Grassroots is working with a coalition of allies to fight for farming policies that will protect the human right to food, support family farmers in the United States and abroad and build a healthier food and farming system for consumers, communities and the environment.
The Senate's plan to set aside $25 million for locally-sourced food aid is a big win for family farmers in some of the world's poorest regions, but there is a lot that is still at stake in this farm bill.
]]>Grassroots is working with a coalition of allies to fight for farming policies that will protect the human right to food, support family farmers in the United States and abroad and build a healthier food and farming system for consumers, communities and the environment.
The Senate's plan to set aside $25 million for locally-sourced food aid is a big win for family farmers in some of the world's poorest regions, but there is a lot that is still at stake in this farm bill.
The Diversity Initiative (in which Grassroots is working with the Rural Coalition, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the National Family Farm Coalition, among others) has called on the Senate to make sure that socially disadvantaged farmers receive their fair share of the resources provided in the farm bill. The USDA has admitted discriminating against African American farmers in the past and other farmers of color have come forward in recent years to report similar abuses. We're calling on our representatives to fix this. You can get more information about the Diversity Initiative on the website of the Rural Coalition.
Grassroots is also part of a coalition that has been calling attention to the human and environmental costs of agrofuels, which are already having serious negative effects on rural communities around the world. Some politicians have suggested moving the controversial benchmarks for U.S. production and purchase of ethanol and biodiesel from the Energy Bill to the Farm Bill, where they hope it will attract less attention. Along with groups like the Friends of the Earth and Food First, we have serious concerns about what the industrial-scale production of biofuels will mean to rural communities and hungry people everywhere.
We will keep you posted on any developments in these or other related areas of the farm bill.
]]>A peaceful protest against genetically-modified seed testing turned into an a bloody shooting that resulted in the death of a local leader and the wounding of eight other activists i.
The gunmen, who were carrying illegal firearms including automatic weapons, worked for a security company hired by Syngenta, one of the biggest producers of seeds and agricutural chemicals in the world.
]]>A peaceful protest against genetically-modified seed testing turned into an a bloody shooting that resulted in the death of a local leader and the wounding of eight other activists i.
The gunmen, who were carrying illegal firearms including automatic weapons, worked for a security company hired by Syngenta, one of the biggest producers of seeds and agricutural chemicals in the world.
The Via and the MST are planning a series of actions to protest Sybgenta's deadly practices.
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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.
]]>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.
This past weekend Corrina Steward and Saulo Araujo participated in a forum on Biofuels called Food vs. Fuel. In her presentation, Corrina said "We'd all like to believe that there's a simple, healthy alternative that will let the whole world continue to consume at our present levels, but it's important to base our discussion today on the realities that have already irrevocably transformed landscapes and communities throughout the Global South. Today, the consequences of agrofuels for food security, rural livelihoods and communities are felt by millions of people and millions of acres of forest around the world, and the sad reality is that agrofuel production is already exacting a heavy cost on food security (I'm afraid I don't have time to talk much about the human rights violations (thousands of cases of slavery discovered in Brazil this year) or the cost to the environment (from deforestation, over-irrigation, pesticide use etc.)."
You could say the same thing about most of the other miracle cures for hunger and for the environment: the green revolution was supposed to feed the world's hungry has instead increased nutritional problems, driven self-sufficient farmers off the land, used up millions of gallons of precious water for irrigation and caused irreparable damage to the environment due to over-reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
Meanwhile, there's another way that we know works. Small farmers using agroecological methods can produce enough food for themselves and their communities. With just a little support (much less than the levels needed to subsidize the profits of multinational agribusinesses) they could easily feed the world, at much lower costs to the environment and to the world's irreplaceable rural cultures.
So, today, on this day of action for the environment, think about the small farmers of the world who are feeding their families and neighbors without toxic chemicals. And tomorrow, on World Hunger Day, think about the environmental and social costs of your imported fruits and vegetables.
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Yesterday, RAN activists dropped a 60 x 40 foot banner on the facade of the Chicago Board of Trade which read, "ADM, Bunge, and Cargill: The ABC's of Rainforest Destruction." The banner greeted traders and onlookers as they arrived at work. It remained up for over an hour until the activists were arrested and pulled down.
RAN also took out a full page ad in the Chicago Tribune calling these three companies out for contributing to climate change in their pursuit of biofuels. You can see a copy of the ad at: http://ran.org/media_center/ads/Grassroots is proud to stand with RAN, with our partners and allies in the Global South and North and with thousands of other people who will not tolerate rainforest destruction, the displacement of Indigenous communities and small-scale family farmers, and the human rights abuses that come with the massive imposition of the destructive industrial agricultural model.
