View previous stories
	The interrelated principles of food sovereignty and the right to food by Food First, Oakland Institute, Greenpeace Greenpeace International, Food First, Oakland Institute   GM Crops: The Genetic Colonialists, by Kumi Naidoo. (Greenpeace International)   While we are producing enough food for everyone we are failing to distribute it equitably, advances in biotechnology to help us produce more are to be welcomed in a world with an increasingly destabilised climate and a growing population.   Sophisticated plant breeding techniques have brought us blight-resistant potatoes and crops enriched with nutrients; flood-tolerant scuba rice that can survive under water for a fortnight or more; and drought-tolerant maize that increases yields by up to 30%. These crops are being used successfully by thousands of farmers in Africa today.   However, none of these seeds were genetically engineered. They were produced using marker-assisted breeding, genome sequencing and traditional cross-breeding and grafting techniques, allied to a greater understanding of crop biology. And they work.   But we still urgently need reforms to land ownership and trade if all of us are to benefit. In my own country, under the 1913 Natives Land Act South Africa"s black majority was excluded from land ownership in favour of the white minority. The act destroyed traditional farming. A century later, the unequal distribution of land in South Africa is still a big political issue. It"s a pattern that is repeated throughout Africa, and is becoming a bigger problem as land grabbing by foreign enterprises spreads. I fear that GM crops corporations are using the "feed the world" argument as a Trojan horse for a new form of colonialism.   Claims by the agrochemical industry that the next generation of genetically engineered crops will save the planet and feed the world, but what it actually gives us is mostly empty promises, contamination scandals, corporate capture of our food and increasing use of agrochemicals. The poster crop of the agrochemical industry is still, after 15 years of development, "golden rice". Its developers say that it will be ready for cultivation in another two years. Meanwhile supporters of GM trot out the simplistic line that people who are anti GM are responsible for children going blind. In practice, one of the solutions that is saving the lives of millions of children is adding vitamin A supplements to their diet twice a year. According to the World Health Organisation, this is one of the most successful health prevention programmes. But, what would save our children in a sustainable future is not so much a technical fix, and only dealing with vitamin A, but a healthy balanced diet that gives them the vitamins they need from the food they eat. Is this too much to ask?   Governments should be supporting the ecological farming solutions offered by the United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).   Governments around the world can move us towards a resilient and ecological agriculture by prioritising the resource needs and knowledge of the world"s small-scale ecological farmers. We must support ecological farming systems that can address climate change. And finally we have to recognise the interrelated principles of food sovereignty and the right to food.   * Kumi Naidoo is Executive Director of Greenpeace International http://www.greeenpeace.org   We desperately need a new food system writes Eric Holt-Giménez, Director of Food First.   For the first time in recorded history the next generation is expected to die younger than their parents due to malnutrition and diet-related disease. This is because some will not get enough food to eat. Others will have no choice but to eat cheap, processed food. Both are victims of a global food system that serves monopoly profit rather than people.   Even though we produce 1 ˝ times enough food for every man, woman and child on the planet, nearly a billion people go hungry while over a billion are malnourished. Ironically, most of the hungry in the Global South are the very people producing half the world"s food: peasant women. Similarly, most of the food insecure people in the developed world are food and farm workers -- as are many of those suffering from obesity and diet-related disease. Hunger and malnutrition are not by-products, but an integral part of the global food system. We desperately need a new food system.   Ensuring environmental sustainability, food security and good nutrition around the world -- as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) asserts -- will require a radical transformation in how we grow, process and distribute our food. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reached a similar conclusion in their 2013 report, "Wake Up Before it"s Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable now for Food Security."   