FoodFirst: Institute for Food and Development Policy

May 12 This news just in from Eco-Farm and USAgNet. This is the same industrial model of corporate consolidation that is currently the basis for the biofuels boom, i.e., the merger of major genetic engineering companies with giant grain and cellulose companies. Encountering resistance to GMOs in our food system, Monsanto and Syngenta are looking to spread them into our fuel and fiber industries.

The legitimate struggle of the National Black Farmers Association is the first of many to come. Stopping Monsanto here is important for all of us.

See below:
The National Black Farmers Association is calling on its 66,000

May 9th- Under public pressure, the National Organic Program re-considered its recent decision to abandon the group certification process used by hundreds of thousands of small-scale organic farmers in the Global South.

More than 3,700 consumers and activists wrote to the USDA’s National Organic Program to protest the recent ruling that would have made Organic certification too expensive millions of small-scale farmers and their cooperatives. It worked: The USDA announced on May 2 that certification for grower groups will continue as it has since 2002 until they come up with a new rule at their fall meeting.

For most of the world, May 1 is Labor Day. Last year in response to proposed U.S. federal legislation that would have turned all illegal aliens into criminals, people took to the streets in numbers not seen since the Civil Rights Movement. This May Day, following immigration raids at job sites across the country which resulted in deportations that are splitting families, thousands of immigrants and their allies rallied in cities across the nation. In Chicago, over 150,000 people marched, with tens of thousands more in New York City, Detroit and other major cities.

“El Camino del Migrante: Immigrants and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty”—July 29th-August 7th, 2007

This tour will be lead by Eric Holt-Giménez, a seasoned tour guide. A documentary will be made during this trip.

The purpose of our tour is to understand how 25 years of neo-liberal policies, structural adjustment, privatization, and untrammeled resource extraction by transnational corporations, have destroyed the food systems of the campesino farmers and indigenous peoples of the global South, resulting in migration of millions of desperate people to the U.S. We will also learn how communities are mobilizing politically, using migration to re-build their futures through farmer-to-farmer sustainable agriculture and broad-based social movements for food sovereignty.

From:Rob Everts, Executive Director
Equal Exchange

Friends,
On April 18th we notified you, and about 5,000 others, that the USDA had recently issued a new policy that threatened the organic certification of small-scale farmers the world over, including the thousands of coffee, tea, cocoa and sugar growers that we partner with.

We want to thank you for your overwhelming response. We had asked that you sign on to a letter we and our allies had drafted and that we were going to deliver in person to officials at the USDA. Because so many of you took action--and shared the message with others--in less than a week 3,150 individuals and 450 organizations signed on to the letter. This was a much, much more powerful response than we had dared hoped for and we thank you.

Sign Equal Exchange's Petition to the USDA to help small coffee growers: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/501659372?ltl=1176170421

See Tad Mutersbaugh's urgent appeal below:

Follow up on Organic Certification "Crisis" Things YOU CAN DO!!
>
> As many of you are aware, the USDA may be on the verge of
> disqualifying the village-based inspections process, termed
> 'internal inspections', used by the most marginalized of Mexican
> organic farmers.
>
> However, these new conditions do not seem to be a 'done deal' yet,
> and a growing campaign (see 'what to do' below) to press for

April 8th, Pacifica radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California, featured a panel entitled "Food or Fuel? Do we have to choose?" on the Sunday Salon program, hosted by Sandra Lupien.

Guests Tom Philipott, farmer-writer from North Carolina, and Isabella Kenfield, a free-lance U.S. journalist living in Brazil, were both highly critical of the biofuels boom. However, Jake Caldwell, of the Center for American Progress staked out what is probably the mainstream U.S. view. He insisted that corn ethanol was a sustainable energy source that would revitalize rural economies around the world, IF carefully regulated. He then gushed over the future potential of cellulosic ethanol, the next generation biofuel.

The notion that biofuels will be fair and green as long as they are properly regulated and made primarily from cellulosic materials (like switchgrass and trees) rests on two basic and very heroic assumptions:

The USDA has done it again.

Remember when the U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to relax organic standards for the agri-foods industry by accepting irradiated food, genetically engineered organisms, and sewage sludge as “organic”?

It took a sustained outcry from organic producers and consumers to keep the agency from destroying the meaning of organic. Get ready. It is happening again, only this time they have set their myopic sights set on small-scale coffee farmers in the Global South.