The free event will take place Friday, December 5th and Saturday, December 6th and will feature hands-on workshops and panels that help us to Understand Corporate Control and Build Just Alternatives with respect to local and global food systems. Saturday will be held at Seattle Central Community College and Friday’s location will be announced soon!

We could still use lots of help with planning of the teach-in! If you are interested, please email Teresa at fjp@seattleglobaljustice.org

Snacking on roasted corn from Marra and other spacingspacingThe sun sets, a prerequisite for any outdoor film
local farms!

Our host at duskspacingspacingspacingspacingspacingspaeeA view of Marra Farm

Searching for the best seats in the house…spacingspacingspeRoll the film! Thanks for coming.

Read AGRA Watch’s letter to Scientific American, in response to their article, “Food Shortage Aid Should Start with Lessons in Agriculture.” Please check back to see if they publish it!

Editors:

In regards to your article “Food Shortage Aid Should Start with Lessons in Agriculture.” [Aug 2008], isn’t it time that groups in wealthy developed countries stopped professing to know “the solution” to hunger in Africa? If Scientific American is concerned about “putting African bread on African tables,” maybe you should be reporting on, and supporting, the many agroecological projects on that continent and elsewhere that have increased productivity using means more readily available to Global South farmers. [For example, the NY Times has reported that just intercropping of rice strains can double yields (Carol Kaesuk Yoon, "Simple Method Found to Increase Crop Yields Vastly," August 22, 2000)].

Many farming organizations in Africa have, with comparatively little international support behind them, achieved amazing agricultural successes through endogenous innovation, biointensive farming, and other organic farming methods, without the use of genetically engineered seeds.

We disagree with your support of Green Revolution technologies as a solution for African farmers. Green Revolution packages of hybrid seed, mechanical instruments, and chemical inputs were previously introduced in much of Africa, and for the most part, they failed due to their incompatibility with place-specific agricultural production patterns. Elsewhere in the world, they have led to significant negative consequences –consolidation of farms, massive debt for smallholders, and subsequent suicide epidemics. They did not reduce global hunger.

High tech inputs may be suitable for large mechanized industrial farms (although even here they present significant problems), but they are completely inconsistent with the needs of smallholders in the Global South. For example, while these technologies benefited those large farmers who were well-connected, they failed to address the politics of class. Patented GE seeds can not be legally replanted, shared with neighbors, or crossed with other varieties-the techniques that enabled these people to feed themselves for millennia.

The recent report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, prepared by the World Bank and the UN, refused to support the further industrialization and globalization of agriculture and, in particular, reliance on genetically engineered plants, because the analysis shows that this route is unlikely to achieve the goal of feeding a hungry world.

GE issues are intensely political, as are agricultural issues in general-hunger in Africa and elsewhere is at least partly attributable to problems with unequal global distribution of food, political instability, and international trade regimes. However, your article leaves out the various political and economic aspects of the problem; these will not be fixed by technological improvements in agriculture.

Given our concern with the global state of agriculture and food security, we encourage Scientific American to consider all factors contributing to world hunger and to feature non-genetically engineered approaches that combine agricultural science with social, political, and economic non-technological solutions in your pages.

Sincerely,

Prof. Philip L. Bereano and Ashley Fent
on behalf of AGRA Watch, Seattle

Read the original article:

Scientific American Magazine - July 29, 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=food-shortage-aid
“Food Shortage Aid Should Start with Lessons in Agriculture”

The U.S. needs to expand support for agricultural science targeted at developing countries [Note: This story was originally published with the title, "We Can Do More".]

By The Editors

Global food prices have roughly doubled in three years. At the World Food Summit in Rome in early June, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon recalled that on a trip to Liberia he encountered people who had once bought rice by the bag and whose cash now suffices for a meager cupful. The current crisis means that another 100 million hungry may join the 854 million who already lack sufficient daily nourishment.

