirement funds aren’t interested in supporting small, family farms or local food systems. They want to make money, and that means expanding large-scale, monocrop agribusiness and industrial biofuels.
The retirement fund TIAA (formerly TIAA-CREF) – which manages the retirements of millions of teachers, professors, and school administrators – is the largest institutional
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