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Brazilian Peasant Women Embody the Spirit of International Women’s Day

By: Carol Schachet | mars 7, 2008

In celebration of International Womens Day on Saturday, we at Grassroots would like to honor 900 peasant women who bravely seized and occupied a vast corporate tree farm in southern Brazil that they believe symbolizes the type of development that is destroying their communities and Mother Earth itself.
It could not have been easy.
The women, members of the Via Campesina, staged thetakeover just before dawn on Tuesday, then proceeded to cut down the corporations trees and plant native trees in their place. At least 50 women were injured by rubber bullets and other material when police forcefully removed them from the 5,200-acre farm. Hundreds of them were reportedly arrested.
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Brazil

A Brazilian Perspective on Food and Energy Sovereignty

By: Carol Schachet | février 6, 2008

There is no doubt that Planet Earth is gravely ill due to the destructive actions of corporate and financial capitalist elites, responsible for global environmental destruction and climactic changes, as well as the privatization of all forms of life. We stand at a crossroads: we either change the paradigm of current civilization or human and planetary life will be destroyed.
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Brazil

A Moratorium on Agrofuels

By: Carol Schachet | janvier 3, 2008

Grassroots International has been working with a group of organizations that first met together in Atlanta at the U.S. Social Forum in June 2007 to discuss what to do about biofuels and U.S. food and fuel policies. After much deliberation, these groups. including Grassroots, have formed a national coalition and are calling for an immediate moratorium on U.S. incentives for agrofuels, U.S. agroenergy monocultures and global trade in agrofuels.
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Brazil

Speaking Tour of Brazilian Land Rights Activist in Massachusetts

By: Grassroots International | novembre 29, 2007

Grassroots International and U.S. Friends of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (FMST) are delighted to host Luis Antonio Pasquetti, from the National Committee of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), a member of Via Campesina, during his tour in the United States.
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Brazil

One Drop of Water at a Time: Solidarity Moves the Global Movement for Social Justice

By: Grassroots International | novembre 28, 2007

In times of war and institutionalized terrorism, examples of solidarity between people in the United States and the Global South give us hope for a better world. In fact, it is only through solidarity with people that we will never actually meet that we can build the "global movement for social justice".
Here is a case that has re-energized us at Grassroots International this end of year.
Last spring, Grassroots made a brief presentation to students of Boston's Philbrick School about our work to support rural communities throughout the globe to reclaim their rights to land, water and food.
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Brazil

Activists Attacked in Brazil: Update

By: Jake Miller | octobre 30, 2007

Isabella Kenfield and Roger Burbach of Center for the Study of the Americas have written an article with more details about a vicious, deadly attack on activists from the Via Campesina and the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Parana, Brazil on October 21.
A peaceful protest against genetically-modified seed testing turned into an a bloody shooting that resulted in the death of a local leader and the wounding of eight other activists i.
The gunmen, who were carrying illegal firearms including automatic weapons, worked for a security company hired by Syngenta, one of the biggest producers of seeds and agricutural chemicals in the world.
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Brazil

Protestor Assasinated During Direct Action in Brazil

By: Jake Miller | octobre 24, 2007

Private security forces hired by the multinational agribusiness Syngenta shot and killed Valmir Motta de Olivera, a leader of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Via Campesina during a direct action protest on Sunday, Oct 21 in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. Eight other protestors were wounded in the attack. The landless workers were occupying the site, where Syngenta runs field trials for genetically modified seeds. The land borders an ecologically important national park area, and the Via have proposed that the land be developed instead as a center for agroecology and creole seed production.
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Brazil

Biofuels: The Beautiful Dream and the Painful Reality

By: Jake Miller | octobre 5, 2007

In the last month or so, magazines as diverse as the venerable National Geographic and the next-gen Wired have featured stories about the almost magical properties of industrial-scale agrofuel production, claiming that biofuels will lift the rural poor out of misery by providing high-paying jobs, reversing global warming and ending war in the Middle East.
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Brazil

Ethanol’s Dissonant Sounds: A Dirge for the Commons

By: Carol Schachet | août 10, 2007

I recently traveled to Iowa to visit an ethanol plant. Over the din of the machinery, here are the sounds that I heard:
Glub, glub. The plant consumes over a million kilos of corn per day. That's good news for area farmers especially as the price has almost doubled due to high demand. The bad news is that our current agricultural system is petroleum-soaked. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, machinery, irrigation pumps, and grain transport all depend on the stuff. Sustainable Table reports that each acre of corn, just in chemical pesticides and fertilizers, requires 5.5 gallons of petroleum.
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Brazil

Sugar Slaves: 1,108 freed, 14 in jail

By: Grassroots International | juillet 24, 2007

Much of the sweat that goes into cutting cane for sugar to eat and increasingly as a primary ingredient for ethanol comes from low-wage and slave (bonded) labor. This month, the Brazilian government freed 1,108 sugar cane cutters in the state of Pará in the Amazon region. In the western state of Mato Grosso, 14 farm workers from an ethanol producing plant were incarcerated for protesting the delay in payment of their salaries. The average salary of a sugar cane cutter is less than $ 300.00 per month.
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Brazil