An immediate response should include policies that discourage grain hoarding, that reapportion the way food aid is delivered and that ensure that subsidies for food purchases are carefully targeted to reach the truly poor. Just shipping more grain to Africa, by far the most vulnerable region, will not suffice. Over the long haul, science and technology have a big role to play. Finding nonfood substitutes for ethanol produced from corn or sugarcane would help. But the only lasting solution to hunger in Africa and elsewhere must focus on poor agricultural productivity.

U.S. secretary of agriculture Ed Schafer called on participants at the summit to consider the use of biotechnology to grow crops with higher yields that are capable of resisting assaults from inclement weather, disease or pests. Some activists, invoking fears about genetic manipulation of food crops, have jumped on the administration’s stance as pandering to agribusiness and overhyping benefits from genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

That criticism is unfounded. Nongovernmental organizations that advocate exporting the organic food movement to Africa are at best misguided. Much of Africa practices what political scientist Robert Paarlberg calls “de facto organic farming,” and overall productivity has plummeted. African small farmers achieve crop yields only one third of those obtained by farmers in developing countries in Asia. GMOs have the potential to increase productivity by incorporating beneficial traits that would, for one, allow crops to thrive even when rain is a rare event.

The Bush administration, never a beacon of enlightened social policymaking, would have come across more convincingly if it had incorporated biotechnology into a well-defined framework of research and development assistance. At the moment, genetically modifying cassava or cowpeas against viruses or insects is akin to producing hydrogen fuel cells in the energy arena. Both hold tremendous promise, and both are not ready for wide commercial dissemination.

The best hope for improving African crop yields today would be to borrow technology from the decades-old green revolution that transformed agriculture in Asia and Latin America. Using conventionally bred hybrid seeds, farmers in certain fertile areas of Ethiopia have witnessed their fields turn into a breadbasket that is rivaled in the sub-Saharan region of the continent only by South Africa. Eventually these same farmers will likely demand still better yields that will leave an opening for acceptance of genetically modified crops.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (a partnership of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations) signed an agreement with three U.N. food agencies at the June summit meeting to bolster the lot of African small farmers. The Bush administration had asked in May that part of a recent aid package to address the food crisis go to agricultural development, including the planting of GMOs. More is needed, though. As the world’s largest food aid donor, the U.S. channels most of its dollars to pay for acute emergencies, a response that, by law, requires shipping crops grown in Iowa or Kansas to needy countries-largely on U.S. ships. Meanwhile the U.S. Agency for International Development’s funding for agricultural science in Africa dropped by 75 percent after inflation from the mid-1980s to 2004.

To avoid a crisis without end, we should back a program that not only delivers better seeds to African farmers but also devotes still more assistance to support improvements in soil, irrigation, roads and farmer education. Then, when necessary, we should use remaining aid money to buy either hybrid or genetically modified crops grown in African soil for local distribution. The U.S. farm lobby will howl in protest, but this action will be the best way to work toward putting African bread on African tables.

CAGJ invites you to:
*See the film - It opens at the Neptune Theater in the U-District and at the Uptown on Queen Anne. Visit the “Battle in Seattle” Film website and trailer.

*Help to create and amplify a People’s History of the Battle of Seattle told by the people, groups and movements who participated and made it happen! This project was launched at the 2007 US Social Forum to create a space where “social movements can tell our own stories, reclaim our own histories, and publicly fight damaging myths of our movements past and present” (read ”A Call to Social Movements to Reclaim Our History” below)

We need your help! You can…

1. Share YOUR story from the 1999 protests on the recently created website, “The Real Battle in Seattle”. It is easy to contribute!
2. View the Seattle WTO People’s History! You can browse postings by date, or subject or author. The website also includes information about the WTO and social movements organizing for global justice.
3. Help spread the word:

-Contact CAGJ if you would like to pass out post-cards about the project at one of the upcoming screenings: call 206.405.4600
-Tell your friends, colleagues, & families about this People’s History Project!

4. Learn more about the film and response, including the Seattle WTO People’s History Project:

-Read “The Battle for Reality”, by David Solnit, a key organizer of the protests in 1999.

