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Food Sovereignty

Bolivian Agricultural Production Company Created For Food Sovereignty

According to Minister of Rural Development and Lands Remmy Gonzales, the company will be in charge of producing different crops and covering the deficit in food production, with aims to ensure food sovereignty for Bolivians. The authority clarified that the government doesn’t intend to compete with entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector, but to establish actions to support and promote food production. The MAS government is also taking measures to encourage wheat production. Minister Gonzales said that actions are being implemented through the National Wheat Program and that the purchase of wheat grain production from the winter agricultural campaign will be guaranteed.

Yakama Nation Acquires Inaba Produce Farms

On Monday, November 1, 2021, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation (“Yakama Nation”), acting through its agricultural enterprise Yakama Nation Farms, purchased Inaba Produce Farms, Inc. from the Inaba family. “When the Inaba family began farming here on the Yakama Reservation in the early 1900’s, Yakama tribal members supported their efforts, leasing land to them when the laws of the United States did not permit Japanese immigrants to be landowners. Today, the Inaba family honors our historic relationship by selling Inaba Produce Farms to the Yakama Nation to support our sovereignty and food security,” said Virgil Lewis, Sr., the Yakama Tribal Council Vice Chairman and Yakama Nation Farms Board Chair.

Nicaragua Is The Exception: Letter To A Cynic

“That’s unbelievable,” my father-in-law wrote me from Ireland after watching me give a statistic-heavy webinar on the advances for the poor in Nicaragua since 2007. “I know, right?” I replied. “No, I mean it’s actually unbelievable,” he wrote back. “For cynical people like me, our faith in humanity has been undermined. The story of a government really looking after ordinary people is too good to be true.” I understand what he means. If I hadn’t been living in Nicaragua for the last 20 years and hadn’t seen with my own eyes the changes since the Sandinista government came back in to power with a pro poor strategy 14 years ago, I know that I would also dismiss the statistics as nothing but propaganda.

Food Sovereignty, A Manifesto For The Future Of Our Planet

It offers a vision for our collective future, and defines the principles around which we organize our daily living and co-exist with Mother Earth. It is a celebration of life and all the diversity around us. It embraces every element of our cosmos; the sky above our heads, the land beneath our feet, the air we breathe, the forests, the mountains, valleys, farms, oceans, rivers and ponds. It recognizes and protects the inter-dependency between eight million species that share this home with us. We inherited this collective wisdom from our ancestors, who ploughed the land and waded the waters for 10,000 years, a period in which we evolved into an agrarian society. Food Sovereignty promotes justice, equality, dignity, fraternity and solidarity.

A World Without Hunger

On 1 October, the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), a network of over 200 social and political movements, had its public launch. The IPA owes its origin to a meeting held in Brazil in 2015 where movement leaders gathered to talk about the perilous situation facing the world. At this meeting – called the Dilemmas of Humanity – the idea was born to create the IPA and three partner processes: a media network ( Peoples Dispatch ), a network of political schools (the International Collective of Political Education), and a research institute ( Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research ). Over the course of the next few months, I will be writing more about the history of the IPA and its general orientation. For now, we welcome its launch.

How Big Corporations And Bill Gates Took Over The UN Food Summit

This September 23, the United Nations holds its Food Systems Summit in New York. Under the guise of the UN system, and despite sleight-of-hand language about “equal opportunities,” this summit represents a hostile takeover of world governance by corporate forces and the billionaire elite. Today, social movements are standing up for democracy and against big capital’s devastation of their lands, farms, and communities. The United Nations is based on the idea of multilateralism, where states seek peaceful solutions on the basis of equality and respect, replacing the colonialist institutions that preceded it. That’s why for decades, the United States government has instead pushed for things like G-7, NATO, and other forms of control over geopolitics.

How Did Nicaragua Reduce Hunger And Malnutrition?

Despite crippling, unilateral sanctions and globally rising food prices, hunger levels in Nicaragua have been falling. The Sandinista government has been able to ensure people’s food needs are met through its focus on building food sovereignty and security. How has this been achieved? Erika Takeo from Nicaragua’s Association of Rural Workers (ATC) and Rohan Rice, a writer and campaigner with the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign explain.

Declaration Of The Counter-Mobilization To Transform Corporate Food Systems

The only just and sustainable path forward is to immediately halt and transform corporate globalized food systems. The first step on this path is fully recognizing, implementing, and enforcing the human right to adequate food. While foundational, the right to adequate food is indivisible from other basic human rights, such as the right to health, housing, safe working conditions, living wages, social protection, clean environments, and civil-political rights including collective bargaining and political participation, which collectively should be central to any food system process.

