Local Food

A new online film from WhyHunger, “The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It,” highlights the impact of today’s global food system on the climate and how a community-based food movement around the world is bringing to life a way of farming and eating that’s better for our bodies and the planet. Featuring interviews with farmers, community leaders, and sustainability advocates, the film highlights how the industrial food system is among the greatest contributors to global warming and how sustainable farming practices can pose a powerful solution to the crisis.

Nestled between Haiti’s turquoise Caribbean waters and the foothills of the northern mountains, is a large plot of land close to the town of Limonade. Here at the height of planting season a group of peasants is hard at work. Claudelle Sensmyr, 36, quietly sprinkles handfuls of seeds down row after row of prepped soil. "I just started farming a few months ago," she told me, brushing off her hands and looking up. "I’m from Port-au-Prince," she added shyly and then motioned to the other farmers, "Many of us are."

The former capital of capitalism lies in ruins. The fourth richest city in the world in the 1940s, Detroit, East-Central U.S.A., has become a graveyard of buildings and factories. The Michigan Central Train Station symbolizes the city's crisis: inaugurated in 1913 and abandoned since 1988, the eighteen-story train station with hundreds of broken windows dominates the skyline and continually reminds one that of the devastation that is Detroit.

By Alisa Pimentel

Among the almost 20,000 activists gathered in Detroit for the US Social Forum this week are several Grassroots International partners and allies. Grassroots International regularly provides funding to our partners and allies to participate in movement-building and leadership development gatherings.

Doudou Pierre is a Grassroots International partner and a member of the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress and the Peasant Movement for Acul du Nord. He.is also on the coordinating committee of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA .and a member of the International Coordinating Committee for Food Sovereignty, organized by Vía Campesina, the worldwide coalition of small farmer organizations. This week he will be heading to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

No one denies that Haiti needs seeds and support this planting season, as the population still faces steep challenges since January’s devastating earthquake. Many thousands have fled urban areas for the countryside, taxing already strained resources and causing many rural communities to re-purpose for food the seeds set aside for planting.

But is any seed a good seed? No, says Chavannes Jean-Baptiste and other Haitian activists. Chavannes is the executive director of Grassroots International partner the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP).

"A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.