All people have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for everyone. This is the basic principle behind food sovereignty. If you want to support domestic food security through the production of healthy food at a fair price, and you believe that family farmers and fishers should have the first right to local and regional markets, then food sovereignty is for you.
In order to raise awareness about our food and farming system we asked the people in our community to complete the phrase “Food is…” We received responses from all over the United States, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and Palestine.
Responses ranged from one word to poems and essays and illustrated what Grassroots International has known since we launched our Resource Rights Initiative—people around the world have a lot to say about our food and farming system and recognize that it is more than a simple commodity.
The legend of the first Thanksgiving is a tale of different worlds coming together in peace to share the bounty of the harvest, of Old World and New World crops and cultures coming together for the
Every year, as Thanksgiving comes round the corner, I think about food—the history of food and the history of the peoples who grow and eat it.
I think about salads in the same way I think about eggs: I can eat them at any time of day, cooked any which way, and with almost anything I have around.
This recipe was handed down from my grandmother. My mom now makes these muffins for almost every holiday or special occasion.
My mother has a book of hand written recipes that provide a map to my childhood. It's as old as I am, 29 years old.
Progress by Grace Darby
When I was a girl,
Eggs were warm, silky brown ,
From haystack barn, manger
When I was seven, the owners of my dad's workplace shut down production and locked the workers out.
Food is a right, a responsibility, a gift, a life, a mystery, a puzzle of unequal distribution of resources which must be solved right now.
"Water and other natural resources are at the center of conflicts worldwide, in large part due to their unequal distribution. These conflicts are both paradigmatic and traditional, involving a fundamental difference over whether water is a human right or a marketable commodity. For rural small producers from the Middle East to Latin America, there is no question that access to and control of water is essential to their very survival. The source of the water challenges these producers face vary across the globe, from occupying powers to a state of war, and from government-sponsored, top-down development models to corporate interests that promote private gain over public good. When viewed through the lens of resource rights, globalization is shrinking the global commons through the concentration and privatization of natural resources. Social change movements of small producers are at the forefront of envisioning and realizing more sustainable alternatives."
The Via Campesina and the Landless Workers Movement (MST) have successfully advocated for removing the global agribusiness Syngenta from a national park in Santa Teresa do Oeste, Paraná, in the south of Brazil.
An article on the connections between water, resource rights and social justice in a special issue on Water and Social Justice for Progressive Planning, the magazine of the
On our way back from a tour of the enormous hydro-electric dam here in Paulo Alfonso this afternoon, Saulo Araujo and I stopped at a small pond covered with water lilies and what looked to my North-American eyes like duckweed. I was delighted to see dozens of Jacanas and gallinules feeding in the weeds and just as we were about to leave an Amazon Kingfisher flew out from the trees on the edge and dove into the pond for a fish.
Last month, 300 women and men from quilombos of the Brazilian southeastern state of Espírito Santo reclaimed a parcel of ancestral land from ARACRUZ Cellulose, a Norwegian-based corporation, according reports from the Anti-Green Desserts Network. The land is part of the former Linharinho quilombo. Two of Grassroots International's Brazilian partners, the Landless Movement (MST) and the Movement of Small Farmers (MPA), supported the initiative of the quilombolas in Espirito Santo.
A few years ago I was driving around lost on the Olympic Peninsula. I was in a hurry, trying to make my way to Hurricane Ridge overlook in the Olympic Mountains in time to see the sunset. When I figured out where I'd gone wrong, I made a u-turn and I almost didn't stop at the little farm stand that caught my eyes both times I drove by it, but I decided that maybe the forces of serendipity had sent me on that detour just so that I could try the local fruit.
I bought a few peaches--individually nestled in extra-large egg carton type material--and a pint of cherries, and chatted with the folks on the other side of the table for a few moments, about the growing season (it seemed late for peaches to me), about the other crops they grow, what a lovely day it was, that kind of thing.
Photographs by Jennifer Lemire for Grassroots International
Many things have changed in the Gaza Strip since Hamas won the elections in January 2006 according to the public will. The E.U. and U.S.
Editor's Note: Daniel Moss sent this post from Jacmel, a city south of Port au Prince on the Caribbean coast. They visited the small town of La Fond on 21st, the day of the national parliamentary elections.
Please join me in a jeep bumping over river stones with Vigot, an agronomist from KROS, the Regional Coordination of Southeast Organizations. As part of its Resource Rights Initiative, Grassroots International staff visited this remote area to observe up close the work of Haiti's regional peasant associations.
On Monday, April 17 movements all over the world kicked off global mobilizations and actions in support of peasants' struggles for land, water and food rights.
The Via Campesina, an international movement of family farmers, landless workers, fisher folk and women's and indigenous' organizations, designated April 17th the International Day of Peasant Struggle to commemorate the 1996 Massacre in Carajas, Brazil. The incident resulted in the murders of 19 members of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), a member of the Via Campesina and a Grassroots partner.
