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Food Sovereignty

NAFTA is Killing Tradition of Corn in Mexico

By: Nikhil Aziz | November 9, 2007

Sin maíz no hay país is the resounding clarion call given by Grassroots International’s Mexican partners, grantees and their allies in rolling out the National Campaign in Defense of Food Sovereignty and the Revitalization of Rural Mexico.
Corn is indigenous to Mexico, and the alliance of peasant, farm worker, indigenous peoples, fisher, consumer, environmental and human rights groups and other organizations that came together to declare sin maíz no hay país are making the point that corn is intrinsically tied to the very idea and identity of Mexico.
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Food Sovereignty

Biting the Hands that Feed Us

By: Nikhil Aziz | November 8, 2007

"Punjabis are poisoning themselves" declared the Economist not too long ago, quipping that the poster child of India's green revolution is now "in the throes of a grey revolution." We take heart that the Economist, a cheerleader for "free trade" and neoliberal economic policies, is raising questions about policies that have caused massive environmental degradation and serious public health consequences for India's bread basket state.
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Food Sovereignty

Agrofuels Violate the Human Right to Food

By: Carol Schachet | November 5, 2007

Over the last few months, we've reported on the damaging impact of agrofuels on human rights, the environment and food security.
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Food Sovereignty

Protestor Assasinated During Direct Action in Brazil

By: Jake Miller | October 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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Food Sovereignty

When Hope Triumphs Over Fear: An Invisible Global Revolution: Frances Moore Lappé at the Jamaica Plain Forum

By: Carol Schachet | October 18, 2007

Thursday, November 1st
7:00pm
FREE

First Church in Jamaica Plain
Unitarian Universalist Sanctuary
6 Eliot St (Across from the Monument)
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts 02130

In 2006 an energized electorate seemed poised to reassert ownership of the democratic process. Since the elections, however, polls show that citizens confidence in government has resumed its downward trend. Far from waning, disillusion and disengagement continue to spread.

Why is this happening, and how can we stop it?
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Food Sovereignty

World Food Day: The Right to Food IS Food Sovereignty

By: Nikhil Aziz | October 17, 2007

More and more people around the world are taking up the call by peasant and small farmers, indigenous peoples and pastoralists for food sovereignty as an expression of, and a way to realize the right to food. Earlier this year members of the Via Campesina and other organizations met in Mali to put in motion an action plan for achieving food sovereignty. On October 16^th, World Food Day, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) endorsed food sovereignty as the right to food. As IFOAM notes, food sovereignty as the right to food means the right to feed oneself as opposed to the right to be fed.
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Food Sovereignty

Days of Action

By: Jake Miller | October 15, 2007

Today is Blog Action Day and more than 15,000 bloggers with a combined reach of more than 12 million subscribers are joining forces to blog about the environment.
Tomorrow is World Food Day, a day created by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, a day that's dedicated to bringing awareness to the struggles of the 800 million people who go hungry every day. Thousands of people around the world will take action to fight hunger.
It's too bad these two days didn't coincide, because so many of the problems related to hunger are environmental, and so many of the solutions are ecological.
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Food Sovereignty

Food vs. Fuel: Is Biofuel Production from Farms Jeapordizing our Food Security?

By: Carol Schachet | October 10, 2007

A daylong event that will explore Biofuels from a multi-sectoral, global perspective, and debate the question of whether Biofuel production is endangering our food security.

Featuring Saulo Araujo, Grasroots' Global Programs Assistant and a Senior Fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program and George Naylor, President of the National Family Farm Coalition in the workshop "Biofuel-Food Complex" and Grassroots' Resource Rights Specialist Corrina Steward in the Food vs. Fuel debate.

Tufts University’s School of Nutrition
150 Harrison Ave.
Boston, MA 02111
October 13th 8:30—3:30
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Food Sovereignty

Agrarian Reform and Peasant and Women’s Leadership Strengthened at the Francisco Morazan Central America Peasant School

By: Grassroots International | September 25, 2007

It is my seventh day traveling around Central America and I have filled many, many pages with notes. As much as I want to know, it is impossible to absorb so much information and history in a week. Conversations here are a rich experience often sprinkled with bountiful details of local and Latin American history.
Over the last two days, I have been participating as an observer in the Central American Regional Conference on Agrarian Reform of the Via Campesina at the Francisco Morazan Central American Peasant School, named after the 19^th century Central American leader who tried to create a united, progressive Central America.
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Food Sovereignty

Continuing Coverage of the Agrofuels Controversy

By: Jake Miller | September 18, 2007

When something sounds too good to be true, it often is.
Clean, green, biofuels that magically reduce dependance on fossil fuels and reduce global warming with no negative impacts are a myth.
Our friends at the IRC Americas program are continuing to cover the realities of the booming agrofuel industry: increased hunger, consolidation of the food and farming system and environmental degradation and decreased human rights, food sovereignty and local autonomy.
Here's their latest article, by Laura Carlsen, the director of the Americas Program, based in Mexico City.
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Food Sovereignty