Luckily, we have many examples of good food systems in the making. Agroecologically-managed smallholder farms like those in Latin America"s Campesino a Campesino Movement increase yields; conserve soil, water and biodiversity; and capture carbon to cool the planet. Urban farms from Havana to Bangkok are steadily increasing food production and improving livelihoods. Community-supported Agriculture groups around the world provide fresh, healthy food for members and a living income for local family farmers. Hundreds of municipal Food Policy Councils and Food Hubs are implementing citizen-driven initiatives to keep the food dollar in the community where it can recycle up to five times, thereby creating jobs and kick-starting local economic development. What do all these efforts have in common? They are grounded in sustainable, equitable and dignified livelihoods. Food security is ensured by citizens democratic control over their food system, what many food activists are calling: food sovereignty.   We know what practices make a food system sustainable; why don"t we enact enabling policies to prioritize them? The simple answer is that the institutions that produce the agreements, laws and regulations shaping our food systems don"t yet have the political will to make sustainable food systems a priority, and they are still a long way from addressing the structural changes needed for food system transformation. Historically, the political will for systemic change is a response to the power of strong social movements.   The movements for food sovereignty, food justice, agroecology, climate justice, women"s rights and labor rights are spreading, and their influence on our food system is growing. As the food, fuel and climate crises worsen, these movements are steadily converging -- in all their diversity -- into a force to be reckoned with. Their impact is felt in the United Nation"s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) -- the "most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders to work together in a coordinated way to ensure food security and nutrition for all."   In 1996 La Vía Campesina, the international peasant movement that defends two million small-scale food producers, started this trend by putting out the call for food sovereignty and it has been spreading ever since, democratizing the world"s food systems in favor of women and the poor. In the United States, Europe, Africa and Latin America, Food Sovereignty Alliances have formed, bringing together producers, environmentalists, consumers and indigenous organizations to forge new policies and institutions that transform our food systems. The power of its social movements led Kerala, India to implement a statewide transition to organic agriculture to protect the environment, ensure food security and provide viable livelihoods to its farmers. These developments and many others indicate that the catalyst for transforming food systems -- political action -- is already in the making, and that the global food movement is on the move.   * Eric Holt-Giménez, is Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy. http://www.foodfirst.org   Nov 2013   Global Land Grab: PNG Rainforest Vanishing (Oakland Institute)   Spurred by increasing food prices and demand for biofuels in Europe and North America, one of the world’s largest rainforests in Papua New Guinea is quickly disappearing under a voracious land rush that has handed 12 percent of the country’s entire land area to foreign companies over the last decade, according to a new report.   Under the umbrella of a government program promoting Special Agriculture Business Leases, 13.6 million acres (5.5 million hectares) — an area nearly twice the size of Maryland – was leased out to foreign corporations hungry for the country’s natural resources. The government forged many of these deals in secret, the report says, without consulting customary landowners who depend on the rainforest for their livelihoods.   The report by the Oakland Institute and the Pacific Network on Globalisation, nonprofit advocacy organizations that oppose large-scale land deals, found that in one case, police coerced villagers to sign over their land rights at gunpoint.   Sparked in part by a worldwide spike in food prices in 2007, multinational companies have been buying rights to massive tracts of land in Africa, South America and Asia over the last few years. Wealthy nations in the European Union and the United States have raised biofuel targets to reduce dependence on oil and find cleaner alternatives. But scarcity of arable land in developed countries is prompting global companies to buy up vast tracts of cheap acreage in the developing world, where governments thirsty for foreign investment have flung open their doors.   “It was really shocking to see that it was an official policy of the government to take land away from the people of PNG for development,” said Frederic Mousseau, the author of the report and policy director for the Oakland Institute.   In PNG, home to the third largest rainforest in the world, companies that clear land for crops like oil palm also get a tasty payoff in hardwood timber. The remote nation bordering Indonesia has become the second leading exporter of tropical wood in the world, at 3 million cubic meters per year. With the surge in investment, a third of PNG’s entire land mass is now controlled by foreign companies.   The new report, On Our Land, paints a grim picture of poorly managed land deals gained through fraud, brutality and intimidation. The loss of land is sparking growing tension in Papua New Guinea, whose 6.2 million citizens hold communal land rights, an unusual system that was baked into the nation’s constitution in 1975.   