G-8 Leaders: After 20 Years, It’s Time to Listen to Via Campesina

by Eric Holt Gimenez, Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

This week in Jakarta, Indonesia over 400 farmers from 70 countries gathered at the 6th International Conference of La Via Campesina to celebrate 20 years of struggle for food sovereignty. The representatives of this 200 million-strong international peasant movement hammered out a global call to action to bring an end to hunger, poverty, environmental destruction and social injustice.

It was a remarkable event.

The smallholders growing 70 percent of the world’s food have a plan to save the world from hunger. It looks nothing like the top-heavy Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID’s “Feed the Future” or the corporate-led “New Vision for Agriculture.” Its called food sovereignty.

The major difference is that La Via Campesina believes hunger is caused by injustice—not scarcity. (The world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people.) These farmers see smallholder farmers as the protagonists rather than “clients” in solutions to hunger, poverty and climate change.

The list goes on: They support smallholder farming instead of plantation agriculture; They practice agroecology and reject the “New Green Revolution” and GMOs; They demand land reform and an end to land grabs; They reject the neoliberal free trade agenda that has destroyed rural economies over the last 20 years, driving millions to bankruptcy and migration; and they call for an end to all forms of violence against women, who, in fact, grow most of the world’s food.

The gulf between the growing peasant movement and the solutions advanced by the corporate food regime is not only vast, it separates actors and institutions that are diametrically opposed regarding who should control the world’s food system.

“We need an agricultural revolution. Farmers need to take back control over agriculture from agribusiness,” said Selene, a farmer from Africa. Edgardo, a farm labor leader from Nicaragua insisted, that “the two models are not compatible. Capitalism can’t resolve the crises. We need a new world order based on social justice.”

These are strong words from people that mainstream development institutions are supposed to be helping… One reason for this is the unprecedented levels of violence that development of extractive industries like palm oil, agrofuels and mining has unleashed upon the world’s peasantry. It is not unusual in areas like Guatemala or Honduras for the army to enforce this “modernization” of the countryside at the point of a gun.

After eight years in Indonesia, La Via Campesina is moving its secretariat to Zimbabwe. Said Henry Saragih, global coordinator and head of Indonesia’s farmer’s union, “We will pass on the torch to Africa this year. Africa is a very important continent because the transnationals… are grabbing land there and want to impose the green revolution model with GMOs. We in Asia already know that the green revolution has failed here. We extend solidarity and unite with the African peasant movements to… choose a development path that will actually benefit the African people and peasants.”

The G-8 countries now meeting in Ireland should listen to protesters calling for an end to hunger. But they should listen to the farmers to make sure they support real solutions and not just business as usual.

via http://www.foodfirst.org/en/time+to+listen+to+Via+Campesina

G8’s new alliance for food security and nutrition is a flawed project

Already, under the guise of helping to fight poor nutrition in Africa, genetically engineered bananas and cassava are being tested – despite concern about their impacts, and the existence of better conventional varieties.

Several countries have been asked to speed up the takeover of land by foreign investors. Ethiopia, for instance, will “Refine land law, if necessary, to encourage long-term land leasing” (pdf), while companies are already asking for up to 500,000 hectares (12.35m acres) of land in Ivory Coast under this scheme.

Countless studies, including one by the UN special rapporteur on the right to food (pdf), have shown that large-scale land acquisitions and leases destroy the livelihoods and food security of thousands of communities, and that access to land (pdf) is essential for the right to food. This lends more than a touch of irony to the commitment by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, to address land grabbing in this G8 through the much-criticised land transparency initiative.

Already, multinational GM seed, fertiliser and grain companies such as Yara International, Monsanto and Cargill have signed up to benefit from the new alliance, and six African countries – Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique and Tanzania – have signed co-operation agreements. Most of these have barely been subject to democratic scrutiny, and undermine African-led democratic initiatives to tackle hunger such as the Maputo declaration (pdf) to raise public spending on agriculture and regional agriculture policies in west Africa.

No wonder the runup to this weekend’s summit has been greeted by an outcry. Networks of smallholder farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and environmentalists from across Africa have called the scheme “a new wave of colonialism” designed to secure profits and royalty flows out of Africa. Global civil society agrees.