UN Food Systems Summit: Here Is Why We Are Boycotting It

Yet, the organised peasant and indigenous movements from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas that collectively represent most of the world’s small-scale food producers have called for a total boycott of this summit. In April this year, scores of scientists, researchers, faculty members, and educators who work in agriculture and food systems, also issued an open call to boycott the event. To understand why social movements and scientists are staying out of a UN-sponsored summit, it is important to know how the world’s food system works today.

Nicaragua Is Teaching Us How To Put People Over Profits

Members of the Sanctions Kill coalition are currently in Nicaragua as guests of the Friends of the ATC (the Association of Rural Workers) to learn about the Sandinista Revolution and the impacts of the recent economic war being waged by the United States against it. The ATC is a member of the global Via Campesina movement. Nicaragua is putting concrete programs in place to uplift its people by focusing on eradicating poverty, providing basic necessities such as health care, education, retirement security and more and empowering sectors of society that are typically at a disadvantage. A major focus of the Nicaraguan government is achieving food sovereignty using farming methods that are rooted in sustainable and organic methods and supporting small farmers. Clearing the FOG speaks with Erika Takeo of the Friends of the ATC, Antonio Tovar of the Farmworkers Association of Florida and Paul Oqwist of the Nicaraguan government.

‘It’s A Beautiful Thing To Be Able To Feed Your Community’

A little over a year ago Abrianni Perry, a 28-year-old transplant from Houston, came to Cooperation Jackson to learn about cooperatives from people who’ve been doing it for decades. She’s been happily plunging her hands into the rich West Jackson, Mississippi ever since.  “It’s a beautiful thing to be able to feed your community, especially in a food desert,” she says as she works the seven acres of the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust’s Freedom Farm in anticipation of the fall growing season. “The dirt is soft, and when it’s wet I feel like a little kid making mud pies.

Feeding The People In Times Of Pandemic

In its 2019-2023 Strategic Plan for Nicaragua, the United Nations World Food Program said that “In the last decade… Nicaragua is one of the countries that has reduced hunger the most in the region,” while the government reports that chronic child malnutrition dropped from 21.7 percent in 2006 to 11.1 percent in 2019 for children under 5 years of age. Nicaragua was also one of the first countries to achieve Millennium Development Goal Number 1 of cutting undernutrition in half from 2.3 million in 1990-1992 to 1 million in 2014-2016, placing it among the countries of the region that had reduced hunger the most in the previous 25 years. Vitamin A deficiency among children under 5 was also eliminated. Nicaragua’s advances are reflected in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Hunger Map.

Food Sovereignty Policy Prevents Hunger In Nicaragua

Today, thanks to our peasant families and the public policies of the Sandinista government, Nicaragua is no longer on the hunger map. Instead, we are well on the way to food sovereignty because our food production is local and it is distributed in small clusters—even more true if one considers the size of the country. For this reason, there is enough food in Nicaragua at this difficult time, and prices have remained stable or fallen slightly. The country’s peasant culture, and its talent and capacity to work in harmony with the earth, ensures that the words of President Daniel Ortega last month will remain true: “We will not die of hunger.” The first round of planting is about to start and farm families are lovingly preparing for it.

Cooperation Humboldt And The Solidarity Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed all of the inconvenient truths about life in the United States. It is no longer possible to hide the disconnect between myths of a great and advanced society with scenes of long lines for food pantries, millions of workers suddenly unemployed and a political system that gives a one-time maximum payment of $1,200 in a time of severe economic crisis. The already marginalized are at greatest risk of death as black and brown people constitute the majority of coronavirus victims in large cities like New York, Detroit and Milwaukee. Before this health crisis struck there were people all over the country who understood the need for a solidarity economy. The concept is one which holds that every person is an economist in that they are all aware of their needs and those of their communities.

Seeds Of Resistance: The Fight For Food Sovereignty In Palestine

Food sovereignty in Palestine is inextricably linked to the fight for self-determination. Land dispossession in Palestine began in 1948 when 78 percent of historical Palestine became Israel. Since 1967, the remaining 22 percent of the land – now referred to as the ‘Palestinian territories’ – has either been occupied or is controlled by the Israeli army. The separation wall, the buffer zones, the illegal Israeli settlements, and the military exclusion zones within these territories are slowly stripping the indigenous people of all farmland and water resources.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.