The Special Agriculture Business Leases, or SABLs, were created to promote agricultural development, but loopholes and weak oversight have opened the way for foreign investors to acquire massive plots of land for other purposes.   The government commission appointed in 2011 found widespread corruption and mismanagement, and said the system had been “widely abused by logging companies.”   The new report says that given the commission’s findings of widespread fraud, intimidation, bribery – even children’s names were signed on official documents – most of the country’s timber exports should be considered illegal. Though the government has admitted that the SABL agreements are flawed, it has taken no steps to reform the system.   http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/global-land-grab-rainforest-vanishing-shady-deals-report-says Visit the related web page
	Roma face mounting discrimination across Europe by ICARE, Romea, Global Post, agencies   27/1/2014   Roma face mounting discrimination across Europe. (The Global Post)   Dimitris Triantafyllou’s cellphone rings as he drinks Greek coffee at his home in this small, central town. A local student is on the line asking to talk about an incident on a school bus. A new driver is refusing to take more than 40 children home from a school for Roma, the traditionally marginalized ethnic community still often described as gypsies. As president of the local Roma community, Triantafyllou is used to dealing with such incidents.   Earlier in the day, he tried to convince the national power company to send a technician to restore electricity to Roma neighborhoods after three days of outages. "The racism Roma face is not only personal but institutional," he said. "We’ve seen many similar attitudes from the local authorities over the past few months. But we’ve learned to live with the burden and fight for change.” Prejudice against Roma appears to have been on the rise since October, when police took custody of a blonde, white-skinned 5-year-old named Maria in Farsala — a small town just 24 miles away — because she didn’t resemble the dark-skinned family caring for her.   When the news hit international headlines, European media suggested she may have been the abducted child of an unknown German or Scandinavian couple that had traveled to Greece years ago — or the offspring of a British boy who disappeared in 1991 while on vacation with his family on the Aegean island of Kos. Neither was true. It turned out that the press had fed into an old stereotype of gypsies as child snatchers.   DNA testing showed that Maria was the child of a Bulgarian Roma couple who gave the little girl away because they couldn''t afford to raise her, and the story vanished from the news. Revelations about the bias did little to change perceptions about Roma in Sofades or elsewhere in Europe, however. Last year, Amnesty International called the approximately 12 million Roma in Europe “the largest and most disadvantaged minority” on the continent.   In Sofades, a town of 6,000 that’s evenly divided between Roma and “balamos” — what Roma call white Greeks — many Roma live in unheated, jury-rigged houses of asbestos, stone and zinc. Although they patronize local Greek-owned shops, they aren’t welcome in cafes and bars. “Every one of us has a similar story that shows our exclusion,” said Spyros Mpantis, a 27-year-old unemployed Roma who says he’s been denied coffee in the center of town. “Is this life?”   Greece’s financial crisis has made matters worse. Many Roma families receive financial assistance for low-income households and having more than three children, an issue that’s bred resentment among others. “The Roma population has become so big that our weak local economy can’t support them,” said Mayor Babis Papadopoulos, who blames high unemployment rates and other problems on the increase in the local Roma population. However, many Roma can’t buy food without the help.   Roma market owner George Ramantanis says members of his community constantly ask him for free food. “Until they receive their pensions or welfare benefits every beginning of the month,” he said, “I get nothing.” In a country where the official unemployment rate remains more than 27 percent, Roma suffer from disproportionally high levels of joblessness. Some admit breaking the law in order to survive, by using extension power cables to steal electricity from their neighbors, for example. Others have reverted to their centuries-old occupation of tinkering: roaming the streets to find and sell scrap metal for a few euros. “If I can’t buy milk for my babies, aren’t I going to steal?” said 53-year-old Vassilis. He says he’s only partly unemployed because Greeks prefer to hire less expensive Albanians and Pakistanis who have flooded the rural Greek labor market in recent years. “Roma people here do not have food to eat,” he said. “There are no jobs anymore and the balamos look down on us with contempt.”   