A little while ago I hailed a popular victory against a NAFTA-compliance measure that would spray large parts of Northern California with a toxin that hadn’t been tested on people before, to eliminate a threat that wasn’t a threat at all.
Photo Credit kylita
A few days back, I posted a piece from Pambazuka News on the effects of the food crisis on women. Below is the fact-filled source for much of that article, by Women Thrive Worldwide and is well worth a read.
The Effect of the Food Crisis on Women and Their Families
Women Thrive Worldwide
May 2008
The splendid George Caffentzis has kindly allowed me to share this piece, written for Turbulence in the UK.
I’m not at all used to the world of punditry, even though it is increasingly what I find myself doing these days. And the confines of soundbites in short mass-media-segments are something I’ve had trouble with before and no doubt will again.
Here’s something on the WTO now up at Comment is Free.
When the World Trade Organisation talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets, and a wailing and renting of clothes in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha round of WTO talks in Geneva this week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its boosters and critics. In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, and in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable front company for international capital. This week’s failure had less to do with global justice, and much more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism.
The blamestorming and name-calling has begun around the WTO collapse. I’ll post more about that particular storm in a teacup soon. Update: Here’s a swift thinkpiece on the WTO.
Were we perhaps expecting the event to come to us pre-labelled? The first US food riot of the twenty-first century didn’t look like much, and there certainly weren’t large signs announcing it. But the scenes outside the main welfare office in Milwaukee in the wake of last month’s floods must surely count.
The headline says it all, and the article gives the details.
What’s curious for me, though, is the organisation that sponsored the research. On its ‘about’ page, the Organization for Competitive Markets advertises itself thus: Keep Reading »
This report is lifted from the pages of the excellent Pambazuka News, where it first appeared. It’s a much better and more thoughtful article than the one that appeared in the Washington Post. I’m not linking to it directly, but to the CommonDreams page, which has some excellent back-and-forth in the comments section, nailing quite precisely the patronising and infantilising attitudes that characterise a great deal of reporting on the food crisis. More below the fold
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