Grassroots International Launches Resource Rights for All

Grassroots International announces the launch of Resource Rights for All, a three-year initiative to support the international movement to protect land and water rights. Grassroots International is a long-time supporter of social movements and progressive organizations around the world including in Brazil, Mexico, Haiti and Palestine. Resource Rights for All deepens our relationships with our overseas partners through cross-border organizing and alliance building for resource rights.

The initiative rests on the belief that access to land for food production and clean water are fundamental human rights. Trade agreements, international development banks and the corporations that control much of world agriculture have tried to wrest control of what have traditionally been community decisions: how best to use local resources to meet the needs of local people. This neo-liberal, market-based model limits communities’ access to and control of these essential resources around the world.

“The Resource Rights for All initiative is our response to the pressures of globalization felt by our partners and by communities all over the global South and also the North,” said Executive Director Nikhil Aziz. “The international movement for land and water rights represents an alternative globalization, a Globalization-from-Below. This is evident in the increasing transnational linkages that are being formed around struggles against water privatization, corporate agriculture and the patenting and extraction of natural resources, among others.”

Our overseas partners advocate stopping policies that threaten their livelihoods, the environment and social justice. They work for food sovereignty, sustainable livelihoods and resource rights for all.

Through Resource Rights, Grassroots International will provide education, communications and advocacy support to our partners and our U.S. allies, helping to build the global network of movements and activists who are working to protect these vital rights. The initiative will create new spaces for action and new connections between local and international resource rights efforts—uniting us all in the global struggle for land, water and food rights.

For more information about the Resource Rights initiative, please contact Corrina Steward, Resource Rights Specialist at 617.524.1400 or csteward@grassrootsonline.org.