Human Right to Food

A new online film from WhyHunger, “The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It,” highlights the impact of today’s global food system on the climate and how a community-based food movement around the world is bringing to life a way of farming and eating that’s better for our bodies and the planet. Featuring interviews with farmers, community leaders, and sustainability advocates, the film highlights how the industrial food system is among the greatest contributors to global warming and how sustainable farming practices can pose a powerful solution to the crisis.

The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter is interviewed on agro-ecology and other important food-related issues. Results of a recent Essex University study on yield and agro-ecology are highlighted.

The former capital of capitalism lies in ruins. The fourth richest city in the world in the 1940s, Detroit, East-Central U.S.A., has become a graveyard of buildings and factories. The Michigan Central Train Station symbolizes the city's crisis: inaugurated in 1913 and abandoned since 1988, the eighteen-story train station with hundreds of broken windows dominates the skyline and continually reminds one that of the devastation that is Detroit.

In another great piece in GRIST, author Tom Philpott stresses that we can’t change the broken food system only through changing what food we consume and how, important thought it may be. This echoes what progressive U.S. food system advocates have been saying for some time: to fix the current food system we need structural change. “We also have to get out there and organize for policy reform: to become, in short, a countervailing force that challenges the power of the food lobby”, Philpott contends.

By Alisa Pimentel

Among the almost 20,000 activists gathered in Detroit for the US Social Forum this week are several Grassroots International partners and allies. Grassroots International regularly provides funding to our partners and allies to participate in movement-building and leadership development gatherings.

I have a button on my backpack that says: “If You Are What You Eat, Then I’m Fast, Cheap, and Easy.” Thankfully, this quip is sarcastic in my case, but for many people, including many of those working for global justice, it is all too true. Whether due to marketing hype or sheer convenience, usually smart folks can fall down when it comes to what they put in their mouths. The personal is political, and this is reflected each time someone votes for “business as usual” by giving their money to a fast-food chain or big box retailer. The result is a broken food/farm system that is systematically abusing animals, exploiting workers, perverting biodiversity, undermining democracy, jeopardizing health, and destroying the planet.

Doudou Pierre is a Grassroots International partner and a member of the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress and the Peasant Movement for Acul du Nord. He.is also on the coordinating committee of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA .and a member of the International Coordinating Committee for Food Sovereignty, organized by Vía Campesina, the worldwide coalition of small farmer organizations. This week he will be heading to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

On the cusp of Haiti’s spring planting season, we received urgent requests from our partners and allies in Haiti about their dire need for seeds and tools to ensure that food production would be secured in the immediate planting season -- this is all the more important in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and the massive migration to rural areas from Port-au-Prince.

Grassroots International is making three new grants of $25,000 each, all of which will help provide seeds, tools and training for this planting season to these groups:

• The Peasant Movement of Papaye (the MPP). Funds for the MPP will cover the Central Plateau.