February 2006 e-newsletter
Inter Pares' E-Newsletter
Food Sovereignty: Building New Futures
In this e-newsletter:
- Letter of Introduction
- Excerpts from:
- Food Sovereignty: Building New Futures
- The Uprooted of Burma: Security Begins with Food
- Food and Security in Colombia
- Defending Guinea-Bissau's Sacred Islands
- Terminator Technology: An All-Out Assault on Food Sovereignty
- Sustaining Social Justice Action: Planning for Inter Pares' Future
- Action Alert: Ban Terminator Seeds - Join the Campaign
- Publication: New document on Canadian Pension Plan
Links
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Dear friends,
We are pleased to send you the first Inter Pares Bulletin of 2006 entitled Food Sovereignty: Building New Futures. We are asking you to consider acting to support Inter Pares and the actions highlighted in these pages - politically and financially.
This Bulletin describes the ways in which the struggle for food sovereignty is being played out in various contexts around the world, and the efforts of Inter Pares and our counterparts in Canada, India, Colombia, Thailand, and Guinea-Bissau, to exert control over a process that is fundamental to life - the sustainable cultivation and production of food.
During the past three decades, the issues of ecological agriculture, community-based food security, and sustainable rural development have been central to our work. Instead of entrusting global food security to a coterie of unaccountable global corporations and international financial institutions, people around the world are taking back control, and applying public pressure on governments at local, regional, and national levels to protect and defend our right to grow healthy and nutritious food.
Inter Pares and our counterparts are also collaborating through joint initiatives, such as the "Ban Terminator" campaign described in this Bulletin, to build a new future for all, based on social solidarity, the enhancement of livelihoods and communities, and the sustainable use of resources. If you would like to participate in the "Ban Terminator" campaign, in addition to reviewing the steps you can take as outlined on the back page of this Bulletin, please visit
http://www.banterminator.org to make your voice heard. If additional copies of the Bulletin or "Ban Terminator" campaign material would be useful in your community, please let us know.As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
Sincerely,
Karen Seabrooke
Program Manager
P.S. Your financial commitment is an integral part of the success of this work and all of Inter Pares' programs. Please consider making a gift to help us work together with others to build a better world. We thank you for your support.
Food Sovereignty: Building New Futures
All over the world, farmers and indigenous communities are suffering the effects of the dominant industrial agricultural model, where bigger is considered better, and individual labourers an inefficient expense to be replaced with machines and other technologies. This vision is resulting in fewer farm families on the land through the consolidation of small farms into large monocultures, and a reliance on commercial seeds and chemical agricultural inputs. Against this trend, in the Medak District of Andhra Pradesh, India, women farmers and seed keepers are blazing the trail for a new future for agriculture. Like farmers around the world, they understand that local agriculture - agriculture based on local knowledge and local labour - is often the cornerstone of thriving rural communities.
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The Uprooted of Burma: Security Begins with Food
"We are upland farmers, but landmines have been planted around our fields so we dare not cultivate our crops. It's like our land has been occupied by someone else." Karenni farmer, Burma.
Burma was once considered the 'rice basket' of Asia. So vast was its annual rice yield that it could produce enough for domestic consumption and still be among the world's leading rice-exporting countries. However, forty years of military dictatorship have reversed Burma's food security situation and the regime's policies have significantly affected the livelihoods of rural people. Most disturbingly, the junta's tactic of deliberate starvation of ethnic people living in the border states has created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Click here to read the rest of this article
Food and Security in Colombia
Doña Rosa stands beside a wire pen at the back of her house, looking proudly at her pigs. "If they come again, I won't let them take my pigs."
We are in San Juancito in north-eastern Colombia, a village of a few hundred people on the edge of a river surrounded by rolling green hills. It is beautiful, but also dangerous - an area fought over by paramilitaries, guerrillas and the army, all attempting to control the people and the resources that reside there. The region has settled into a tense calm, but the memories of massacres and fleeing with no more than the clothes on their backs are still fresh for Doña Rosa.
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Defending Guinea-Bissau's Sacred Islands
On a calm October evening, a green turtle slowly makes her way back to the sea, having laid her eggs deep in the sand on Poilão Island. She is but one of seven thousand turtles that congregate here each year to give life. Poilão is part of the Bijagos archipelago, an ecological and cultural treasure that is comprised of eighty islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, with a population of 25,000 people.
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Terminator Technology: An All-Out Assault on Food Sovereignty
Seeds are the foundation of global food security. Seeds exist to grow into plants and then to reproduce, multiplying into more seeds to grow more plants. Throughout history, farmers have evolved sophisticated plant-breeding techniques premised on saving seeds from the best plants of the current year's harvest to plant again. It is through human ingenuity mixed with the life force of seeds that farmers have fed themselves and the rest of the world for thousands of years. It is almost inconceivable to think that this life-giving process is now under attack.
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Sustaining Social Justice Action: Planning for Inter Pares' Future
Thirty years ago, a group of young Canadian activists decided to create an organization that would join in common cause with activists in the South to combat the causes and effects of poverty and injustice. Young and brimming with energy, they brought with them their experience in community work in Canada and abroad, and their budding relationships with organizations in West Africa and Bangladesh. Most importantly, they brought their shared belief in a new kind of relationship between Canadians and people in the South - one that rejected the imposition of solutions from outside, and instead sought to support the dreams and efforts of those working in their own countries to bring change from the ground up.
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Action Alert: Ban Terminator Seeds - Join the Campaign
Terminator technology - "suicide seeds" are back! Your action is needed!
Unfortunately Terminator is not yesterday's news. Corporations and governments are again pushing hard to commercialize Terminator technology - plants that are genetically modified to render sterile seeds at harvest. The Canadian government tried to overturn the international (United Nations) de facto moratorium on Terminator in February 2005. To meet this new crisis and re-build global opposition, we ask you to join the new Ban Terminator Campaign and take action with us. Please
click here for more information.Publication: New document on Canadian Pension Plan
Your pension contributions at work?, op-ed by Peter Gillespie, published on December 22, 2005, in the Toronto Star
Peter Gillespie criticizes Canadian pension investments in the world's leading arms manufacturers, in companies that have been prosecuted for criminal activities, in the tobacco industry, and in companies complicit in human rights abuses overseas. He argues that our Canadian Pension Plan contributions should be invested in ways that are in the public interest and calls for the development of a socially responsible investment framework. Please
click here to view this document.Subscribing / Cancelling / Back issues
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Abonnez-vous à la version française
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This Bulletin on the Web
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Inter Pares
221 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6P1
Phone (1-613) 563-4801 Fax (1-613) 594-4704
Inter Pares works overseas and in Canada in support of self-help development groups, and in the promotion of understanding about the causes, effects and solutions to under-development and poverty. Charitable registration number (BN) 11897 1100 RR000 1.
Please re-distribute this e-newsletter to anyone you think would enjoy it, in its complete and original form only. Copyright 2006 Inter Pares. All rights reserved.
Financial support for the E-Newsletter is provided by the Canadian International Development Agency.
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