Thousands of Farmers in India Rise up Against Monsanto – Christina Sarich

Some have said that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, arrived at the nation’s pro-GMO position with the help of generous campaign funding from a GMO lobby, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of Indian farmers from demonstrating against Monsanto and their biotech cronies in a massive grassroots movement that shuns anti-farmer practices and genetically modified crop farming. Shri Rakesh Tikait, National Spokesperson for the …

Nepal Death Toll Could Reach 10,000: Millions Starving, Entire Mountain Villages Flattened

Death toll in the Nepal earthquake could reach 10,000 as rescue teams have started reaching isolated mountain villages. Entire mountain villages have been razed to the ground and millions of people are starving as they are cut off from all food supply and communication. Wet weather and cold are making life intolerable. An estimated 8 million people have been affected. …

Corporate Power, Grassroots Resistance, and the Battle Over the Food System – ELIZABETH FRASER AND ANURADHA MITTAL

For most of history, farmers have had control over their seeds: saving, sharing, and replanting them with freedom. Developments in the course of the 20th century, however, have greatly eroded this autonomy. Legal changes, ranging from the Plant Variety Protection Act (1970) in the United States to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), …

China is a “major driver” of environmental degradation in Latin America – Robert Soutar

China’s increased trade and investment in Latin America over the past decade has resulted in powerful social and environmental impacts such as job losses and pollution, although the growing relationship has also brought some benefits, says new research published today. The high concentration of Chinese activity in Latin America’s agriculture and extractive sectors has placed a heavy strain on water …

India and the Globalization of Servitude

Angus Maddison has noted that India was the richest country in the world and had controlled a third of global wealth until the 17th century. The village was the centre of a rural economy that was an economic powerhouse of entrepreneurialism. The British Raj almost dismantled this system however by introducing mono crop activities and mill made products, and post independent India has failed to repair the …

Traditional rainwater harvesting could be used to combat the effects of climate change across the world.

School textbooks in India have been telling children for generations that Rajasthan is an inhospitable state in the northwest of the country, constrained by the hot, hostile sands of the Thar Desert. But the driest state in India has a softer, humane face as well – that of Rajendra Singh, known as the “Water Man of India”, whose untiring efforts …

Journalism as Subversion

The assault of global capitalism is not only an economic and political assault. It is a cultural and historical assault. Global capitalism seeks to erase our stories and our histories. Its systems of mass communication, which peddle a fake intimacy with manufactured celebrities and a false sense of belonging within a mercenary consumer culture, shut out our voices, hopes and …

White men meet in London to plot ways of profiting off Africa’s seed systems

A meeting is to be held in London on 23 March by predominantly white men with a sprinkling of Africans, some of whom represent private seed companies, to discuss how to make a killing off Africa’s seed systems. Farmers and civil society organisations have not been invited to the meeting, which will be attended only by private seed companies, donors, …