It’s not as if there is a dearth of opportunities for G8 countries to reduce hunger. They could scrap targets for crop-based biofuels, which are linked to hunger by a growing list of bodies including the World Bank. They could follow the advice of the UK parliament to address overconsumption of meat and support services to smallholders. They could regulate investors to stop land grabbing. And they could fund the legitimate and democratic global governance space on hunger – the committee on world food security – instead of competing with it.

But the new alliance marches on under the banner of “investment”.

read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jun/07/g8-new-alliance-flawed-project

lostintrafficlights:

SOON YOU SHALL BE MADE INTO FOOD!

MUHAHAHA!

! wish i could watch and learn how you guys make plum extract!

korean bellflower root (도라지) harvest. a few are a decade or so years old.

sustainableprosperity:

The Russians Prove Small Scale Organic CAN Feed the World

By Christina Sarich

If you’ve already been through an economic collapse, you might know a thing or two about how to feed your family with little money. More importantly, you might know how to do it without pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and GMO seed. On a total of about 20 million acres managed by over 35 million Russian families, Russians are carrying on an old-world technique, which we Americans might learn from. They are growing their own organic crops - and it’s working.

According to some statistics, they grow 92% of the entire countries’ potatoes, 77% of its vegetables, 87% of its fruit, and feed 71% of the entire population from privately owned, organic farms or house gardens all across the country. These aren’t huge Agro-farms run by pharmaceutical companies; these are small family farms and less-than-an-acre gardens.

A recent report from Agro-ecology and the Right to Food says that organic and sustainable small-scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue. Within five to 10 years we could see a big jump in crop cultivation. It could also take the teeth out of GMO business in the US.

According to World Watch, we can also farm fish responsibly and feed the planet. Sustainable fish farms along with organic gardening are becoming the new agro-business.

“Farmed seafood has certain advantages over wild fish in meeting modern demand. For a global marketplace that demands increasingly predictable products—uniform-sized fillets available year-round, free of the vagaries of weather or open-ocean fishing—fish farming delivers this predictability. Farms are also becoming more productive, raising fish at a lower cost and expanding the potential market.” (Brian Halwell, Farming Fish for the Future).

As long as this is done in sustainable ways without GMO salmon, we really can feed over 7 billion people.

Unfortunately, not all of us want to utilize organic farming. Purchasing 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock in 2012, Bill Gates is just one key figure who argues that GMOs are an absolute necessity in order to fight global starvation. Of course along with ‘saving the world from starvation’, GMO crops also bring along a large number of unwanted health and environmental effects. This isn’t even considering the fact that long term, we truly don’t know what kind of impact this will have on the earth on a major scale. Though we do know once everything is GMO, it will be virtually impossible to go back to a natural world.

Check out NaturalSociety’s YouTube Channel for some recent videos on the March Against Monsanto event occurring in Philadelphia, PA. The videos offer some educational information along with a look at how people everywhere reject Monsanto and genetically modified organisms. Say goodbye to GMOs. We don’t need them.

“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” says Olivier De Schutter.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/russians-prove-small-scale-organic-can-feed-world-1369923601. All rights are reserved

(via cultureofresistance)

(via fertiledecline)

i enjoyed this the other day. this is 호떡 (hotteok). i made this animated gif as my gift to you.

emitaro:

蓮根の磯辺揚げ　（蓮根・青のり・塩・片栗粉）

deep fried lotus root with seaweed (lotus root, seaweed, salt,potato starch)

Ooou! never had it like this before but it looks so good!

(via electro-wizard)

hardcoresandals:

pipperipembo:

harvestsacramento:

tranqualizer:

When eating organic was totally uncool

Before hipsters got rooftop gards, my poor, refugee family ate that way because we had to. And we were ashamed

by Pha Lo

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.

My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.

these people are way ahead of the curve. goes to show how perspective is everything. 

do yourself a favor and read this. 

Respect.

kind of reminds me of the recent biking bicycle scene/movement…

(via funwithplantingplans)

the-more-u-know:

Brain Food!

the-more-u-know:

lindanotshealthylife:

Great!

indeed

black pepper.

(via villa-verde)