Food First Annual Report 2009 including IRS 990 for year ending July 31, 2009
Highlights of Food First's 2009 activities and plans for 2010
Food First's work falls under three program areas aimed at integrating Food Sovereignty across both rural and urban and spanning local, national and international arenas.
Programs include:
--Assisting with the building of local agri-foods systems,
--Accompanying farmers forging food sovereignty,
--Supporting groups struggling to democratize development including land, resources and markets.
Message from Executive Director, Eric Holt-Giménez
Thank you for your generous support of Food First’s work. You may already know that most of Food First’s work is funded by donors like you. Because of the financial crisis, some of our donors had to cut back their donations. In an act of sacrifice and solidarity, others actually increase their donations in 2009. Whatever your contribution, we thank you for your
continued commitment to the fight against hunger.
Two years after rapid food price increases pushed 200 million additional people into the ranks of the hungry, our food systems are still in crisis. There are now over 1 billion hungry people worldwide— including 50 million in the U.S. who the USDA admits are suffering from “food insecurity.”
Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation, insists that in order to be food secure, we must have food sovereignty—the democratization of our food systems in favor of the poor. Because, as one Campesino elder said, “When the poor are better off, we are all better off.”
The contradiction of growing hunger and food insecurity in the face of massive concentration of wealth brings new urgency to our global food movement. Over the last decade people’s movements have been growing worldwide as citizens and communities strive to take back their food systems from unsustainable, unsafe and unjust corporate control. Your donations are allowing Food First to participate in building that transformative movement aimed at solving our deepening food and agricultural crisis.
There are hopeful signs that many movements within the global food movement are in the process of converging—rural with urban, north with south, practitioners with advocates. Even labor—the often neglected, but essential, sector in the food system—is making its presence felt.
We now hear promises from northern governments to support peasant farmers in the Global South, growing support for the U.S. Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act and Farm-to-School programs, and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Agriculture’s first-ever workshops on the corporate concentration in agriculture.
Our diversity—a disadvantage when we are fragmented—can be our primary strength when we are united. The challenge for building a powerful food movement is to find ways to converge in our diversity. Our goal is to turn today’s “rumblings of reform” into a powerful social movement that doesn’t just patch up, but rather transforms our food system so that it becomes a source of health, jobs and justice.
I hope that you can tell how enthusiastic (and also overwhelmed) I am by the tasks on our plate for 2010 and beyond. After years of tireless groundwork by many individuals and organizations our food movements are on the verge of a quantum leap. Can we mobilize enough people to take back our food system; locally regionally, nationally, and internationally? We think we can. We are so very grateful that you are with us on this exciting journey to end global hunger by ending injustice!
Eric Holt-Giménez
To read the rest of the 2009 Annual Progress Report, open the attached PDF file.
| Download | Size | |
|---|---|---|
 | Food First - Form 990 - 2009.pdf | 218.67 KB |
| News and Views Spring 2010.pdf | 856.81 KB |
