Ngaire Woods, author most recently of The Globalizers and lecturer at Oxford University, has put together a lovely radio documentary at the BBC, looking at how negotiations happen at the World Trade Organization. The title of the show, War by Other Means, suggests what’s in store. She managed to secure a interviews with the great and the good at the WTO and, more important, with the diplomatic minnows – most countries in the developing world fall into this category – who are brushed aside in the negotiating process. Listen to the podcast here.
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Farms don’t just grow food – they grow communities. You don’t have to go far to be part of these communities, either. In South Durban, urban farmers have long been supporting the local economy, and the surrounding neighbourhoods. And they’re under threat.
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At the Food News website (about which more here), they’ve thoughtfully posted an article from The Economist about local food systems, and response to it too. Watch this space – I’ll be weighing in on this too!
An early-era Monty Python sketch has a scene in a bed shop in which all the staff are perfectly normal, but for the fact that you need to divide what they say by ten, or multiply it by two, or not say the word ‘mattress’.
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It turns out that the International Monetary Fund is ever diligent with its payments. Here’s something I got from their director, who wanted to make sure I was dead before paying $5.7 million to Mr Robert Water.
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Lee Kyung Hae was a peasant leader from South Korea who took his life at the 2003 World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, Mexico. In the hours before he died, he handed out a leaflet, challenging the WTO. Here, in a new translation by Christine Dann and Kim Hak Mook, is the text of that leaflet. You can also download a .pdf file.
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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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