Food First's blog

Review by Tanya Kerssen, who was leading a Food First Food Sovereignty Tour in Bolivia when she wrote this blog review.

New film raises important questions for NGOs, researchers and activists.

By Tanya Kerssen reporting from Bolivia as she leads a Food First Food Sovereignty Tour. March 12, 2012

March 9, 2012
Reported by Food First consultant, Tanya Kerssen, who is leading a Food Sovereignty Tour to Bolivia starting March 10, 2012

Nearly 15,000 families are affected by flooding in the Bolivian departments of Oruro and La Paz caused by intense rains. 340 families in Chipaya have lost 100% of their potato and quinoa crops and are sharing 12 canoes to get around the area and recover what they can. Because of the loss of forage, sheep are dying from eating their own wool.

The Bolivian government has declared a national emergency.

By Michelle Rostampour

By Michelle Rostampour

by Navina Khanna with contributions from Joann Lo.

This summer, I traveled over 3000 miles with 20 young adults on Food and Freedom Rides that sought to shed light on our food system, and how injustice in the system—from farm to processing center to table—impacts us all. The rides commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Rides, when Black and White students sat together on Greyhound buses to challenge racial segregation in the Jim Crow South.

By Tanya Kerssen

Food First’s recent food sovereignty delegation to Bolivia occurred at a historic juncture in the struggle for indigenous rights in Bolivia. On August 15, over 500 indigenous people departed the lowland tropical city of Trinidad on a 300+ mile march to the highland capital La Paz in protest of a proposed highway construction through the “TIPNIS” indigenous territory and ecological reserve. The government of Evo Morales, with a number of union supporters, claims the highway is the road to progress. Indigenous peoples argue it is an infringement on their territorial rights and the road to ecological ruin. Since the march began, the conflict has gripped Bolivian society and sparked global debates over the meaning of development.

By Anders Riel Muller, South Korea Food Sovereignty Tour leader
August/September 2011 Conducive Magazine

Dear Editors, New York Times

By Amelia Moore

On Thursday 14th July, Lucas Benitez from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) stopped by the Food First office to talk to the interns and staff about their campaign for better working conditions and labor rights for the tomato pickers of Immokalee, Florida. The visit formed part of the CIW’s week-long California Truth Tour that targeted Trader Joe’s with protests and community get-togethers.

By Caitlin Payne Roberts

I'm writing from the community radio station La Voz de Zacate Grande, located in Puerto Grande, a town on the island of Zacate Grande in the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast of Honduras. The communities that have lived here for generations have been engaged in a land struggle against the richest man in Honduras, Miguel Facussé, for at least 20 years.

In his book "Capitalism in Crisis: An obsolete system" Samir Amin decries the financialization of everything, and the rise of neoliberal globalization. In an interview with Pambazuka, he said that "it has now come to a point where continuing the accumulation of capital is deepening and continuing the destruction of the natural basis for the reproduction of civilisation. And therefore ... we ought to move and start moving beyond capitalism."

by Christina Bronsing

by Josep Maria Antentas & Esther Vivas

There is no doubt about it. The wind that has electrified the Arab world in recent months, the spirit of the repeated protests in Greece or the student struggles in Britain and Italy, the mobilizations against Sarkozy in France... has come to the Spanish State.

Richard Jonasse