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.
Tim Wise, former Executive Director of Grassroots International elaborated on this based on Grassroots' principles back in 2005 shortly after the Asian tsunami. Those pointers are just as relevant today. Progressive-minded people who want to contribute to humanitarian aid efforts too often abandon their progressive principles, particularly in crisis situations. Why? They want to help, and they want to do so quickly. And they focus on the service-delivery – food rations, medicines, shelter – rather than the service deliverers.
Bringing GRI's message and the work of our partners to a public high school audience in Providence, Rhode Island is one of those things I wish we could be doing more of. So on Monday morning at the crack of dawn I got up, to lead an assembly or "Pick Me Up" as they called it, at one of the schools of the Met (Metropolitan Regional and Technical Center)–a unique state-funded public school K-12, that is structured around students individualized projects and skills development.
Grassroots was proud to participate in the first Boston Social Forum, which took place July 23-25 2004 at U Mass Boston. It was the first U.S.
In a challenging political and economic environment, Boston-based Grassroots International (GRI) announced today the successful completion of its $1 million Global Justice Fund.
“We launched this fund at the absolute trough of the recession and in a national political environment very hostile to international social change philanthropy,” said GRI Executive Director, Kevin Murray. “That we were successful says something important about the work of our international partners, and the ability of our donors to see the connection between global justice and real global security.”
The Democratic National Convention is coming to Boston. Plans are in place to dramatically restrict vehicle and pedestrian traffic in the center city. Just yesterday, a judge said that the space being prepared to keep protestors "under wraps" resembled an internment camp, but he refused to order the police to re-think this radical restriction of the right to assembly. Life is good in the Cradle of Liberty. The jury is still out on whether or not any of this could prevent the feared terrorist attack, but turning Boston into a police state will surely keep thousands of people from exercising their democratic rights...such as they are.
Luckily, the DNC will not be the only political gathering in Boston during July's final days.
By Nisrin Elamin
CNN and BBC headlines about Israeli withdrawals from Gaza, Iraqi sovereignty and Israel dropping Sharon's bribery case have made me feel like some people are living a different reality than the rest of us. Never mind, that two brutal occupations persist and that plans for withdrawal, handing back power and restoring democracy and justice seem further away from reality than ever. Can we let what happened in Gaza and Abu Ghraib fall through the cracks and into oblivion so quickly? Can we allow flagrant U.S. and Israeli violations of international laws to continue without organizing internal opposition and dissent?
Those were some of the questions I was thinking about on my way to the 3rd Annual National Organizer's Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation that took place on June 4-7, 2004 in Washington D.C.
The people at globalissues.org provide some of the best information available on a wide range of human rights issues. Their page on Haiti is an incredible piece of research, but we believe that it could include a bit more reference to the views of those Haitian social change organizations that have opposed both ex-President Aristide and U.S. military intervention.
We share here our letter to the creators of this excellent site:
Asked whether or not the U.S. had any plans to intervene in Haiti, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said just that on the 2/12 broadcast of NPR's "Evening Edition." The U.S., of course, has contingency plans for another invasion of Haiti, but has no plans to use those plans. Such talk makes Haitians nervous, and it should.