-KUOW interviewed CAGJ’s Director, Heather Day, about the film the day after its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival. They wanted to talk to someone who had been involved in the 1999 protests who had attended the premiere. Hear the interview, and Heather’s critiques of the film (It starts about 45 minutes into the program - you can quickly fast forward to hear it). Note: this link must be pasted into the address bar in order to work!
http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=15000

-KPFA Hard Knock Radio in the Bay Area interviewed Heather Sept 17 (it starts about 10 minutes into the program):

-See/hear David Solnit and Stuart Townsend on Democracy Now 9/18.

-Check out “The Battle of the Story of the “Battle of Seattle”, a new book edited by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit - Publisher: AK Press. “With the World Trade Organization in retreat globally, do we remember the seeds of the anti-capitalist movements that blossomed and, in 1999, brought Seattle to a standstill? This collection confronts the challenges of historical memory. David Solnit recounts the story of his consultation with the Battle In Seattle filmmakers…Rebecca Solnit tells of her battle with the NY Times, challenging their repeated misinformation about the Seattle protests.”  Read more, and order the book here: http://www.akpress.org/2008/items/battleofseattleakpress

5. Watch “This is What Democracy Looks Like”, an excellent documentary that captures the 1999 WTO protests, cut from the footage of over 100 media activists. Call CAGJ to borrow a copy, or order the film here.

The Battle for the Story of Seattle: A Call to Social Movements to Reclaim Our History
“Until the lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.”
—African Proverb

In the fall of 2009, a major motion picture called “Battle in Seattle” will come out in cities across the country. The movie is a fictionalized account based on real events, featuring extensive archival footage. It may shape what most people in the US and around the world think happened for decades to come—unless we speak up. We call for social movements to take action: to reclaim our history, our stories, and our future.

The story of popular resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 is a story of how people power can change the world. It is a dangerous example for the global elite, and a powerful one for movements.

For eight years, the US corporate media, global elites, and their police have been twisting and marginalizing the truth, in order to invent their own story of Seattle 1999 and the stories of social movements’ resistance and victories. These lies and revisions of history have been used in an attempt to criminalize and repress our protests, movements, and mobilizations.

The movie will be released on the eighth anniversary of the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO uprising and shutdown [note: this release date was planned but did not happen]. It was written by a well-meaning actor-director, but is unlikely to reflect the motives, experience, or thinking of the movements behind the shutdown of the WTO. The potential is high and the possibilities are infinite to interrupt this narrative and claim the history that we helped create.
“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
—Milan Kundera

It’s time that we in the social movements tell our own stories, reclaim our own histories, and publicly fight damaging myths of our movements past and present. We must intervene in the public understanding of what happened, what is happening, and what it all means. Stories are how we understand the world and thus shape the future—they are part of our fight against corporate power, empire, war, and social and environmental injustice and for the alternatives that will make a better world.

The real story of Seattle 1999 is of tens of thousands of people rising up, taking direct action, and changing history; standing up to corporations and governments and winning; joining with movements around the world in our common struggle against the WTO.

“When it’s truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it.”
—Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: a primer for the looking-glass world

Let’s link the 1999 resistance to the WTO in Seattle and globally with building support for today’s resistance that is continuing the fight for global justice on many fronts; against war and occupation for environmental and climate justice; for workers, immigrants, women, and farmers rights, etc. We call for commemorations, public events, performances, media, interventions, interruptions, educational events, performances, screenings, gatherings, and celebrations.

Featuring “The Greening of Cuba” and “Zapata’s Garden”

When: Saturday, September 13, 2008, 7:00 PM Rain or Shine!

Where: Marra Farm 9026 4th Ave S. (Located in the South Park Neighborhood, just south of S. Cloverdale and 5th Avenue S.) The film will be shown in the Lettuce Link garden, in the NW corner of the farm. Driving and bus directions are listed below. Street parking is available, but carpooling is highly encouraged!

Suggested donation: $10. (No one turned away for lack of funds). Bring blankets, your kids, and snacks or a dessert to share! We’ll have freshly roasted corn and drinks available!

