Environmental for Food Justice

Criticisms by scientists, civil society, and indigenous farmers dismissed NO REPLY TO FAO AND CBD INQUIRIES Devon G. Peña |   Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO | July 6, 2014 While Mexico is a party to the international treaty known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a signatory to the Cartegena Protocol (which is fully enforceable), the federal government is so far ignoring both court rulings against Monsanto and other corporations and the advice of its own and other scientific committees actively advising the international bodies concerned with enforcing the CBD’s biosafety regulations.  The reinstalled PRI presidency occupied by  Enrique Peña Nieto is unsurprisingly acting the usual arrogant way and ignoring science and the rule of law. This past week, we received correspondence from scientist-advocates attending CDB-SBSTTA 18 in Montreal, Canada reporting these concerns. Article 25 of the CBD “establishes an open-ended intergovernmental sc...

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...