Many of us who have been fighting the wholesale introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment have known all along how the U.S. government was being influenced by the US-based transnational corporations that profit from genetic engineering and the export-oriented, agribusiness model of agriculture in general. Recently released Wikileaks cables document just how close that relationship has become

Three years ago the "food crisis" became headline news when, in several countries, the rapid increases in the price of basic foods sent people into the streets in protest, creating feas of global instability. While it is widely believed that the crisis has abated because it has receded from the headlines, the price of food continues to rise to unprecedented levels. The United nations' Foodand Agriculture Organizations (FAO) reported that the price of basic foods, on a global scale, was

For ten days in November, twenty community development facilitators and representatives of farmer's group attended a business management workshop in Kenema, Sierra Leone. This workshop is the latest capacity building activity in a four year program designed to equip local communities with the skills and resources needed to plan and implement their own development programs and initiatives.

Theme:  Land, Liberation and Food Sovereignty

Place:   Shawnee, Oklahoma

Dates:   June 22-27, 2011

 

More details mid-February.

Mwitobe, Lukunda, Fukuyi, Lovoy and Kademba are some of the villages in the DRC that the Sustainable Agriculture and Development (SA&D) program has significantly impacted in recent years. As a result of the intervention of this program there have been marked improvements in the in food security status and economic well-being of the people who live in these remote villages of the North Katanga Province.

For many people Haiti by February 2011 had become a tortured caricature of human suffering, a sad island nation of intractable crisis. “What can be done for Haiti?” is a question commonly heard these days, whenever the subject comes up. “Has the cholera epidemic slowed down?” “I heard that only 5% of the rubble in Port-au-Prince has been removed a year after the catastrophic earthquake.”

Was it being downwind of the Canary Islands
in 1492? Was that the crime?
un-avoidable landfall for Colon’s fateful, lustful sailors
lost somewhere east of the Indies?

Was it for having spectacular bays and waterfalls?
the best mahogany
and peaceful agriculturalists flush with corn and cassava
free for the plundering? What crime?