Another World is Possible; Another US is Necessary – the United States Social Forum

By: Nikhil Aziz | juillet 3, 2007

“Our Youth is not the Future, Our Youth is the Present” – Julian Moya, Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), Albuquerque, New Mexico
“We cannot choose the historical conditions we find ourselves in, but we can choose how we respond to them” – Ajamu Baraka, Director, U.S. Human Rights Network, Atlanta, Georgia
These two quotes, among many other hopeful messages I heard at the U.S. Social Forum (USSF) from June 27 to July 1, 2007 in Atlanta epitomized for me the USSF – what it stands for and envisions in terms of a different kind of United States. Both represent the truth embedded in the official slogan of the USSF – Another World is Possible; Another US is Necessary.
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Brazil

River Rerouting in Brazil: Reinventing a Broken Wheel

By: Grassroots International | juin 27, 2007

1,200 indigenous people, fishermen and peasant farmers occupied the construction site of a major river rerouting project of the São Francisco river in protest. Members of different organizations and social movements in northeast Brazil are demanding that the federal government stop the implementation of this project and guarantee indigenous people’s land rights in the area.
“We are being evicted from our land for this by people who are not concerned with the river or with the livelihood of our families” said Neguinho Truká, leader of the Truká ethnic group.
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Brazil

The Myth of Biofuels

By: Carol Schachet | mai 8, 2007

A Report from Brazil's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and Social Network for Justice and Human Rights (Rede Social).By Edivan Pinto, Marluce Melo and Maria Luisa Mendonça*
Recent studies about the impacts caused by fossil fuels contributed in highlighting the theme of bioenergy . The energy matrix is composed of petroleum (35%), coal (23%) and natural gas (21%).On their own, the ten richest countries consume 80% of the energy produced in the world. Amongst these, the USA is responsible for 25% of pollution to the atmosphere. Analysts estimate that within 25 years, the world demand for petroleum, natural gas and coal may have an increase of 80%.
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Brazil

Food Sovereignty and Biofuels

By: Grassroots International | mars 23, 2007

Article three in a three issue series on biofuel in Brazil.
The memorandum of understanding between Brazil and the United States signed during the visit of President Bush to Brazil early this month has been under intense scrutiny. For one, the high U.S. tariffs on Brazilian ethanol make the initiative unrealistic for now. But speculative investors are already rushing to expand the "green desert", as activists have taken to calling the vast areas of monocrops like sugar cane, soybean and castor seed that bring high profits for agribusiness and industry at the cost of rural livelihoods and biodiversity. This expansion takes land and water rights and the possibility of a dignified livelihood away from rural families.
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Brazil

Biofuels: The industrial model is bad for the environment, worse for workers

By: Grassroots International | mars 14, 2007

The latest post in our ongoing series on biofuels, human rights and the environment in Latin America.
We hear the claims so often—biofuels will save the environment, biofuels are clean and green—that they begin to sound like common sense. The corporations tell us that biofuels made from sugar cane, castor beans and soy will save the environment from the ravages of petroleum-based fuels, and we all wish that it were true.
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Brazil

Bush, Biofuels and Latin America

By: Grassroots International | mars 8, 2007

This is the first of three articles that we will be publishing about biofuels and their impact on trade, the environment and the water and land rights of rural workers and indigenous and traditional Afro-descendant communities in Latin America.
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Brazil

Women of Via Campesina Brazil in Honor of International Women’s Day Occupy a Cargill-owned Sugar Mill in Sao Paulo

By: Maria Aguiar | mars 8, 2007

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.
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Brazil

Full Tanks at the Cost of Empty Stomachs:The Expansion of the Sugarcane Industry in Latin America

By: Maria Aguiar | mars 7, 2007

During the last week of February 2007, Grassroots International's partner Rede Social or Social Justice Network of Brazil hosted a Latin American conference on the expansion of the intensive cultivation of sugar cane for biofuel throughout Latin America. Rede hosted delegates from various countries where sugar cane monocultivation is expanding as demand for bio fuels grows. Read the final declaration from the Latin American groups represented:
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Via Campesina Brazil’s Women Are for Food Sovereignty and against Agribusiness

By: Maria Aguiar | mars 6, 2007

Today, March 6th, Grassroots International received an announcement from the Via Campesina Brazil. The women of the Via Campesina Brazil are honoring International Women's Day by organizing land occupations and protests against large Brazilian and transnational corporations who own and exploit huge tracts of Brazilian land and labor for monocultured cultivation of trees for cellulose for export. The women refer to these huge tracts of land planted only with such trees as the "green deserts" of Brazil - green deserts because they produce no food and very little employment, and are also environmentally damaging. Please read the announcement of our partners below:
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Brazil

Joao Pedro Stedile (MST) Says International Financial Institutions Do Not Represent People

By: Nikhil Aziz | février 28, 2007

Joao Pedro Stedile, an MST leader and member of Grassroots International's Resource Rights Advisory Group participated along with his colleagues at the Nyeleni Food Sovereignty Forum. While there he spoke with Radio Mundo Real about how the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do not represent the interests of ordinary people and argued that international trade must first and foremost meet the needs of people not corporations. The interview originally appeared on the Nyeleni website.
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