Grassroots International’s partner Camille Chalmers, Executive Director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA) traveled to Washington, DC during the last week of July to testify before the Congressional Black Caucus. The CBC sponsored-hearing on Haiti entitled “Focus on Haiti: The Road to Recovery - A Six Month Review” wassupported by the Haiti Advocacy Working Group (HAWG).
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:
Since a devastating earthquake shook Haiti more than two weeks ago, Grassroots International’s partners on the ground have been working to assess the situation and respond to the needs of the community – even as they themselves have suffered great losses. With help from hundreds of people who have donated in response to the crisis, Grassroots International has made three initial grants to three of our partners in Haiti.
The “special treatment” began in the Newark Liberty International Airport where the departure gate for Continental Flight 84 to Tel Aviv, Israel was walled off and separated from all the other gates and passengers. In order to enter that gate area, one had to pass through yet another personal inspection with metal detectors and hand luggage had to be checked all over again. Once you were in this special closed-off gate area you could not leave.
I have had the privilege of being the point person for Grassroots International on our U.S-based advocacy work on food and farm policy issues. A large part of this work is done in conjunction with our allies in the US Working Group on the Global Food Crisis, where Grassroots is a member of the ad hoc steering committee I have been working to raise the voices of Grassroots’ partners, like the Via Campesina, in the policy solutions put forward for consideration in Washington. Among the strategies for which our partners, and we, advocate is a transition away from large-scale industrialized fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture toward a more earth and people friendly model of sustainable agriculture.
When it rains, it pours. This week has seen a deluge of global food and trade strategies, all of which may deeply impact food and agriculture policies for Grassroots International, our partners and our allies.
Since late spring of 2008 I have been playing an active role in the work of the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis. This broad network of farmer, fisher, farmworker, labor, faith, food and hunger and policy advocacy organizations has echoed the call of global social movements and civil society to implement a clear and simple set of principles included in the findings of the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and join the community of nations supporting the right to food.
We salute Representative Dennis Kucinich for his compassionate and courageous letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking her to use her influence to press the Israeli government to honor international law and end the blockade against Gaza. (Click the link below to read his letter.)
For several years Grassroots International has had a collegial relationship with Carlos Marentes of the Sin Fronteras Border Agricultural Workers Project in El Paso, Texas. Carlos is also a leader of the Via Campesina - North American Region and chair of the Via Campesina's international commission on Migrations and Rural Workers. The Via Campesina understands that most migration is a consequence of the corporate-led global trade model that has exacerbated rural impoverishment in many already poor countries.
Recently I returned from the Via Campeisna's Vth International Conference in Mozambique, followed by brief visit with social justice organizations in South Africa. Also in Mozambique, as delegate to the Via Campesina Conference, was Grassroots International colleague John Peck of the Family Farm Defenders and the National Family Farm Coalition. John wrote the article below just days after hearing the President of Mozambique, Armando Emilio Guebuza, address the Via Campesina Assembly. In his address, Guebuza unfortunately noted that his government would be supporting the expansion of jatropha plantations for agrofuels production.
I have had the privilege of accompanying some of the largest and most dynamic social movements in Latin America over the course of my work at Grassroots International. In early 2001, we struggled with how to share the news of the agrarian reform and land rights struggles of our partners in Brazil and other Latin American and Caribbean countries in ways that would resonate with folks here in the United States. What we came up with back then was to connect land rights with food rights.
More recently the right to food has been the daily bread of the news media as the sharp increase in food prices have resulted in food riots in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the US, the working poor are suffering hunger in silent resignation.
The road to Jacmel is paved with good intentions - in fact, it is the best-paved road in all of Haiti. I was told that the road was built by France as a friendship gift to Haiti, but Haitians don't see it as enough repayment for all that France has taken from Haiti since colonial times. Centuries ago, when France herded African slaves to Haiti to work in the sugar cane plantations, they filled the slave ships returning to France with Haiti's precious tropical timber. Thus began Haiti's deforestation, from which it has never recovered.
Hello from Port au Prince! I've just returned to Haiti for the first time since May 2004 and wanted to share my impressions with you.
This recent article by our friend and colleague George Naylor -- an Iowa corn farmer and the outgoing president of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) -- speaks to all the reasons why we need to fight for Food Sovereignty and against huge agribusinesses here in the United States today!
Take a look and let us know what you think.
This week we received a letter from Chavannes Jean Baptiste, Executive Secretary of the Peasant Movement of Papaye, one of Grassroots International's partners in Haiti. His letter highlights the root causes of the ongoing neglect of rural communities in Haiti and the devastation in the countryside due to recent floods. Please read his words below:
Grassroots International has received this report from our partners in Brazil. Part of a week-long series of actions honoring International Women's Day and protesting the upcoming visit of President Bush, the women of Via Campesina Brazil and the MST have occupied a sugar mill in the state of Sao Paulo that was recently purchased by Cargill - one of the five largest agricultural transational corporations in the world.
