Last month I was in Istanbul to participate in the People's Water Forum that was being held simultaneously with (and challenging) the World Water Forum. The latter is organized by water corporations through their front, the World Water Council, and with the support of multilateral financial organizations like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
My colleague, Saulo Araujo, Program Coordinator for Brazil & Mesoamerica, and I are in Trinidad for the 4th People's Summit of the Americas (April 15-18, 2009). Being held in conjunction with the 5th Summit of the Americas, the People's Summit was coordinated by local Trinidadian social movements and civil society organizations, particularly labor unions (for e.g. the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and NGOs and the Oilfield Workers Trade Union), as well as transnational networks such as the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples and the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA).
Last December, I had the good fortune to be able to attend and participate in the 2nd international strategy meeting of the Economic, Social, & Cultural Rights Network - ESCR-Net, which is a global coalition of movements and NGOs that are struggling for or working on economic, social and cultural rights. The four day meeting took place in Nairobi, Kenya, in conjunction with a special gathering of social movements and grassroots groups.
The Right to Food like many other human rights has been under threat from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its rules that often prevent countries from designing and implementing domestic policies that aim to realize those rights. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food recently presented the conclusions from his mission to the WTO to the UN Human Rights Council.
The G20 meetings in London are drawing a lot of attention in the media and around the world. Typically, much of the mainstream media attention is focused either on the pomp sideshow (the Queen and Michelle Obama's hug) or the small portion of the protestors that broke windows and equipment in the RBS offices (which bolsters mainstream media's emphasis on sensationalism and their ability to dismiss genuine global protest against the destructive policies of governments and multilateral institutions).
Not for the world's people for sure. And especially not for the increasingly thirsty billions who lack acess to clean and safe water for drinking, cooking, and growing food; or for those that have been displaced by huge mega dam projects or suffered from water diversions for agribusinesses and bottled water corporations. This was amply evident when the World Water Forum (WWF) denied permission to the United Nations General Assembly President, Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann (from Nicaragua) to speak at its 5th gathering in Istanbul, Turkey this past week.
By Nikhil Aziz.
Nikhil is reporting from the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey.
One of the events organized by civil society during the corporate-driven World Water Forum in Istanbul was "International Day" on March 19th. Various members of the anti-privatization sector of the global water justice movement organized this in collaboration with Turkish civil society representatives. For example, Our Water Commons, the Trans National Institute, Food & Water Watch, and regional networks like Red Vida (Latin America) and the African Water Network.
The opening day of the World Water Forum (WWF) in Istanbul was emblematic of the undemocratic and unaccountable nature of the WWF. The WWF, like the World Economic Forum, is a virtual country club. Dominated by multinational corporations like Veolia and Suez, international financial institutions like the World Bank, and governments, it is run by an unelected body, the World Water Council (WWC), which charges exorbitant entry fees and goes further to silence opposition by nefarious means.
Climate Change is big business. Literally! Many corporations, including some of the worst polluters, are salivating at the prospects of potentially vast sums of money that could very well come their way in the name of saving the planet. Climate justice activists, including indigenous peoples, are rightly worried that in the rush to "save the planet" governments and international institutions (including the World Bank, for example) will once again put profits before people.
Photo courtesy of Sandra Yu, Detroiters for Environmental Justice
"I simply gotta march, my heart's a drummer; nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my parade!"
I remembered the lyrics of this song, first sung by Barbra Streisand I think, as we marched – some 100,000 of us – in a torrential downpour through the streets of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Pará. It was the Opening March of the 2009 World Social Forum. Despite the rain, the enthusiasm of the crowds was contagious.
The world's most powerful "leaders" meet today in Washington to debate what is to be done about the global financial crisis - a crisis they themselves were instrumental in causing. It is their blind devotion to a consistently failed ideology, outright greed, and a slavish willingness to be accountable only to their corporate backers (on the part of almost all that are gathering), and an ambition to get a seat at the table in the country club (on the part of the G-20 minus 7) that has created this toxic mix that we are all being forced to swallow.
The world's most powerful "leaders" meet today in Washington to debate what is to be done about the global financial crisis - a crisis they themselves were instrumental in causing. It is their blind devotion to a consistently failed ideology, outright greed, and a slavish willingness to be accountable only to their corporate backers (on the part of almost all that are gathering), and an ambition to get a seat at the table in the country club (on the part of the G-20 minus 7) that has created this toxic mix that we are all being forced to swallow.
Grassroots International founder Dan Connell today sits on the organization’s board as an emeritus member. The article draws on a consultancy he had with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 1996 and originally appeared in Development in Practice, vol. 7, no. 3 (August 1997), Oxford, U.K., and as a chapter "Participatory Development: an approach sensitive to class and gender" in Dorienne Rowan-Campbell ed., Development with Women, Oxford, U.K.: Oxfam Books, 1999.
Introduction
Rome, Italy, 3 June 2008
Watch the video of the action in Rome!
Farmer and civil society leaders carrying out a peaceful action today in Rome, Italy at the FAO Summit on the Food Crisis were forcefully removed from the premises. At around 1:30pm farmers and representatives of civil society organisations staged an action at the press room to deliver a message that millions of additional people are joining the ranks of the hungry as the corporations that control the global food system are making record profits.
Rome, June 1, 2008.
On the eve of the High Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome, farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have declared a People's State of Emergency.
"Governments and intergovernmental organisations must immediately stop any policies, which lead to violations of the human right to food", says Maryam Rahmanian of CENESTA, Iran. "Free trade policies have seriously damaged the food system over time, leading to the food crisis that we're facing today". Parallel to the official conference, civil society organisations are holding a five day Forum to voice their demands on how to overcome the crisis.
Cape Town, South Africa
The Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) will be highlighting the commonality between its members that have been evicted and/or threatened with evictions, and the plight of the thousands of refugees who have also been "evicted" by violence from their homes and communities.
In particular, the AEC would like to point out the following:
Dozens of people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced across South Africa in a wave of anti-immigrant violence over the past several weeks. This comes against a backdrop of growing impatience with the government's anemic efforts to overcome the chronic poverty and massive social inequality inherited from the apartheid era, now more than a decade and a half behind them, and in the face of rising political violence in neighboring Zimbabwe from where many of the 5-10 million "foreigners" come.
Around the world it seems more and more that the time has come for La Via Campesina. The global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an alternative proposal for how to structure a country's food system, called Food Sovereignty. It was clear at the World Forum for Food Sovereignty, held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been gaining ground with other social movements, including those of indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade unions, and others. Though when it comes to governments and international agencies, it has until recently been met with mostly deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already
The other night I went to listen to Sandy Tolan read from his book The Lemon Tree. Grassroots International’s friend Hilda Silverman, a long time activist for Palestinian rights who sadly passed away recently, had invited Sandy to Cambridge.
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew and the Heart of the Middle East is an agonizingly beautiful, sad and yet even hopeful story of two people and two peoples, two nations and one land. Listening again, as I have before, to the stories of partition, independence, refugees and war, I was overcome with emotion and my thoughts wandered as they have often during such times to my own India-Pakistan. And I had to remind myself that this was Palestine-Israel.
From Jacmel on the tropical blue Caribbean coast we drove up into the southern mountains to Cap Rouge. The main road had been washed away by floods and the route we took was a deeply potholed mix of dirt and gravel making for a very bumpy ride. We were in a rented SUV but saw scores of mopeds (mini motorcycles) carrying anywhere from 3 to 5 people along with their goods navigating the steep climb up the mountains with far more dexterity and speed than us.
