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Brazil’s Largest Hydroelectric Dam Project Suspended by Indigenous Action

By: Robert A. Vigna | May 6, 2016

April has been an exceptional month for Indigenous groups in Brazil.
On April 19th, which happens to be Indigenous people’s day in Brazil, Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, suspended the license of one of the biggest hydroelectric dam projects in Brazil, São Luiz do Tapajós in the Amazon, which was to be started this year. The company building the dam was planning on flooding about 7% of the Mundruku peoples land, which would be unconstitutional once the indigenous status of land is confirmed.
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Blog

Celebrating Mothers from the Movements

By: Johanna Kougbeadjo | May 6, 2016

This Mother’s Day we celebrate three women who find the courage to overcome the great adversity they face as they work to improve the lives of their families and of their communities. Juslene, Esperanza and Samiha are three inspiring mothers who, working with Grassroots International’s partners in Haiti, Honduras and Palestine, are key leaders within their communities.
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In the News

Supporting Water Rights Around the World

By: Robert A. Vigna | March 21, 2016

March 22nd is International World Water Day and it serves as a reminder that water has not yet become a human right, and that millions continue to be denied access to water or have difficulty obtaining a fresh supply on a daily basis.
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In the News

Mozambique’s Movement to End Land Grabs

By: Anabela Lemos, interview conducted, edited and compiled by Simone Adler | March 7, 2016

To corporations, the forest is only business. To communities, the forest is everything: trees, medicine, culture, spirituality. Land-grabbing and the removal of communities from forests and land breaks the community, displaces access to food and water, and uproots the connection to nature and local knowledge. If the community structure is broken, if the land – the means of food production – is lost, we lose everything. Land That Can Only Grow Stones In Mozambique, where 80% of the population is campesinos – traditional, family farmers – companies are taking the best, most fertile land and moving people to land that can’t grow anything.
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In the News

Climate Justice and Palestine: The New Intersectionality

By: Alice Rothchild | February 19, 2016

On February 9, 2016, the US Supreme Court in a troubling example of shortsighted hubris halted Obama’s latest climate change resolutions which had emerged from the December Paris Agreement on global warming, thus also threatening commitments made by other top polluters, India and China. While China has now surpassed the US as the number one polluter, the decades of fossil fuel use by the US stills makes us the largest contributor to the climate crisis. The decision to freeze the resolutions which sought to decrease greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants until legal challenges are resolved, threatens to imperil an already inadequate approach to climate change.
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In the News

La Via Campesina, Building an International Movement for Food and Seed Sovereignty

By: Simone Adler | February 11, 2016

Who we are fighting for is every single peasant farmer – more than 200 million – on the planet. People are eager to join hands in building a global voice. Transnational corporations are pushing policies in African countries for industrial farming and the use of GMO [genetically modified] seeds, while grabbing our land and [stealing] our natural resources. No one should come and tell us how to produce food. In Via Campesina, we believe in controlling our land and seeds and producing the healthy food that we want, the way we want.
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Blog

Palestinian Farmers Push for Control of Water

By: Grassroots International | January 20, 2016

Water is life. Unfortunately, it is increasingly used as a weapon. And it can be a deadly one when political conflict meets drought.
For decades the Israeli government has had varying degrees of legal and coercive control over the Palestinian water supply. Eighty-five percent of Palestinian water resources are controlled by Israelis and all-too-often, wells and other agricultural projects are demolished or confiscated.
The result is a gaping inequity: Israelis have swimming pools, and Palestinians can barely survive.
The average Israeli uses 300 liters of water per day, but Palestinians are limited by bureaucracy and lack of access to 30-70 liters – and the World Health Organization recommends a minimum 100 liters per day.
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In the News

African Women Organize to Reclaim Agriculture Against Corporate Takeover

By: Simone Adler and Beverly Bell | January 6, 2016

Everybody originated with indigenous ways of living and the way of Mother Earth. The real role of women is in the seed. It is the women who harvest, select, store, and plant seeds. Our seeds come from our mothers and our grandmothers. To us, the seed is the symbol of the continuity of life. Seed is not just about the crops. Seed is about the soil, about the water, and about the forest. When we plant our seeds, we don’t just plant them anytime or anywhere. We listen to our elders, who teach us about the ecological calendar. The seed follows this natural ecological flow. When it bears another seed, that one is planted and the cycle continues. If you cut the cycle of the seed, you cut the cycle of life.
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In the News

Decolonizing Our Minds and Our Lands: Reviving Seeds, Culture, and African Strength

By: Gathuru Mburu. Edited by Beverly Bell and Simone Adler. | December 23, 2015

Recolonization is happening. There is a second scramble, not just in Africa, but across the global South. Corporations started it. We need to name and shame these corporations – Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, and the program promoting them, AGRA [A Green Revolution for Africa] – to take this battle to the next level. The wars [of conquest of Africa] have not actually ended – the artillery has just transformed into a different type against us farmers today. All of us are fighting.
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In the News

