We can do it with your help.
There are promising signs that this crucial legislation may pass the Senate, but we need your help to make it happen. Every call counts as the Farm Bill gets closer to a vote.
Call your Senators now and ask them to support food aid that works.
What single bill – albeit with a great many tentacles – currently sits before Congress and will define the future of so much of the commons – our land use, soil and water quality, the future of our rural communities?
Look no further than the tip of your fork: the Farm Bill.
Michael Pollan, in the New York Times magazine, April 22, 2007, described it this way: “This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation…sets the rules for the American food system – indeed to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system.”
With one common sense reform to the U.S. food aid program, we can save many more lives without spending one cent more. Take Action Now or read on for more information.
More than 5000 people rallied on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Sunday, June 10th to call for an end to the 40 year Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They represented over 300 organizations from around the country including Grassroots International—Grassroots’ Executive Director Nikhil Aziz participated in the rally. The organizations ranged from faith-based groups and labor unions to civil rights, students’, women’s and lesbian and gay groups. They demanded that the U.S. government act to bring about a lasting and just peace and an end to the occupation and conflict.
Reports about a backroom deal between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Charles Rangel and the White House on "fast track" -- the authorization the President sought to extend that gives him power to practically bypass Congress on free trade deals because it can only vote on and cannot amend the deals President makes -- in return for concessions in other areas were floating around Washington for some time. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Dennis Olson and Alexandra Spieldoch report on what this means for agriculture, here in the U.S. and in the global South.
I had the incredible opportunity to coordinate a meeting between the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (UAWC) and the U.S. farmers and farm worker delegates to Nyeleni.
Present at the meeting were Omar Doanna, UAWC and Stop the Wall, Fuad Abu Sail, UAWC, Khalid Hedmi, UAWC, Zakaraya, a Palestinian farmer, Dena Hoff, NFFC, John Kinsman and John Peck, Family Farm Defenders, Carlos Marentes, Border Agricultural Workers.
The meeting was a rare chance for farmer-activists from very different places to share farming experiences, compare notes on movement-building strategy and show that human connection can conquer political divides.
What better place to talk about the right to food, land and water than in one of the US's great food capitals, New Orleans? I've just returned from Share our Strength's (http://www.strength.org) annual Conference of Leaders - a remarkable network of restaurateurs and chefs seeking to end childhood hunger, a network with which Grassroots International is honored to collaborate.
Building local, national and international solutions for hunger and the crisis in the global rural economy
Earlier ths week at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Vancouver, BC, Grassroots and the National Family Farm Coalition debuted a new booklet that we created this summer on food sovereignty.
In the simplest terms, food sovereignty is the belief that communities should have plenty of food that's not only healthy for the bodies, healthy for their way of life and that the communities themselves have control over.
In New Orleans, today, farmers, fishers, shrimpers and chefs will join the community in a Thanksgiving dinner at the Crescent City Farmers Market. They will give thanks and "celebrate surviving, reinventing and rediscovering the power of community." On our recent trip to the South, Azalia and I had the privilege to experience the power and strength of the Crescent City Farmers Market. We witnessed the endurance of the producers to continue with a long tradition of going to the market, and the customers' relief that they continue to be there.
Corrina and I just returned from a whirlwind three-state tour of the South. Our trip began in Alabama, took us to Mississippi and ended in New Orleans, Louisiana. The landscape was beautiful, the heat and humidity bordering on oppressive, the vowels pronounced long and slowly, the people welcoming and the food delicious.
We are here to denounce the continuing war crimes perpetrated by the Israel government against the million and a half residents of the Gaza Strip, and to demand that your government cease its mili
"Farm to Cafeteria" is a wonderful idea being promoted by a large number of organizations representing family farmers, farm workers, children's and youth advocates, environmental, health and hunger activists, organic consumers, faith-based groups and others, including Grassroots International, the National Family Farm Coalition, the Rural Coalition, the Organic Consumers Association and the Community Food Security Coalition.
Everyday more than 800 million people go hungry. Many of the hungry are family farmers or landless farm workers in the Global South. In the U.S., family farmers are struggling to stay in business and fighting for a cleaner environment and for a food system that will protect rural livelihoods and provide consumers with safe, delicious, local food. To face these daunting challenges, family farmers from around the world are organizing themselves into a global movement for social justice.
In Washington D.C., Grassroots and the National Family Farm Coalition organized a public forum for farmers movements, academics and activists from around the nation and around the world to share theirglobal vision for food and farming.
Yesterday, the US released its trade position for the upcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong in December. The US plan calls for deep subsidy cuts for the US and the European Union. Yet, the cuts rest on the promise that developing countries will significantly reduce industrial tariffs--a compromise that the world's least developed countries say threaten their development and livelihood security rights.
The majority of Grassroots International's partners rely on agriculture for income, food security and sustaining healthy communities. The US's trade position is intricately linked to the parameters of the US Farm Bill, the major legislation that ultimately controls US and global agricultural markets. Our partners' livelihoods are affected by a US agricultural policy process that they have no control over. Their greatest hope is through social movements like the Via Campesina, an international movement of small farmers, indigenous communities, community fisher people, agricultural workers and rural women working to stop global agriculture from being regulated through the WTO.
The Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund (FSC), a member of Grassroots International's ally the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), has set up an Emergency Relief Fund for relief and long-term reconstruction to help Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama farmers rebuild facilities and markets and help with direct emergency assistance for housing, food and water. Grassroots will be making a solidarity grant to support this effort.
Current U.S. food aid policy makes responding to wide-spread hunger like the current conditions in Niger an opportunity for the U.S. agricultural industry to gain new markets.
A recent study by a Grassroots International Resource Rights Advisor, Kathleen McAfee, and Sophia Murphy of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP), shows two distinct changes to the way U.S. food aid operates that could focus aid on saving lives rather than boosting sales for the U.S. agricultural industry.
They are: 1) provide cash, not U.S. produced food, to the U.N. World Food Programme and 2) support the World Food Programme'?s effort to buy food from regions adjacent to affected areas by not inundating local markets with U.S. food sales.
