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The colonizer’s food is slowly killing us. Food is the weapon of self-destruction the colonizer placed in our hands and sells us at the Super-Size Me fast food joints and convenience marts. But food is also the solution. It is our tool for liberation, health, and spiritual healing. Deep food is our weapon – the means to move toward autonomy and the renewal of a living traditional community. 
Corporations, governments, even universities are enclosing indigenous territories. For the past two years we have been tracking the voracious land grab that is unfolding across much of the two-thirds world including Africa, Asia, and South America. These new enclosures are a destructive force associated with the plague of globalization and its marshaling and disciplining rationale of neoliberalism with its panacea of free trade and privatization. 
Water is scarce in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. There is little difference between the dry and wet seasons, common in the tropics and the rest of Ethiopia. Usually by January, Tigray’s many villages dry up and become nests of desperation while families as well as the farmers depend on a series of small streams and wells. 
Hispanics suffer more hunger than any other group in the US and on June 2, 2012, a group of over 100 gathered in Eugene, Oregon to celebrate services that have helped Hispanic families feed themselves. University of Oregon graduate student Chris Roddy and filmmaker, highlights three projects of Huerto de la Familia/The Family Garden: organic family gardens, the Small Farmers Project, and the Micro Enterprise Project. 
Sometimes when Samson Aberra is working in the garden, planting seedlings or replenishing his nursery, onlookers gather to watch him toil. What they don’t know is that Samson Aberra is not “toiling” — he’s barely working. In fact, he is doing what he loves: gardening. Samson’s garden lies next to the main highway running through the Ethiopian highland town of Dessie, located in the northeast of the country. The garden forms a triangle between the main road and a contaminated stream that meanders through the city in its journey to the low lying plains below. 
When 29-year-old China Dessale approached the Wain Hotel where she used to work as a commercial sex worker, carrying a basket teeming with cabbage, carrots, lettuce and eggs, the hotel owner couldn’t believe his eyes. He remembered China when she was 15 years old. In desperation, China had joined the same hotel to make a livelihood in Ethiopia’s risky commercial sex worker industry. 
Three women from USAID Urban Gardens Program prove that urban agriculture can improve lives of people living with HIV through economic empowerment as well as social engagement. 
Going “off the grid” has connotations of romance and counter-culture in the US, but to 600 communities across rural Latin America, off the grid means they will remain poor and under-developed. Imagine what can happen when each community is given solar panels and, in some cases, a back-up wind generator to produce renewable and clean energy. 
Washington apple growers are in trouble! It was a late spring, a cool summer, a long damp fall, and the apple trees are covered with ripe fruit. Unfortunately, it’s late October and cold, wet weather is just around the corner. If those apples don’t get picked soon they’ll rot on the tree. 
We offer the following interview with Devon Peña to highlight issues that are facing farmers across the US as well as around the world. Challenges like farm worker shortages – is it an immigration issue or worker welfare issue? Or corporate control by Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Org (as in organics)? Or commodity speculation by the world’s stock markets which is driving the cost of basic food stuffs beyond the reach of millions? Or factory farming that have mastered the “art” of growing and killing animals faster and on a larger scale than ever before? We’ll bring you information on all those issues this week, and we start with a “food commons.” |
 Video: Seed Saving Around the World
Kate Flint, Australian gardener and seed saver, talks about her seed saving passion.
The Growing Revolution is the story of Jubilee Biodynamic Farm in Carnation, Washington.
Pig Mania
Crown S Ranch, Winthrop WA
(Click the image for a larger version.) |
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