People Putting Food First #97

1. Walking The Walk At FOOD FIRST
2. No News is Bad News: Global Protests Over Failure to Meet Millennium Development Goals, But No Mainstream Media Coverage
3. Indentured Servants freed from Brazilian Sugar Cane Biofuel Plantation

1. Walking The Walk At FOOD FIRST

The Food First office inhabits a former home, which sits on a quiet, tree-lined residential street in North Oakland. The yard in front of the office was taken over by weeds and Bermuda grass. But that all changed in February 2007, when interns decided that the time was ripe, so to speak, for Food First to make use of the overgrown yard and grow its own food. The approach is two-pronged; not only does a garden supply Food First with free food, but it is a living example of sustainable agroecology.

Interns did intensive weeding, keeping some preexisting desirable plants while removing unwanted plants. Scrapwood was used to build beds and wine barrels and leftover seeds were donated. “Most gardeners have a seed drawer, some spot where you keep extra seeds,” says former intern Ian Bailey. The beds and barrels were filled with a mix of purchased soil and free compost; mulch was laid out between the beds.

In a short span of time, such a small plot has been transformed into an edible paradise, yielding such crops as kohlrabi, cauliflower, peas, spinach, bok choy, ground cherries, bell and chile peppers, beets, and cilantro, to name but a handful. “It’s a testament to the potential of urban gardens, the potential of any nook that people can manage,” says intern Caiti Hachmyer. The garden uses zero pesticides or other synthetic inputs; when it comes to pests, Food First interns mostly rely on integrated pest management. For example, bees eat other pests while simultaneously pollinating the flowers. Inevitably, however, pests will get away with eating some of the crops. “We got to accept a little bit of damage, accept a few holes,” says intern Joey Smith. “We learn as we go along.” Growing food in the garden is forever a process of trial-and-error.

“It’s very odd that it’s become a privilege to have fresh food on your property,” says Smith. Home garden plots are nothing new; they have existed throughout human history, from the tribes of Papua New Guinea to cosmopolitan Cordoba, in medieval Islamic Spain. What sets today apart from the past is the rise of wage labor. In the industrialized world, growing food on one’s property has morphed into a hobby, something one has to have the time to do. It’s not that having fresh food on one’s property is too expensive, as the garden at Food First demonstrates; a person who has to hold down two or three jobs just to pay the rent probably won’t have much time to grow a garden. And paying rent to a landlord, as opposed to owning the property, renders growing one’s own food all the less feasible. Still, in major urban centers all across the United States, community gardens are sprouting up. They may not be the sole solution to inequities in access to fresh, healthy food—but they are certainly a step in the right direction.

2. No News is Bad News: Global Protests Over Failure to Meet Millennium Development Goals, But No Mainstream Media Coverage

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) were launched in September 2000 with great fanfare at the United Nations Millennium Summit. In covering the summit, the BBC noted that the Millennium Summit was “the largest gathering of world leaders in history.” The 189 world leaders present signed the Millennium Declaration, a United Nations resolution that would seek to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal education, empower women, improve maternal health, reduce child mortality, combat HIV/aids and malaria, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development. All of these goals were to be achieved by 2015. Seven years later, and halfway towards that date, progress on achieving those goals has been disappointing.

On Saturday, July 7th, 2007 demonstrators from around the world took to the streets to protest the lack of progress in achieving the millennium development goals. Demonstrators in over 40 countries, from Azerbaijan to Benin, banded together in a global call for change. The organization that coordinated these protests, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), holds policy makers from the Global North responsible for the failure to reach these goals. According to the U.N., over 1 billion people around the world continue to make a living on less than one dollar a day. Similarly, another 1 billion people lack access to sanitation and drainage facilities. Given the bold pronouncements made by world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit, the lack of progress in meeting these goals is all the more unfortunate.

A common theme during the protests was the ease with which these goals could still be met, provided that leaders from both the global north and global south make international development a cornerstone of their domestic and foreign policies. GCAP activists noted that “studies have shown that only $47 billion is required to meet the goals on health, education, and water sanitation, which is not even a small fraction of the $1 trillion the world spends on military allocations each year.” Similarly, to provide safe water to all those in need by 2015, “researchers estimate it would cost no more than $4 billion a year, an amount equivalent to what Europeans spend on bottled water every month.” Louis Arbour, a top U.N. Human Rights official who agrees with the GCAP position asserted that although developed countries have given some debt relief to the world’s poorest nations; development assistance, as a whole, has reduced in the last few years.

Sadly, these demonstrations were not covered in the mainstream media, a sad sign of the media’s apathy towards human rights issues. This issue was covered by One World, an activist centered news organization dedicated to covering issues of social and economic justice all over the world. The lack of mainstream coverage of these protests implies one thing: when it comes to the Millennium Development Goals, no news is bad news.

Further reading:
http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/151208/1/3319

3. Indentured Servants Freed from Brazilian Sugar Cane Biofuel Plantation

This summer, the Brazilian Labor Ministry discovered and freed over 1,000 slaves who had been working 14-hour days cutting sugar cane in the Amazon. Perhaps even more disturbing are the estimates that 25,000 to 40,000 slaves are still working on plantations or clearing away Amazon rainforest for cattle ranches.

These slaves are indentured servants consisting of displaced indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians, many of whom were once farmers. Their shackles are debts, which they have accumulated through migration to work in remote areas. Middlemen, called “gatos,” or “cats,” contract the poor and charge them outrageous amounts for transportation to work sites. Once on a plantation, the laborers work and live in horrible conditions: they are sprayed by pesticides, paid only when they produce at predetermined rates, housed in deteriorating buildings, and given spoiled food. When the government discovered the slaves on the Para Parstoril e Agricola SA plantation this June, many were sick. Francisco de Oliveira, a Brazilian sociologist, says that sugar cane “cutters’ average lifespan is less than that of colonial slaves.”

Similar to their destruction of vulnerable communities and workers, biofuels have proven to be ecologically disastrous. Not only do they necessitate incredible applications of petroleum-based fertilizers, but their absorption of rainforests and savannas is hazardous. Brazilian ethanol’s growth in the global market means an expansion into the delicate ecosystems of its countryside. According to Miguel Altieri, the “natural vegetation cover [in the Cerrado region] is expected to disappear by 2030.” Biofuels are a suspicious beacon for “Sustainability” pushed by transnational corporations to appear as the only solution for our future. We cannot allow them to destroy important ecosystems, and we especially cannot permit them to do it on the shoulders of the poor, displaced and exploited slaves.

References:
Altieri, Miguel and Elizabeth Bravo. “The ecological and social tragedy of crop-based biofuel production in the Americas.” http://www.foodfirst.org
Araujo, Saulo. “Sugar Slaves: 1,108 freed, 14 in jail.” Grassroots International. 24 July 2007. http://us.oneworld.net
Holt-Giménez, Eric. “The Biofuels Myths”. International Herald Tribune. 10 July 2007.
“’Slave’ labourers freed in Brazil.” BBC News. 3 July 27, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk.
Zibechi, Raúl. “The Dark Side of Biofuels: Horror in the ‘Brazilian California.’” Americas Program Report: Biofuels, Biodiversity, and Our Energy Future. 23 July 2007. http://www.americas.irc-online.org.
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This issue of People Putting Food First was written by Food First interns Laura A. Miller, Hamza Hasan, and Rachel Fields.