Films:

“The Greening of Cuba”

A Food First film that profiles Cuban farmers and scientists working to reinvent a sustainable agriculture, based on ecological principles and local knowledge rather than imported agricultural inputs. In their quest for self sufficiency, Cubans combine time-tested traditional methods with cutting edge bio-technology.

“Zapata’s Garden/ El Huerto de Zapata”

Shot and produced by indigenous men and women video makers in the Autonomous Municipaltiy of Emiliano Zapata, this video looks at the new society that the Zapatista’s are building. Zapata’s Garden shows how this new municipality is fighting the effects of globalization and government corruption through their work in their collective garden. Community members talk about the importance of collective work in building this new society.

The Community Alliance for Global Justice is an organization of volunteers who contribute their skills, time and money to work for a just local and global economy.

Driving and Bus Directions:

Southbound – from 99 via First Avenue South Bridge

Southbound from I-5

BUS ROUTES # 130, 132, and 60:

Another round of World Trade Organization talks collapsed on July 29th, largely due to India’s insistence that they be able to protect farmers from a surge of agricultural imports from rich nations. Efforts to complete the “Doha” Round of negotiations, begun in 2001, have continually failed, as countries of the Global South have insisted on more fair-dealing from the US and EU, rejecting their hypocrisy.

By Victor Menotti, International Forum on Globalization

July 30, 2008

Seeing the Sweep of History

As experts dissect the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round of global trade talks to explain its causes and effects, many are missing how it signals a shift in the sensibilities of people everywhere to end of the era of global free trade and renew government’s rightful role in regulating commerce, especially in the critical areas of fuel, food, and finance.
These three, interrelated crises are the direct result of a failure to govern in the public interest and each now requires rapid responses through global cooperation. Contrary to what some are saying, derailing Doha actually clears the way to solve today’s fuel, food, and financial crises while providing a pathway to a new paradigm of global cooperation rather than competition.

How so? First, failure to expand the WTO’s powers over essential areas of our economy, in fact, preserves the “policy space” needed to shape vigorous responses to today’s most pressing problems without policymakers worrying about violating insidious world trade rules; see more on that below. Second, with Doha “dead in the water,” the world can now concentrate on other options already in play for addressing the rise in food and fuel prices (not to mention temperatures and sea levels), as well as the deepening turmoil in global financial markets.

While the WTO’s so-called Doha Development Agenda (DDA) was supposed to prioritize the needs of poor countries, its proposals would have expanded an energy-intensive and export-oriented development model, undercut millions of peasant farmers with cheaper imports, intensified industrial agriculture in the Amazon, increased trade in environmentally sensitive goods, and reduced the rights of governments to protect public services, consumer safety, community development, and ecological limits. True, action on developing country demands will be delayed but even more disappointing is the fact that most of their priorities went all but ignored by the interests of global corporations’ push to access more resources and new markets.

Victory led by Peasants, Farmers, Small Businesses in the Global South

Governments who were captured by corporate interests wrote the rules of the WTO in 1994. Since then, peoples’ movements in key countries have been slowly “taking back” their governments and putting forth new positions on trade. Doha’s derailment is the direct result of governments unable to agree because they were held accountable to concerned citizens’ back in their national capitols, especially in developing countries demanding protections for peasant farmers, domestic employment and production, public health, education, water, and energy. In the end, global corporate greed was restrained by peasants in India, China, and Indonesia, by workers’ unions and small businesses in South Africa, Argentina, and the Philippines, plus by many, many other efforts worldwide.

Derailing Doha is a victory for peoples’ movements everywhere and needs to be celebrated in the context of global civil society’s rewriting the rules of globalization. Since before the 1999 “battle in Seattle,” global civil society has organized successful opposition to expanding WTO’s powers. And although many groups may now be ready to declare the death of Doha, peoples’ organizations are already rising to the challenge of replacing WTO with a new set of trade rules while exploring, through more sensible government leaders, other international instruments to address today’s top crises. For example, increasing numbers of groups recognize the opportunity to set global rules for energizing our economies via the United Nation’s climate talks. Doha can not be buried until other institutional options appear viable, so the ball is in civil society’s court to propose a new agenda with specific mechanisms around which all can unite.