The rise of the xenophobic far-right Golden Dawn Party thanks to the financial crisis is complicating efforts to bring the Roma into mainstream society. Polls show it’s helping make Greek society become increasingly conservative. Schools are legally segregated despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year that the practice violates the European Convention for Human Rights. Christos Govaris, an education professor at the University of Thessaly who directs programs for Roma children, believes integration would be the best way to achieve progress. “The rise of Golden Dawn makes our effort to integrate the Roma community through education much more difficult,” he said. “Twelve years of going to school is a long period of time that could result in mutual acceptance.”   In Sofades’s segregated fourth primary school, where more than 500 Roma students are registered, teachers typically leave for home before the school day ends. When the Education Ministry attempted to integrate Roma children two years ago, parents organized protests and sit-ins. Some were later seen distributing Golden Dawn leaflets before integration was abandoned.   However, Greece isn’t alone in mistreating Roma, says Eleni Tsetsekou, a consultant on Roma to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe. “There’s no difference in Roma lives in other European countries, or in how they’re confronted by the majority of people,” she said. “Negative stereotypes are always present and deeply rooted.” Romanian and Spanish schools also remain segregated between Roma and non-Roma children despite the European court’s decision.   In France, police have dismantled Roma shantytowns and deported even minors, violating laws allowing for the free movement of EU citizens. In Hungary, local governments have turned off water supplies to Roma districts. In Slovakia, towns have erected concrete barriers to isolate Roma neighborhoods. In Bulgaria, the far-right political group Ataka openly blames Roma for the poverty-stricken Balkan country’s economic ills.   Back in Sofades, Roma leader Triantafyllou says the Greek authorities aren’t helping. “They want us to be lawful citizens, pay our taxes, enlist in the army,” he said, “But they don’t want us within their society. That’s selective equality.”   24/1/2014   A French MP has avoided jail after he was caught on camera saying “Hitler maybe didn''t kill enough of them” during an altercation with a Roma community close to the town he is mayor of. (The Independent)   Gilles Bourdouleix, who represents the Maine-et-Loire department in Western France made the comments after confronting the group who had illegally parked on a field near the town of Cholet. After the video was widely broadcast across France, Bourdouleix was charged with ‘condoning crimes against humanity’, and was on Thursday found guilty. He was handed a 3000 euro fine by the court which the judges opted to suspend. He was also ordered to pay a 600 euro fine for insulting the journalist who caught him on tape. Prosecutors had sought a six months prison sentence, arguing that his behaviour was “totally intolerable to public order”. His defence claimed that the words, said under his breath, were not aimed at anyone. The maximum sentence possible for the crime is a 45,000 euros fine and a year in jail. Bourdouleix had initially argued that he had not made the statement, but journalists later had it verified by experts. Although Bourdouleix has resigned from his party, the IDU, over the controversy, he has held onto his elected lawmaker seat and mayor rol.   7/10/2013   Romea.cz reports Facebook group "Gypsies to the Gas Chambers", Facebook sees no problem.   The Czech administrators of the Facebook social networking site must really like racism. How else can their refusal to close a group named "Gypsies to the Gas Chambers" ("Cíkáni do plynu") be explained? News server EuroZprávy.cz was the first to report on the issue. Another Facebook group making fun of racism was promptly taken down by the Czech administrators after complaints. The full name of the group is "Gypsies to the Gas Chambers! Fags!" ("Cikáni do plynu !buzeranti!").   It is set up as a "closed" group with only six members. EuroZprávy.cz reports that some of the members are publishing openly racist commentaries. User "Wilson Gabriela" is one of them. Her own Facebook page includes the following commentary (our translation): "I don"t tar you all with the same brush I don"t mind gypsies but their behavior that"s why I don"t tar them all with the same brush but I would throw them all into one giant gas chamber, I know that what I am writing here is what everyone thinks but no one says out loud..."   When the page was reported by other users for its hate speech and symbols, administrators refused to remove it. According to the administrators, the material does not violate Facebook"s rules. News server Romea.cz also reported the page as hateful and received the following response: "You have reported the page "Cikáni do plynu !buzeranti!" for containing hate speech or symbols. The group has not been removed." Facebook has, on the other hand, repeatedly removed the pages of the satirical group "Stop Czechs" ("Stop Čechům").   That group attempted to use humor to point out the dangers of racism and xenophobia by showing Czechs what it would be like to be a minority, but the administrators believe that page is an example of racism and xenophobia.   http://hub.coe.int/web/coe-portal/roma http://fra.europa.eu/en/opinion/2013/fra-opinion-framework-decision-racism-and-xenophobia-special-attention-rights-victims Visit the related web page
	View more stories