Please sign on to RAN's email action alert today, and let the CEO's of ADM, Bunge, and Cargill know that there will be no more agribusiness as usual: http://ga3.org/campaign/ag_launch
]]>We were a little dismayed to read the claim in National Geographic that cane cutters in Brazil earn $250 a week (equivalent to about five times the minimum wage). It's possible that that's the base rate paid to the workers, but the reporter either got it wrong or forgot to ask about the costs of food at company stores and housing in plantation barracks.
Stan Lehman's Associated Press article from earlier this week seems closer to the reality that we've seen with our own eyes in the cane cutting region, and to the horror stories of slavery and starvation wages that our partners, like the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights (Rede Social)[ Portuguese site featuring reports in English] have been telling us.
Lehman reports that top earners may make $420/month, but that most earn much less and many are fired, unpaid, because they can't meet the overwhelming quotas that are demanded of them. (In the past three years in the state of Sao Paulo alone, 18 workers have literally been worked to death, dying of exhaustion, Lehman reports.)
Wired's package is more about an almost sci-fi near future, where genetically modified super-composter organisms do double duty, acting as sugar-digesting bacteria and alcohol producing yeast in one slick, single-celled package. It's an exciting possibility (if you don't mind the idea of unleashing a new super-bug that's really great at eating and rotting things in a way no single organism has ever been before), but it's one of many that researchers have been saying is just around the corner for decades. (Also, as is often the case in this kind of techno-utopianism, no speculation on how we'll grow all the cellulose we need without increasing deforestation or decreasing food production.)
A BBC story about U.S. farmers moving to Brazil to grow crops, including soy for biodiesel, cited the "wide open spaces" of western Bahia.
It would probably come as news to the families who used to earn their living on small plots in the region that their former homes were "wide open spaces." They're only wide open now that those families have been driven off their rented plots as land prices skyrocketed and international conglomerates of investors bought up all the land. The hundreds of thousands of landless workers who have been waiting for the government to allot land that they can use to sustain themselves and their communities might also be surprised. (The few jobs that come with mechanized, industrial-scale agriculture don't come close to making up for the loss of sustainable livelihoods from those driven off the land.)
Small towns are disappearing from western Bahia and the edges of the Amazon and everywhere that palm and sugar and soy plantations have sprung up. The rural culture of those communities, not to mention the species of wildlife that depend on disappearing habitat, are creeping closer to extinction.
Once they're gone, they aren't coming back.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>The breeds of cows, pigs, chickens, goats and sheep that are disappearing are an invaluable source of biodiversity, representing thousands of years of selective breeding for tolerance to disease and harsh local climate conditions. Protecting this kind of local knowledge and community resources is an important part of food sovereignty and an important part of Grassroots program.
Our work with the Peasant Movement of Papaye to repopulate the Haitian Creole pig (which didn't simply become extinct because people stopped breeding it, it was eradicated to protect the interests of U.S. pork processors), with the Movement of Small Farmers to preserve local seed varieties in Brazil are just two examples.
The aftermath of the eradication of the Creole pig tells another important part of the story. The breeds of livestock that do so well in factory farms don't do well at all without cement floors, regular veterinary attention and expensive diets (which, further up the food chain, require lots of fertilizer and irrigation and other expensive inputs). When Haitian farmers were given lovely, lean Iowa hogs to replace their hearty Creole pigs, it was a catastrophic failure. The replacement hogs didn't thrive, and that loss helped fuel deforestation (when people who would have sold a pig for cash now had to sell firewood to make ends meet) and rural-urban migration to starvation-wage jobs in Port-au-Prince sweatshops (when families could no longer make ends meet in their rural communities).
Our solution is to build a green farming system that respects farmers, families and food, that protects wild and crop biodiversity and builds strong rural communities.
]]>The International Court of Justice in the Hague declared in 2004 that the entire route of the wall, falling as it does on occupied territoy, is in violation of international law, that the wall should be removed and that Israel should be required to make reparations for any damage that was done during construction of the Wall.
Protestors have been contesting construction at Bil'in for two years. Grassroots' partner, the Stop the Wall Campaign is a coalition of Palestinian non-governmental organizations and neighborhood committees that works to stop the construction of the Separation Wall inside the 1967 borders of the West Bank.
His latest article outlines the particular challenges to food sovereignty and sustainability posed by proposed agrofuel initiatives in Mexico and outlines an alternative proposal that would incorporate a more sustainable approach with a respect for community control, biodiversity and the rights of indigenous and rural families to the land they have farmed for generations.