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Climate Change

Business as Usual Will Not Solve Global Hunger Crisis

By: Carol Schachet | April 17, 2009

Washington D.C. (April 16, 2009) - The U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis, a group representing anti-hunger, family farm, community food security, environmental, international aid, labor, food justice, consumers and other food system actors, urges the G8 at the upcoming Agricultural Ministerial in Treviso, Italy to reject the failed policies of the Green Revolution. A recent landmark report backed by the UN and World Bank argues for agroecological and sustainable agriculture, rather than reliance on chemical-intensive practices and genetic engineering.
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Climate Change

Lessons from Northeast Brazil: “You can’t fight the environment”

By: Saulo Araujo | March 2, 2009

I believe peasants from Northeast Brazil have a few important things to tell us about climate justice. For starters, the majority of the Northeastern region is dry. And it has been dry since the last glacial period. Also, the Northeast region where I come from is the largest and most populated semi-arid region on the planet, home to 20.5 million people mostly of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian descent.

Because of droughts and lack of water in the past, masses of hungry peasants were forced to migrate to other regions in Brazil.
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Climate Change

Climate Justice Assembly Declaration

By: Carol Schachet | February 12, 2009

Bélém, Brazil, 1 February 2009

No to neoliberal illusions, yes to people's solutions!

For centuries, productivism and industrial capitalism have been destroying our cultures, exploiting our labour and poisoning our environment.

Now, with the climate crisis, the Earth is saying "enough", "ya basta"!

Once again, the people who created the problem are telling us that they also have the solutions: carbon trading, so-called "clean coal", more nuclear power, agrofuels, even a "green new deal". But these are not real solutions, they are neoliberal illusions. It is time to move beyond these illusions.
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Climate Change

Climate Justice Now!

By: Nikhil Aziz | February 12, 2009

Climate Change is big business. Literally! Many corporations, including some of the worst polluters, are salivating at the prospects of potentially vast sums of money that could very well come their way in the name of saving the planet. Climate justice activists, including indigenous peoples, are rightly worried that in the rush to "save the planet" governments and international institutions (including the World Bank, for example) will once again put profits before people.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Yu, Detroiters for Environmental Justice
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Climate Change

“Nobody, No, Nobody is Gonna Rain on My Parade!”

By: Nikhil Aziz | February 5, 2009

"I simply gotta march, my heart's a drummer; nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my parade!"

I remembered the lyrics of this song, first sung by Barbra Streisand I think, as we marched – some 100,000 of us – in a torrential downpour through the streets of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Pará. It was the Opening March of the 2009 World Social Forum. Despite the rain, the enthusiasm of the crowds was contagious.
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Climate Change

Will the New “Green Economy” be Fueled by Unsustainable Agrofuels?

By: Maria Aguiar | January 16, 2009

In 2006 Grassroots International received a report from the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights (Rede Social), one of our Brazilian partners, about rapid expansion of agrofuels production based on large scale plantation-style cultivation of sugar cane for ethanol. We also heard from them about massive expansion of soy plantations and U.S.
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Climate Change

Announcing: A New Popular Education Tool!

By: Carol Schachet | October 16, 2008

Grassroots International and the National Family Farm Coalition announce the release of a new popular education tool that can help you understand and fix the world food crisis: Food for Thought and Action: A Food Sovereignty Curriculum.
It's been said that "you are what you eat." In the face of a global food crisis, it's clear that we've been forced to swallow far more than what's on our plates. Our global food system is broken, with nearly a billion hungry people around the world and millions more forced from their failed farms as industrial agriculture privatizes and despoils our water, soil and biodiversity.
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Climate Change

Local and Fair Trade at the Crossroads

By: Phyllis Robinson of Equal Exchange | July 7, 2008

Grassroots International ally Phyllis Robinson of Equal Exchange recently wrote about the potential wedge driven between advocates of local foods (often called "localvores" in the current vernacular) and those working for Fair Trade. As she points out, Fair Trade and Buy Local advocates share many important concerns about the ways we can take back our food system so that it works best for small farmers and consumers, both locally and throughout the world – developing systems that promote food sovereignty. For more information, read her article.
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Climate Change

Open Letter to the High-Level Conference On World Food Security

By: Grassroots International | June 5, 2008

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.
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Climate Change

Agribusiness Transnational Corporations (TNCs) Create World Food Crisis; Peasants Seize Back Their Rights

By: Via Campesina | April 14, 2008

The world food crisis is starting to appear in its real picture this year. During the last decades hunger was "hiding" in rural or slump areas. Now the number is increasing and many more people cannot stand it anymore. Food riots appear and queues of hungry people are back in many part of the world.
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Climate Change

A Plan for a New Food and Agriculture Agenda in 2008

By: Carol Schachet | April 2, 2008

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:
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Climate Change

What Does Heating Homes in New York City with Biodiesel Have to do with Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

By: Michael Heimbinder of Habitatmap | March 12, 2008

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?
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Climate Change

A Response to the Global Food Prices Crisis

By: Carol Schachet | February 29, 2008

Consumers around the world have seen the prices of staple food dramatically increasing over the past months, creating extreme hardship especially for the poorest communities. Over a year, wheat has doubled in price, maize is nearly 50% higher than a year ago. However, there is no crisis of production. Statistics show that cereals' production has never been as high as in 2007 (1).
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Climate Change

The Story of Stuff

By: Carol Schachet | January 31, 2008

Grassroots International is pleased to highlight "The Story of Stuff ," a newly-released, highly informative and entertaining Web video that documents the destructive impacts of consumerism and waste. The video features activist Annie Leonard taking viewers through the process of creating a consumer good - from the extraction of materials to the disposal. Check it out but beware: Your trash will never look the same.
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Climate Change

Small-scale Sustainable Farmers are Cooling Down the Earth

By: Carol Schachet | January 22, 2008

It’s becoming apparent that climate change is negatively affecting farmers around the world. Erratic weather patterns force farmers to find new ways of growing crops, but sometimes people who work the land are helpless in the face of droughts or excessive rains. When farmers are unable to adapt to changes in climate, local food shortages affect whole communities.
A recent background paper by the Via Campesina summarizes how industrial-scale agriculture fuels climate change and thereby threatens small-scale farmers. But the paper also outlines how many farmers around the world are helping to slow climate change through the practice of sustainable grazing, the use of solar power, and other farm-based endeavors. You can read the background paper here.
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Climate Change

UN: Bali conference ends, new group to take up unresolved issues

By: Carol Schachet | January 18, 2008

Nusa Dua, Bali, 16 Dec (Martin Khor) -- The Bali Climate Change Conference concluded dramatically one day late on Saturday (15 December) afternoon after a dramatic day of events. The day (as the night before) was filled with the tension of deal making and deal breaking.
It saw tempers rising to boiling point, an accusation of mismanagement by the Secretariat that led to its top official taking leave temporarily in tears, a direct intervention of the UN Secretary-General and the Indonesian President to appeal to the countries to make a final deal, a seemingly recalcitrant United States holding the entire meeting to ransom, before several dramatic and angry appeals led finally to its announcement that it would "join the consensus."
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