Maria Aguiar's blog

Grassroots International’s partner Camille Chalmers, Executive Director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA) traveled to Washington, DC during the last week of July to testify before the Congressional Black Caucus. The CBC sponsored-hearing on Haiti entitled “Focus on Haiti: The Road to Recovery - A Six Month Review” was supported by the Haiti Advocacy Working Group (HAWG).

On the cusp of Haiti’s spring planting season, we received urgent requests from our partners and allies in Haiti about their dire need for seeds and tools to ensure that food production would be secured in the immediate planting season -- this is all the more important in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and the massive migration to rural areas from Port-au-Prince.

Grassroots International is making three new grants of $25,000 each, all of which will help provide seeds, tools and training for this planting season to these groups:

• The Peasant Movement of Papaye (the MPP). Funds for the MPP will cover the Central Plateau.

Since a devastating earthquake shook Haiti more than two weeks ago, Grassroots International’s partners on the ground have been working to assess the situation and respond to the needs of the community – even as they themselves have suffered great losses.  With help from hundreds of people who have donated in response to the crisis, Grassroots International has made three initial grants to three of our partners in Haiti.

I have had the privilege of being the point person for Grassroots International on our U.S-based advocacy work on food and farm policy issues. A large part of this work is done in conjunction with our allies in the US Working Group on the Global Food Crisis, where Grassroots is a member of the ad hoc steering committee  I have been working to raise the voices of Grassroots’ partners, like the Via Campesina, in the policy solutions put forward for consideration in Washington. Among the strategies for which our partners, and we, advocate is a transition away from large-scale industrialized fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture toward a more earth and people friendly model of sustainable agriculture.

When it rains, it pours. This week has seen a deluge of global food and trade strategies, all of which may deeply impact food and agriculture policies for Grassroots International, our partners and our allies.

Since late spring of 2008 I have been playing an active role in the work of the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis.  This broad network of farmer, fisher, farmworker, labor, faith, food and hunger and policy advocacy organizations has echoed the call of global social movements and civil society to implement a clear and simple set of principles included in the findings of the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and join the community of nations supporting the right to food. 

Nikhil Aziz,  Grassroots International's Executive Director is in Brazil this week attending  the World Social Forum (WSF), which is happening in Belem in the Amazon region of Brazil.   For four days before the WSF our partner,  the Landless Workers Movement  (MST) did a special site visit  to show international visitors including members of media the destruction that has been brought about by the agribusiness expansion in the Amazon region. They traveled through the southern part of Para state and saw the impacts of mining, logging and hydroelectric projects on the Amazon and its people.