Doha to deepen crises in fuel, food, and finance

In a desperate attempt to play on public fears about today¹s fuel, food and financial crises conflating into global chaos, European Commissioner (EC) for Trade, Peter Mandelson, told the Financial Times on the eve of the mini-Ministerial that failing to conclude a Doha deal would “reduce our ability to pass future tests on climate change, food security, energy security, and other issues.” Mandelson would have us believe that a Doha deal could “bring fresh confidence to a world economy that is certainly in need of it” as well as address these crises directly. But Doha was no silver bullet for today’s complex challenges; it’s more of a boomerang that will come back to hurt efforts to tackle them.

Here’s why. Any expansion of WTO¹s powers over fuel, food, and finance (which were essential elements of any deal) would reduce the role of government in guiding our economies toward a new direction at a time when a lack of leadership has been at the root of these problems. Each of today’s crises has resulted from a failure to govern in the public interest. Solving them requires governments to reassert their proper roles by sending investors and consumers clear market signals that reflect the true social and environmental costs of our imbalanced fuel, food, and financial systems.

Mandelson¹s remarks came as a hand-picked group of trade ministers met in Geneva to finalize a deal before approaching US elections made any trade agreement impossible. That’s because shifting public opinions of trade have allowed President Bush’s authority for signing trade deals to expire. Many countries lack confidence in WTO’s free trade model, but recent polls have shown that Americans’ loss of trust in globalized free trade has only increased with time.

Seeking to seal a deal before the election window closes, American and European trade negotiators pressured other governments for more concessions to present a package that was politically palatable. But trade deals benefit mainly big businesses because, by design, they increase the profits of private companies rather than protect the public interest. And it’s precisely this surrender of popular sovereignty over our economies to narrow corporate interests that led to today’s crises in fuel, food, and finance.

Fuel prices, not to mention floods and fires, are on the increase everywhere because the way we energize our economy has been governed largely by global corporations that profit from our addiction to fossil fuels. Concerns about energy security and climate change should compel us to shift supplies rapidly to sources that are socially stable and ecologically sustainable, yet WTO’s proposed Energy Services agenda would have deepened our dependence on oil by opening new markets for companies like Halliburton while restricting what governments can do to encourage an energy transition. Mandelson’s comments appear ignorant of how expanding WTO’s powers over energy policy would necessarily foreclose options for governments currently engaged in UN climate talks, which aim to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases.

Food riots around the world followed the recent rise in energy demand, despite warnings that the US and EC mandates to boost biofuels production would force limited farmland into production of fuel rather than food. Agriculture reform remains at the heart of Doha, though few expected it to help feed the hungry. That¹s because any deal would have conditioned US and EU cuts in export subsidies to developing nations’ opening their markets more. Not only could this make food even more expensive for poor nations, but past market-opening measures have directly destroyed domestic food production in poor countries, leading to shortages in local supplies.

Financial markets have failed spectacularly to self-regulate, causing the foreclosure of over a million American households. No one knows where it will end as companies continue to sort out their losses on mortgage-backed securities and other financial instruments whose complexity not only eluded government regulators but also engulfed the very investment banks and hedge funds that invented them. Amazingly, at a time when we should be strengthening global financial governance, the US and EU were pressing other nations to agree to a Doha deal that would liberalize financial services even further. US trade negotiators (who wanted to force all nations to treat foreign financial services companies the same as domestic ones) seemed way out of step with Congress’ new provisions to prevent offshore tax evasion by requiring Americans to use only companies under US regulations.

Pathway to a new paradigm

The most prudent course of action now would be for each nation to review current trade rules (for Americans, under our next Congress), and then replace those we find harmful to the public interest with new ones that are democratically debated, not only by the US but also by our trading partners. We need a new set of rules developed by a new round of talks that place public interests before private. Remember that international economic governance was originally under the General Assembly’s Economic and Social Council when UN Charter when it was signed in 1945 in San Francisco; reclaiming that history is one way to ensure that global economic relations, and particularly the tools of trade policy, help not harm all people as well as our planet.

