The Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform and Via Campesina sent out this alert today:
32 members of the “Vallecito Peasant Movement”, situated in Sinaloa, Tocoa municipality, Department of Colón, Honduras, became victims of severe violence on October 6, 2006. Two peasants were wounded by bullets, and the others were beaten up by police agents. The victims belong to 88 peasant families of the Movement who were settled by INA (the National Agrarian Institute) on land in this region. At this moment the peasant families live in precarious conditions in a refugee camp of INA without adequate food or housing.
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In 1994, Bina Agarwal, a professor at the University of New Delhi, wrote the seminal book on gender and land rights – A Field of One’s Own. Last week, the US State Department released a rather distorted version of Agarwal’s conclusions. In a release entitled “Women’s Lack of Property Rights Linked to Abuse, Experts Say”, the State department has reduced the complex web of social and material burdens on women to one simple solution, and one simple right – the right to private property.
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It’s absurd and romantic to think that farmers have virtue as a birthright. This may seem an odd thing to say given that Stuffed and Starved is often a hymn to rural struggles. But it’s important to remember that not all farmers are the same, and that very little soil is bloodless. Consider recent events in South Africa.
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The folk from the Association for India’s Development recently held a vigil outside the US Embassy in Washington DC, in support of farmers in India. Here’s a press release from their event.
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In writing Stuffed and Starved I was lucky enough to interview farmers and movement activists across the world. This meant travelling, and this means CO2 emissions. A generous totting up of the distances travelled puts the figure involved in writing Stuffed and Starved at around 60,000 miles which, using the carbon calculator here means that I put 24 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
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Via Campesina the international peasant movement has called for an international day of action at Mexican embassies around the world on 10 December in protest at the increasingly savage repression of peasant leaders in Oaxaca. In their words:
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The New Anatolian, the Turkish English-language daily, carries a story today about agribusiness giant Cargill. Since the 1990s, Cargill has been operating in the Orghazi district illegally. Its ties with the government have helped it to win, from a court in Bursa, a ruling that would give them an amnesty and a mild fine for unpermitted activity. Cargill’s not out of the woods yet – President Sezer might still veto the amnesty.
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A posting at the Monthly Review Zine tells of the new NAFTA supercorridor. If you’ve not heard of it, that’s partly the point. Surreptitiously, construction has begun on the proposed route, which will link the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico to Duluth at the US Canada border on Lake Superior (download map from MR).
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Singur is a fertile and vibrant farming area in the Hoogly district of West Bengal, India. On December 2, it becamethe scene of brutal repression, as armed police beat men, women and children to evict them from their land.
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