Agriculture and Food Sovereignty

• Rio+20: International campaign of struggles: Peoples of the World against the Commodification of Nature

  by Via Campesina

  8 May 2012

  La Via Campesina calls on all the peasant organizations of the world and their allies to organize actions in the month of June The advance of the capitalist system that has reached unprecedented dimensions in the past two decades is resulting in crises that are of equally unprecedented dimensions. The financial, food, energy and environmental crises are phases of the structural crisis of capitalism, which has no limits in its search for more profits. And, as in other structural crises, it (...)

• Women of Corn

  by Esther Vivas

  24 September 2011

  In the countries of the Global South, women are the principal producers of food, those in charge of working the land, safegaurding the seeds, gathering the fruit, obtaining water. Between 60 to 80% of food production in these countries is down to women, and worldwide at a level of 50%. These women are the main producers of the staple crops, such as rice, wheat and maize, which go to feed the most impoverished populations of the South. But despite their key role in agriculture and provision (...)

• Ploughing through the meanders in Food Speculation

  by Monica Vargas, Olivier Chantry

  23 September 2011

  The figures of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) show that in 2010, the number of persons suffering from hunger in the world was 925 million, and that this number is likely to increase in the future. They also record an upward trend in the prices of staple foods, as can be observed in chart 1. This spring’s disturbances in the Maghreb are not unconnected with this. We must not forget that the popular revolts currently spreading through the Arab countries are linked to (...)

• The whys of famine

  by Esther Vivas

  22 August 2011

  We live in a world of plenty. Today food is produced for 12,000 million people, according to the Organization of the United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO), when the planet is inhabited by 7,000 people. There is food. So why is one of every seven people in the world going hungry? The food emergency that affects over 10 million people in the Horn of Africa brings to light a disaster that has nothing natural about it. Droughts, floods, wars … serve to exacerbate a situation of extreme food (...)

• World Bank told to stop lending to land grabbers

  by GRAIN

  14 July 2011

  Civil society organisations* from Latin America, Europe and around the world have issued an open letter calling on the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to reject a proposal to finance Calyx Agro, a company that acquires farmland in Latin America on behalf of wealthy foreign investors. Calyx Agro is a subsidiary of Louis Dreyfus, one of the world’s biggest commodity traders. The World Bank is considering a loan of up US$30 million to help Calyx Agro expand its operations in Latin (...)

• Miami rice: subsidizing poverty creation in Haiti

  by Probe International

  4 December 2010

  Food aid in Haiti is the real reason the country is struggling to feed itself. Haiti’s inability to feed its own population is often used as an excuse for developed countries and aid agencies to dump food aid on the impoverished country. But a recent report provides more evidence that the real problem behind Haiti’s food crisis is subsidized imports and food aid. The result, according to Oxfam, is that these subsidized food imports have wiped out the country’s farmers, and subsequently, its (...)

• Food sovereignty: we can feed the world

  by Esther Vivas

  16 April 2010

  We live in the context of a multiple systematic crisis: economical, ecological, alimentary, care, energetic… And the capitalist system, far from providing answers to a crisis that itself has generated, bets for a gateway characterized by the same concepts: major privatization of the public services, plundering of the natural resources, technological answers to climate change, giving subsidies and financial grants to private companies and banc institutions. The food crisis shows one of the (...)

• Food Sovereignty: something’s moving in Europe

  by Esther Vivas

  16 February 2010

  The growing impossibility of a dignified livelihood in the European countryside has provoked a widespread and active social response on the part of Europeans unwilling to sacrifice their society and environment to corporate greed. Farmers’ unions, environmental organizations, consumers’ groups, fair trade organizations, and economic solidarity networks, among many others, have begun to work throughout Europe to denounce the impact of the EU’s agricultural policies and call for alternatives. (...)

• Press Release

  No new alternative for facing hunger

  by FIAN

  18 November 2009

  Heidelberg, 17.11.09 - The human rights organization FIAN criticized the final declaration of the World Summit on Food Security as a document that presents no new alternative for facing hunger and promoting the right to food. ”Neither the recognition of the right to food nor the finding that agriculture in countries of the Global South must be promoted are new,” explains Flavio Valente, Secretary General of FIAN International. “We miss any new and obligatory commitment of funds to be invested (...)

• Stop the global land grab!

  GRAIN statement at the joint GRAIN-La Via Campesina media briefing

  by GRAIN

  16 November 2009

  For over a year a half now, we have been watching carefully how investors are trying to take control of farmland in Asia, Africa and Latin America as a response to the food and financial crises. In the beginning, during the early months of 2008, they talked about getting these lands for “food security”, their food security. Gulf State officials began flying around the globe looking for large areas of cultivable land that they could acquire to grow rice to feed their burgeoning populations (...)

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