In the meantime, global cooperation outside of the WTO must intensify to address the crises in fuel, food, and finance. The future of fuel faces a real revolution as public outcries about climate change and energy security are already being priced in to the market. Governments recognize the need for urgent global action on climate and have mandated the UNFCCC to conclude a new set of agreements end of 2009 in Copenhagen. The scientific imperative of shifting to ecologically sustainable and socially stable energy supplies within a few decades requires new global rules on finance and trade. Not only public finance but also private investment must be channeled to low-carbon alternatives. And any climate agreement will also have to relate to world trade rules. For example, the world needs new rules, overriding WTO’s if necessary, to finance the transfer of clean energy technologies to poor countries in ways that ensure affordability while still rewarding innovation. Perhaps nowhere is a cooperative approach more necessary to guarantee our survival than the transition away from fossil fuels. Climate, at least, has a global decision-making process underway whereas other crises like food and finance have as of yet no place to be comprehensively addresses; such spaces need to be created by civil society pressure.

For food, no global policy process now exists to address today’s crisis, as evidenced by the non-impact of the recent UNFAO summit, and the non-enthusiasm current World Bank initiatives are getting from groups who feed the hungry. Still, some comprehensive initiative could be launched to unify the global groundswell of efforts to change WTO rules, revive international commodity agreements, adopt fair trade and organic standards, and create other international instruments to support small scale, sustainable farming and food systems.

Financial regulation remains the ominous black hole in global governance, though the need for much more than mere “cooperation” by national authorities has become increasingly clear and compelling. Everyone knows finance drives all policy decisions yet nothing meaningful exists to govern financial flows globally, private or public. Global justice will be present only when capital, wherever it may go, is held accountable to universal rights. But as the credit crisis and mortgage meltdown continues to spill over into global market turmoil, civil society is once again caught flat-footed in the midst of this crisis. Somehow, as we scale up our responses to today’s emergencies, we must simultaneously create new capacities within civil society to inform and inspire a systemic shift in public opinion about governing global finance.

Solving today’s crises requires a paradigm shift from competitive to cooperative relations among nations and peoples. Global civil society has harnessed enough power to counter the expansion of the global corporate agenda, but can it unify around some of the strategic opportunities, such as the climate process, to balance global governance and define new international instruments that protect universal rights?

Such are the pathways now opening up before us. The political moment in history demands we go on the offensive to propose our own alternatives. Indeed, another world is already arriving …

The delicious dinner was made entirely from produce donated by local farmers and restaurants that use locally grown produce, as well as local fish and food from Portage Bay Café. Diners enjoyed discussions during the meal, which was prepared, as you well know, by our wonderful volunteer chefs, led by Travis English, and served family style. The keynote by Carlos Marentes of Via Campesina and Committee for Immigration Reform and Social Justice was powerful and thought-provoking- look for it on our website soon! We were privileged to have 50 honorary food producer guests at the dinner tables. CAGJ encouraged everyone to become members, or to renew, and to take action to strengthen local economies everywhere. We were also able to share CAGJ’s 3 new programs with guests: the Food Justice Project, AGRA Watch, and the Trade Justice Project.

This year’s silent auction contained over 15 packages with terrific items from garden makeovers to worm bins to gift certificates to local restaurants, and the event closed with an awesome dessert auction! Overall the event raised much-needed funds to help cover expenses and continue working on our three main projects. Most importantly, CAGJ members have been re-energized, and a core group of dedicated volunteers are eager to continue organizing for food and trade justice. We hope you consider yourself one of the energized CAGJ supporters who is ready to engage in change for the better!

We are already thinking ahead to next year’s dinner, searching for an ideal location with great sound and a warm atmosphere. Thanks to the support of organizations and people like you, the event was successful not only economically, but also in that we continued to create a sense of community with a shared vision of a sustainable lifestyle that supports the environment and ourselves.

Check back soon for more pictures from the event!

The new site is meant to be a place for sharing information, news, and events with our members and the public. We’ll soon have all the different ways you can get involved, action alerts, upcoming events, and more! Thanks for bearing with us as we get everything updated.