Grassroots International ally and grantee, the National Family Farm Coalition (a member of Grassroots' partner the Via Campesina), celebrated the demise of the recent Doha Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Grassroots supports the NFFC's and Via's demand for the WTO to "get out of agriculture" as this is imperative to realizing food sovereignty. The disastrous neoliberal trade policies pursued by the WTO benefit the "industrial agricultural complex" while harming family farmers, peasants and farm workers worldwide.

Dear Member of Congress:

All around the globe, food riots have shaken countries from Haiti to Egypt to India to Uzebekistan while rising rice prices cause grief in many Asian countries. A global food crisis threatens to impoverish millions around the world. Here at home, livestock and dairy producers, bakers and food processors have expressed their fears over skyrocketing commodity prices while higher food prices are eating into many family budgets. News reports nervously highlight that U.S. and world grain stocks are at all-time lows since World War II.

The global food and farm system is broken. In the middle of one of the most productive agricultural periods ever, farmers can’t earn a fair price for what they raise and farmworkers don't earn a fair wage for their labor. Meanwhile, more than 850 million people around the world go hungry every day and the environmental degradation caused by industrial farming is spreading across the globe and creeping into our own backyards. Profits for a few seed, agrichemical and food processing corporations outweigh the needs of all of the rest of us. The system no longer values healthy, delicious food, productive and sustainable rural communities or people’s right to make decisions about their communities and their farms.