Growing Change: A Journey Inside Venezuela's Food Revolution

A documentary by Simon Cunich

If current trends continue, global food crises will become more frequent and more severe. Today's food systems already leave hundreds of millions of people in hunger and are rapidly depleting the soil fertility on which long-term food security depends. Add to this mix the convergence of climate change and peak oil and it's clear we need major changes to the way food is produced and distributed.

Growing Change looks at one of the most exciting experiments in the world to turn this around - efforts to grow a more fair and sustainable food system in Venezuela. From fishing villages to cacao plantations to urban gardens, this growing social movement is showing what's possible when people, not corporations, start to take control of food.

For more info’ about the film, visit HERE.

Secret U.S.-Canada Border Deal Hides GMO Takeover

Canada-U.S. Regulatory Co-operation Council under border deal coverage would put Canada under draconian Food Safety Modernization Act, fast track GMO approval.

By Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
December 3, 2011

Our report sounding the alarm that Obama and Harper’s secretive border deal, due to be signed next week, would be used to fast track GMO acceptance has been confirmed. The details have been kept under wraps, but recent reports revealed that the ‘Beyond Borders’ security and law enforcement deal would also seek to ‘harmonize’ U.S. and Canadian regulatory standards for food, auto and other trade sectors.

The Globe and Mail confirms that the North American Union security perimeter initiative, sold to the public as new security measures at the border, has a second major component– the Canada-U.S. Regulatory Co-operation Council.

Mr. Harper… said there are two issues on the joint security and economic agenda of the two countries. One, he said, is the border and perimeter initiative, and the other is Canada-U.S. Regulatory Co-operation Council.

“We are seeking ways of ensuring security in North America while at the same time making sure that we continue strong Canadian access to the American market,” Mr. Harper told reporters.

Cuba Shares Its Experiences in Agroecology

By Dalia Acosta
Havana Times
November  16, 2011

Farmers and experts on agriculture from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique are touring fields in Cuba this week, along with local colleagues, to exchange experiences to foment ecological fruit growing on Caribbean islands.

“I’m leaving with a different take on things,” Audrey Retory, who grows fruit and vegetables and raises barnyard fowl in Guadeloupe, told IPS. “There’s no reason for there to be an antagonistic relationship between agricultural production and nature.

“From now on I’m going to use vermiculture (composting using earthworms), which does not require a major investment, and I know that many people will see what I’m doing and want to replicate it,” she said.

Agrofuels: Industrial Agriculture's Latest Attack on the People and the Planet

Capitalism's environmental chaos

Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, reviews a new book by Christian Parenti that documents the destruction that capitalism and the free market are inflicting on the planet.

Chris Williams
Socialist Worker
September 14, 2011

WHO KILLED Ekaru Loruman?

Until his recent violent death, Ekaru was a pastoralist from northwestern Kenya, a member of the Turkana tribe. He died when a bullet ripped out the side of his head as he tried to defend his few head of cattle, his only form of wealth and livelihood.

One could respond that a member of the Pokot tribe, a traditional enemy of the Turkana, who live and farm in the surrounding hills and raid across the border from Uganda killed Ekaru. That would, after all, be a factually correct response, and any murder investigation by local police would, with the identification and arrest of the individual responsible, end there.

Christian Parenti, in his excellent, if flawed, new book Tropic of Chaos, finds this a deeply unsatisfying answer. And so should anyone seeking to better understand the world and the twin ecological and economic crises in order to take action to ameliorate the consequences of those crises.

Parenti's book makes an important contribution to that effort--he has written a sweeping discourse on the collision set in motion between the natural and the social world--what he calls the "catastrophic convergence": the confluence of poverty, violence and climate change.

Read more HERE.

Film: Not a very green revolution

Red Pepper Blog 
28 August 2011

Interview with Devinder Sharma and pictures of Punjabi farming communities


Not a very Green Revolution from the source project on Vimeo.

We are now witnessing the beginning of the second Green Revolution in India. The Punjab in the north west of India was an experiment to test an oil based, chemically dependent, corporately controlled model. The land, the water and its inhabitants are now testament to a failed system. A system driven not by a desire to enhance an already sustainable system but to destroy it and replace it with one orientated around profit and plunder.

The film is from an interview with Indian food policy analyst Devinder Sharma (blog) and the farming communities of Punjab.

It is part of a series by Jason Taylor and Chitan Gohil at the Source Project, where you can find other beautifully-shot short films about agriculture in South Asia.

Video: La Via Campesina in Movement...

La Via Campesina

El Salvadoran Government and Social Movements Say No to Monsanto

By Carlos Martinez
MRzine
May 26, 2011
 

On the morning of Friday, May 6th, President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador's left-wing FMLN party arrived at the La Maroma agricultural cooperative in the department of Usulután for a potentially historic meeting with hundreds of small family farmers.  Usulután has often been referred to as the country's breadbasket for its fertile soil and capacity for agricultural production, making it one of the most strategic and violent battleground zones during El Salvador's twelve-year civil war between the US-supported government and the FMLN guerrilla movement.

Once again, Usulután has entered the spotlight for its agricultural reputation.  The FMLN, which initially formed around an ideology of national liberation from US hegemony, has now adopted the goal of "food sovereignty," the idea that countries hold the right to define their own agricultural policies, rather than being subject to the whims of international market forces.  On Friday, officials representing the Ministry of Agriculture and the local governorship accompanied President Funes in inaugurating a new plan aimed at reactivating the country's historically ignored rural economy and reversing El Salvador's growing dependence on imported grains.