At President Obama’s inauguration, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger thumped out this splendid tune, a rendition of Woodie Guthrie’s classic This Land Is Your Land. The most delightful verse appears at around 2:25 -

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

As one commentator has noted, this isn’t the version of the song that gets sung at the Democratic National Convention, preferred as a less chauvinist substitute for Irving Berlin’s God Bless America.

The Democratic Party doesn’t like to mess around with the fundamentals of private property – land in particular - and its obfuscating habits are being propagated internationally by the current administration, at an immense human cost. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 9 comments

Posted on 10 August, 2009 - 08:31

Source: Via Campesina

Today’s the International Day of Peasants’ Struggle, and there’ll be over 60 actions taking place around the world to celebrate it.

The day is as good as any to write about a concern that every writer about social movements has to face. It’s a question about representation. While I’ve certainly got some ideas about the structure of the modern food system, and am happy to share them, the voices of the people most directly involved can often get muffled by voices like mine.

So, on the contact form, I’ve wangled a way for folk (particularly the media) to get directly in touch with farmers and peasant movements in Via Campesina. Can’t think of something more appropriate for today than for me to get out of the way of farmers and landless people speaking for themselves. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 17 April, 2008 - 16:36

Update
Thanks to Hande for pointing out that the video is now available to view and download at at the IFAD website and now on Google Video here:

___________________ ... read more »

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Posted on 28 March, 2008 - 22:46

In case you hadn't heard (and I just found out), it's Debt Week from October 14-21. The call to action, posted below, is available in altogether more pleasing PDF format here. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 6 comments

Posted on 16 October, 2007 - 18:09

The good people at Grain have just published one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful exposés of the biofuels scam. And they start by pointing out how the term 'biofuels' itself is, from the outset, a misdirection. As Eric Holt Gimenez has argued, the term 'bio' has connotations of life and nature - the very opposite of what agrofuels actually encourage. They're more energy intensive, more disruptive to the environment, and spawn hunger.

Grain have assembled a series of fine articles on how agrofuels feed straight into the pockets of big agricultural oligopolies, as well as the devastating effects of agrofuels policy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, one of the first homes of the agrofuels epidemic. ... read more »

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Posted on 28 June, 2007 - 17:12

It's a long list, but a good reminder that, throughout the world, there are dozens of events to celebrate International Peasants Day today, April 17th.

Bolivia
Via Campesina Bolivia is celebrating the 17th of April in Montero, in the rural area around Santa Cruz. The event on Agrarian Reform, Food sovereignty and Gender will also be attended by the members of the International Coordinating Committee of La Vía Campesina.
Contact: lulabar_yuramihuilai@yahoo.es

Switzerland

The Swiss peasants of the organisation UNITERRE are organising a tractor’s parade, a press conference and a stall with local products in Geneva to celebrate the 17th of April. The issue of the action day will be « The planet is getting hot, Food sovereignty is “well cooked”! It is time to chose your meal!» ... read more »

Raj's blog | 2 comments

Posted on 18 April, 2007 - 01:19

Following up on yesterday's post here's some more biofuels from Brazil. ... read more »

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Posted on 7 March, 2007 - 18:45

It's a classic stand-off. The environmentalists want to save a toad, or a lizard, or a butterfly. Industry wants to use the land for something else. With a cry of "jobs, or lizards?", and with large wads of lobbying cash, industry rallies politicians to their cause.

Environmentalists may argue that, beyond the intrinsic value of life on earth, animals and plants in ecosystems form a complex web of life, and that removing one link in the chain will degrade the entire system of which humans, inescapably, are a part. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 2 comments

Posted on 10 February, 2007 - 02:22

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'.

And today, as often before, reality has matched the Pythons .

From the open-access journal PLoS Medicine comes an article showing that industry-supported soft-drink science is nearly eight times more likely to conclude that its sponsor's product are beneficial compared to independently funded studies. ... read more »

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Posted on 9 January, 2007 - 18:12

The United Nations released two reports last week. One garnered a great deal of press coverage - The World Distribution of Household Wealth by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University.

They found that ... read more »

• The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth
  

  Raj's blog | 1 comment

  Ch.1. Introduction | gender | Global | inequality

  
  Posted on 13 December, 2006 - 19:33