To Paris and Beyond

By: Chung-Wha Hong and Sara Mersha | December 4, 2015

Two nights ago, we co-hosted a sold-out screening of the Avi Lewis film This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s recent book about climate change and capitalism. The energy was electric, as a crowd full of people from the Boston area watched, hissed and cheered in response to stories on the screen. The film exposed the root causes of climate disruption – a global economic system that exploits people and the earth – as well as highlighting stories of Indigenous Peoples and farmers around the world who are standing together to defend humanity and Mother Earth.
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In the News

Advancing Food Sovereignty to Transform Economies

By: From an Interview with Mamadou Goïta, Edited by Simone Adler and Beverly Bell | December 3, 2015

Food sovereignty can transform local, national, and regional markets to support countries’ domestic economies and allow us to create wealth, both in production and knowledge. Building Global Food Sovereignty Current international debates on feeding the world center on financial viability and making global agriculture profitable. Production is oriented towards international markets, which compromise the food sovereignty of many countries. No country can survive orienting itself towards international markets because producers don’t decide the price. States give money to banks to support agroindustry, which is exploiting the population.
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In the News

Dangers of the Gates Foundation: Displacing Seeds and Farmers

By: From a presentation by Mariam Mayet and Edited by Simone Adler | November 18, 2015

Our farmer-managed seed systems in Africa are being criminalized and displaced by a very aggressive green revolution project of corporate occupation by big multinational companies. This violent agrarian transformation is facing profound objection.
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In the News

We Are the Solution: African Women Organize for Land and Seed Sovereignty

By: Simone Adler and Beverly Bell | November 4, 2015

Traditional, small-holder peasant agriculture is done by women. Women are the ones who save the seeds – the soul of the peasant population. This is to honor what women have inherited from their ancestors: the conservation of seeds as part of their knowledge to care for the whole family and nourish their communities. The green revolution introduced GMOs in Africa. Technicians and researchers come to tell our producers about agriculture from the outside.
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Blog

Grassroots International Condemns Mounting Violence in Israel/Palestine, Calls for End to US Military Aid

By: Grassroots International | October 22, 2015

Violence in Palestine and Israel continues to intensify, with mounting casualties. Since October 1, 50 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli forces and settlers and 8 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian knife attacks. Additionally an Eritrean Asylum seeker was killed after Israeli soldiers mistook him for a Palestinian.
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Blog

New Video Shows How “Together, we can cool the planet!”

By: Grassroots International | October 16, 2015

For many years, La Vía Campesina and GRAIN have been telling the world about how the agroindustrial food system causes half of all greenhouse gas emissions. But the world's governments are refusing to face these problems head on, and the Paris Summit in December is approaching without any effective commitment to doing so on their part.
This new video (Together, we can cool the planet!) by La Vía Campesina and GRAIN gives you the information you need to understand how the agroindustrial food system is impacting our climate, and at the same time what we can do to change course and start cooling the planet. And every single one of us is part of the solution!
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In the News

The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance: Nourishing Food Justice

By: Nyeleni Newsletter | October 2, 2015

The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance: Nourishing Food Justice
Resistance to the legacy of structural racism in the United States is an historical pillar of what we call “Food Justice.” The struggle for food justice takes place in the thousands of underserved rural and urban communities across the country—communities that are reeling from the negative impacts of the corporate food regime.
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Press Releases

Black and Afro-Indigenous Farmers Share 2015 Food Sovereignty Prize

By: Grassroots International | September 1, 2015

In this moment when it is vital to assert that Black lives matter, the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance honors Black and Afro-Indigenous farmers, fishermen, and stewards of ancestral lands and water with the 2015 Food Sovereignty Prize.
The two prize winners are the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in the U.S., and the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH). The prizes will be presented in Des Moines on October 14, 2015.
The award honors both groups as a vital part of food chain workers, who together are creating food sovereignty, meaning a world with healthy, ecologically produced food, and democratic control over food systems.
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Blog

Celebrating International Day of the World’s Indigenous People: A Photo Blog

By: Sarah Welch | August 7, 2015

Since 1994, August 9 has been dedicated as the UN’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous People. The primary purpose of this commemorative day is to help promote and protect the rights of indigenous people around the world.
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In the News

Climate Justice and System Change

By: David Holmstrom | July 24, 2015

Grassroots International supporter Richard Smith has just published Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (a downloadable e-book). It's an important read because it argues convincingly that environmental destruction is an inevitable result of production for profit, so that advocates of "regulated" or "green" capitalism are raising false hopes.
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Building Movements that Will Endure: One Donor’s Reflection on Legacy Giving

By: Jim Graham | July 13, 2015

By Jim Graham
• My wife Lee and I started donating to Grassroots because of our amazement that such a small organization was making the right connections to educate, empower and inspire people in a quest for justice. Although we started by learning of your Middle East work, we were eventually drawn to your work in Haiti (having visited there) as well as Central and South America.
So much of US policy around the world, and what we learn of other places through mass media, is focused on corporate interests. Through Grassroots, we have learned
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