The ever thoughtful Walden Bello tells the long history of the destruction of African agriculture, via Foreign Policy In Focus.
Destroying African Agriculture
Roger Burbach, whose 1980 book Agribusiness in the Americas blew open the story of corporate power and food on this continent, has sent his latest thoughts on agribusiness and Bolivia.
This urgent action just in from FIAN. Time to get scribbling.
Brazil: Increasing repression and criminalization against the Landless
People Movement (MST)
Last June 17, about 300 landless (the vast majority of them women, children and elderly) were forcibly evicted from two camps of the “Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra” (MST), located on leased and private land -therefore legally occupied- in the vicinity of Fazenda Guerra, in Coqueiros do Sul, Northern region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The judiciary of Carazinho issued the eviction order after the Attorney General’s office of Rio Grande do Sul filed a complaint against MST on June 11. In this complaint, the Attorney General accuses MST of crimes against the national security and characterizes MST as a para-military organization which ought to be dismantled.
The excellent ETC Group has just come up with a fine bit of social science that cuts through the guff of the recent FAO Food Summit in Rome.
It took tens of thousands of people, dollars and hours to fight back the ambitions of a few agricultural capitalists, but good sense has at least temporarily prevailed here in California. After making their water-tight case for spraying most of Northern California with an untested pesticide to kill a harmless moth, the state government has backed down.
It has a clunky title, but Stan Cox’s latest piece in Alternet is something I can get behind. It’s called Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won’t Save You — Fighting the Corporations Will.
San Francisco, being a techie sort of town, televises and makes available its proceedings online. You can see how the Civic Center farmer’s market discussion all went down here (begins at 04:14:00). If televised local government is something that floats your boat, you can also watch the public comment period too.
Esther Vivas sent in this fine analysis of the FAO’s summit in Rome. More below the fold.
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The high level summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (the FAO) held in Rome on Food Security ended on June 5th. The conclusions of the gathering do not indicate a change in the policy trends which have been in force these last years and which have led to the current situation. The declarations of good intentions made by various governments and the promises of millions of euros to end hunger in the world are not capable of ending the structural causes that have generated this crisis. On the contrary, the proposals made by the general secretary of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, to increase food production by 50% and to eliminate the export limits imposed by some of the countries affected, only reinforces the root causes of this crisis rather than addressing and guaranteeing the food security of the majority of the people in the global South.
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