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The issue of land grabs remains a critical threat to human rights, forcing millions of people off the land to make way for large-scale industrial farms. Land grabs in Ethiopia are not only threatening to dislocate farmers but are doing so with significant financial aid from the United States. Take a moment to read the information below provided by our colleagues at the Oakland Institute and the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia and take action.

Haitians, whether in Haiti or the diaspora, will always remember where they were on January 12, 2010, when tragedy shook us to our core. Devastating images emerged from Port-au-Prince after the earthquake that brought to mind cinematic depictions of the aftermath of a blitzkrieg. I had to constantly remind myself that an earthquake did this, not indiscriminate bombing. In the days that followed my heart wanted a seat on the next airplane to Haiti, but my mind grounded me on a simple fact: I had no medical training and my presence could not give the kind of help that was immediately needed. But I wanted to do something…

As UN negotiators sat in their air conditioned rooms during the last official day of the United Nations climate negotiations, I had a chance to visit a community in Pateque, Mozambique. I spoke with members of the National Peasants Union (UNAC), a member organization of the Via Campesina. They described the ways they have been impacted by climate change: the summer is hotter than they can ever remember, and they showed me large tracts of empty land where the sun had burned many of their crops (including tomatoes and cucumbers).

On December 10, 2011, the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) will celebrate 20 years of human rights promotion and defense in Haiti. A partner of Grassroots International, POHDH is a non-partisan association of eight non-profit, non-governmental Haitian rights organizations bound by shared beliefs in human rights (individual and collective), democracy, and public education around the issues of social, political, and cultural rights.

Among the speakers was Jim Goodman, from the Family Farmer Defenders in Wisconsin – a Grassroots International grantee and ally, and a member of the Via Campesina. Earlier in the year, Jim and Family Farm Defenders helped organize the Tractorcade to Madison, Wisconsin to show support for organized labor and the right of unions to collective bargaining.  Here, he outlines the problems posed by industrial agriculture and the solution of food sovereignty in his first "mic check" speech.

Right now, government representatives from around the world are gathered in Durban, South Africa, for the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference – better known as the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17).  Historically, these closed-door meetings are where some of the world’s largest polluting countries – including the United States – discuss (and occasionally adopt) global climate policy.  At last year’s COP16 meeting in Cancun, Mexico, these governments negotiated the details of polluting and land-grabbing projects like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and other carbon-trading schemes, which are fundamentally about profit – not forests, not people, and not global w

Selingué, Mali—Early morning on day one of the first peasant-organized international conference to stop land grabbing held in Nyéléni, Mali, delegates from more than 30 countries took their seats for the opening ceremony. Many fumbled with the bulky and crackling radios that would provide simultaneous translation, while a small group of women from across Africa gathered in the center of the open-air conference hall, their feet sinking into the sand. In a long-standing tradition of the Via Campesina, the global peasant movement, the women kicked off the events with a mistica—a ceremony intended to depict socio-political struggles and incite debate.

Effective agrarian reform, according to the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR) includes “ a bundle of policies that ensure that agricultural land is distributed to landless peasants and smallholders swiftly and equitably.” Such redistribution is necessary to combat growing hunger and landlessness worldwide. In fact, nearly one billion people around the world are now suffering from hunger and malnutrition – about half of which live in smallholder farming households.  This crisis of world hunger is set to deepen as livelihood resources such as land and water continue to be transferred from such groups to the financially powerful in ever larger areas and longer timeframes.

 

 The United Nation’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym MINUSTAH, has de facto controlled the island for more than seven years. Since the January 2010 earthquake, it has increased its force “in order to support immediate recovery, reconstruction and stability efforts.” Its work falls under a strict mandate of human rights, meant to ensure the protection of the Haitian people. 

Rwanda is the first nation to sign the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). The CAADP is one of the many weapons deployed in Africa's so-called Green Revolution, designed to produce better yields through investments in agriculture.

With the political extravaganza of the debt ceiling debate now in their rear view mirror, the U.S. Congress will soon vote on “free” trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Despite major concerns raised by legislators and advocacy groups in the US (and in those countries), the majority in the US Congress are expected to approve the three agreements as a means to strengthen a debilitated US economy.

Like most other market-based solutions, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), and its more recent avatar REDD +, are fundamentally about profit – not forests, not people, and not global warming or the climate.