Central America’s Women Fighting Oppression

By: Grassroots International | September 18, 2007

[In September 2007, Saulo Araujo, our Global Programs Assistant, is visiting our partners in Mesoamerica. He'll be reporting back about resource rights and food sovereignty issues in the region. This is the first of a series of three articles. --Ed.]
As I waited for my flight to El Salvador on Tuesday, I decided to browse the newspapers for news about the election in Guatemala and saw a small blurb about the defeat of Rigoberta Menchu. The newspaper article reads that Rigoberta Menchu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, received only 3% of the valid ballots in last Sunday's presidential election in Guatemala.
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Food Sovereignty

Protecting Threatened Livestock and Seed Strains in the Face of Global Extinctions

By: Jake Miller | September 5, 2007

SciDec.net has a story this morning about a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) says that over-reliance on high yield, factory-farming style breeds is causing the extinction of an average of one local breed of animals per month. Meanwhile, in the last 100 years we've lost 75 percent of crop diversity.
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Food Sovereignty

Small Farmers and Agrofuels in Mexico

By: Jake Miller | September 4, 2007

Victor M. Quintana is an adviser to the Frente Democrático Campesino de Chihuahua , researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and collaborator with the Americas Policy Program, at www.americaspolicy.org. He works with the Rural Coalition and the Via Campesina, Mexico and has spoken and written widely about agrofuels, especially about their impact on the price of staple foods like tortillas in Mexico.
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Food Sovereignty

Food Sovereignty and Agrofuels: Voices from the Field

By: Jake Miller | August 31, 2007

[George Naylor, President of the National Family Farm Coalition, continues his report from the Via Campesina's forum on Agrofuels and Food Sovereignty (August 30-31, 2007) with an update on the presentations he's heard. --Ed.]
What I´ve heard here is that multinational corporations and governments intend to provide our energy-insatiable economies (especially in the US and Europe) with agrofuels, even though demand could never be met and monocropping will foreclose food sovereignty and biodiversity.
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Food Sovereignty

George Naylor Reports from the Forum on Food Sovereignty and Agrofuels

By: Jake Miller | August 30, 2007

George Naylor, President of the National Family Farm Coalition sent us a note from the Via Campesina's International Forum on Agrofuels and Food Sovereignty. The forum, which features farmer and peasant activists from around the world, is taking place today and tomorrow in Mexico City. The race to convert acres from food to fuel crops in Mexico, Brazil and the United States has many, including us here at Grassroots, concerned. We fear that pursuing the industrial scale agrofuel model will worsen hunger, speed up destruction of the natural environment and the fertility of farmland and destroy local communities and ways of life that, once gone, can never be brought back.
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Food Sovereignty

Tell the Senate to Support Food Aid that Helps, Not Hurts

By: Jake Miller | August 22, 2007

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.
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Food Sovereignty

Video from Nyeleni Forum for Food Sovereignty on You Tube

By: Jake Miller | August 17, 2007

The Nyeleni communications team just sent us a link to a very inspirational video, a trailer for a documentary on the global food sovereignty movement and Nyeleni 2007, the Forum for Food Sovereigty.
The video is subtitled in Spanish, but for those who don't speak Spanish, many of the interviews were conducted in English.
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Food Sovereignty

CARE Rethinking Aid, Takes Stand Against Dumping

By: Jake Miller | August 16, 2007

The New York Times reports today that, "CARE, one of the world's biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help." (CARE Turns Down Federal Funds for Food Aid)
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Food Sovereignty

Notes from Learning Call on Food Sovereignty in Africa and Nyeleni 2007: Forum for Food Sovereignty

By: Daniel Moss | July 28, 2007

Presenter: Diamantino Nhampossa is the Executive Coordinator for the National Small Scale Farmers Union in Mozambique and a Member of International Coordinating Committee of the Via Campesina for the Africa Region. (Contact information for Diamantino Nhampossa: diamantino.n@gmail.com)

Presenter: Anna Lappé is the author of the best selling book "Grub" and a past Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow.

Moderator and Presenter: Corrina Steward, Resource Rights Specialist, Grassroots International. Corrina was a participant in the Forum on Food Sovereignty along with a number of Grassroots International partners.
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Food Sovereignty

No to Instant Death; Yes to Cancer and Poisoning!

By: Carol Schachet | July 23, 2007

From all the roughing up in the press of China for their shoddy and criminal regulatory neglect, you’d think it was downright patriotic in the US to regulate self-interested corporations. The hypocrisy of our tepid and schizoid embrace of corporate regulation drives me nuts.
Reporting on the discovery of anti-freeze in toothpaste and the execution of the head of China’s Food and Drug Administration equivalent, the New York Times and others have written about recent failures of the Chinese regulatory system which has resulted in dozens of consumer deaths and by many accounts, the slow poisoning of millions. The scrutiny and criticism is welcome and overdue.
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