The tidal wave of American interest in local, sustainable agriculture, and the waves of protest around the world over staggering food prices, seem to have washed over the heads of most members of Congress without them even noticing. The 2008 Farm Bill proves it.
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
Friends and supporters of Grassroots International may be familiar with Hesperian Foundation, a non-profit publisher of community health education materials, best known for Where There Is No Doctor, recognized by WHO as "the most widely-used health manual in the world." With this month's publication of the long-anticipated A Community Guide to Environmental Health, Hesperian celebrates more than just the release of another book. It allows us all to celebrate and learn from the myriad ways in which people at the grassroots can and do take control over their own environmental health.
There's a scary betting game going on. Here's how it goes: Speculators bet that food prices go up (and drive them up in the process). If they're right, they reap a profit. If they're right, the price of food for families skyrockets.
To the conference organizers (FAO, CGIAR, IFAD, WFP); the Heads of States; the General Secretary of the United Nations: bear responsibility to protect the Palestinian people who are exposed to poverty and hunger by the Israeli occupying forces.
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.
The following is an English translation of a statement made by Judson Barros, the president of FUNAGUAS, as he protested the Bunge Corporation outside its annual stockholders' meeting in New York.
Bunge Food Inc. has been in the public eye over the last two months in many media outlets in Brazil (magazines, websites and newspapers) for two reasons:
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
On Friday night (May 2), a massive cyclone (hurricane) hit Burma. U.S. embassy officials now estimate the death toll may well climb to 100,000. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, without water and food prices have skyrocketed.
Worse, the military regime, which did practically nothing to warn the Burmese people of the cyclone, is still not opening the country to international aid in any significant way. This behavior is consistent with the military regime's denial of access for aid agencies to help victims of the military regime's war on civilians in eastern Burma.
A rich, influential citizen of the United States or Europe—say, Bill Clinton or Bill Gates—buys land in Brazil, either as an individual or a partner in a company. They want to invest in agrofuels, and figure that crops can be grown on their new land for fuel (and profit). But as a result, the price of land rises in Brazil; peasants and other low-income workers can no longer afford to buy land. And they have no say in how the land purchased by foreigners is used.
Grassroots International would like to salute Jesus León Santos, the leader of a democratic, farmer-to-farmer network in Oaxaca, Mexico, for winning the 2008 Goldman Environmental Prize – one of the most esteemed awards in the global environmental movement.
Every person who consumes food in America has a right to know if child or slave labor was used to farm or process the food they eat. But agribusinesses don't seem to agree.
Our friends at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) are lobbying for a provision in the pending U.S. Farm Bill that establishes a voluntary certification system in which companies can verify that their products are not made with child and slave labor. But Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) are lobbying intensely to kill the provision. Why? As the ILRF points out, this is a purely voluntary system, and a corporation that is following international law should have nothing to fear.
"Burning food today so as to serve the mobility of the rich countries is a crime against humanity" said Jean Ziegler, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food criticizing the growing push for using food crops as fuel crops and diverting land use from food cultivation to fuel cultivation. In the face of the growing global crisis that he said could lead to "widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale" United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convened a global task force to respond, and called for closing the $755 million funding gap in the UN's World Food Programme.
Dear Member of Congress:
All around the globe, food riots have shaken countries from Haiti to Egypt to India to Uzebekistan while rising rice prices cause grief in many Asian countries. A global food crisis threatens to impoverish millions around the world. Here at home, livestock and dairy producers, bakers and food processors have expressed their fears over skyrocketing commodity prices while higher food prices are eating into many family budgets. News reports nervously highlight that U.S. and world grain stocks are at all-time lows since World War II.
Food prices have been increasing sharply. According to the World Bank, global food prices have climbed by 83% over the last three years. The real price of rice rose to a 19-year high in March 2008, an increase of 50% in two weeks alone while the real price of wheat hit a 28-year high, triggering an international crisis.
Food activists, scientists, and representatives from governments and corporations around the world will begin meeting in Johannesburg on Monday, April 7th, to finalize a report on how the world can tackle the deeply interrelated issues of hunger, poverty, power, and global agriculture.
But global agribusinesses Monsanto, Syngenta, and BASF have refused to participate. They complained recently that genetic modification of agriculture was under-valued by the 4,000 scientists and experts working on the report, and that the report should not have stated that biotechnology in agriculture poses risks.
ETC Group, a Grassroots International ally based in Canada, has released a report highlighting the failure of governments to manage their multilateral food and agriculture agencies.
ETC is calling on the United Nations to gather the leaders of such agencies to hammer out a plan for the future. It says the meeting is necessary because of numerous threats facing the world's agricultural systems:
On March 7 several hundred people occupied a research site of the U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and destroyed the greenhouse and experimental plots of genetically-modified (GM) corn. Participants in the act, members of the international farmers' organization La Vía Campesina, stated in a note that the act was to protest the Brazilian government's decision in February to legalize Monsanto's GM Guardian® corn, which was recently banned in France, Austria, and Hungary due to risks to the environment and human health.
This week Palestinians around the world are commemorating Land Day (begun in 1976) to mark their attachment to, and dispossession from land -- the fundamental issue of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Former Grassroots International Board chair Assaf Kfoury reflects on the re-emergence of the one versus two states debate.
Many of us think we’re doing the climate and the environment a big favor when we consider meeting our liquid fuel needs through biodiesel. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s time to think again.
Agribusiness is seeing dollar signs as cities and states across the country consider using biodiesel to fuel municipal vehicle fleets and heat homes and businesses. In New York City, over a million households depend on petroleum heating oil to stay warm every winter. Legislation currently wending its way through City Council proposes adding biodiesel to future supplies.
But where does this biodiesel come from and at what environmental cost?
