Environmental for Food Justice

Food sovereignty and biodiversity. Credit: Sourcewatch Moderator’s Note: As part of our occasional series on food autonomy, we are reposting this essay by alter-globalization activist, organizer, and author, Esther Vivas. Ms. Vivas argues in this piece that without women the world would go hungry. This operates at several levels including the unpaid and largely invisible work of reproduction, which is to say reproduction of tradition, customs, and all the other qualities that make for a whole way of life or ‘culture’.  Vivas critically unpacks at the impact of neoliberal policies on women and their productive and reproductive labor. One especially significant issue is access to land since women are traditionally the smallholder subsistence farmers of their regions. The smallholders are often the first targets undermined by neoliberal policies designed to promote modernized industrialized agriculture for the production of cash crops for export. As the transition happens nations find...

The corn not from this country. Source: pueblosbarrancassantiago Moderator’s Note: We continue with our focus on the struggle to protect the native corn of Mexico which is threatened by the politics and economics of companies like Monsanto that wish to gain control of one of Mexico’s most important contributions to the food and foodways of the world. Today’s post is borrowed from the eww blog , an active and fascinating site that analyzes struggles through the lens of the Zapatista movement for autonomy. Alfredo Acedo, the Director of Social Communication and adviser to the National Union of Regional Organizations of Autonomous Small Farmers of Mexico , an organizer with La Via Campesina , and a contributor to the Americas Program , prepared this article; it was originally posted in October 2012 but has not enjoyed very wide circulation in the USA. Acedo argues that the battle over corn is really about the plundering of native lands and their biological and cultural diversity. In a w...