An international group of research organisations are collaborating on a project to boost Internet access in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. The project was discussed at a meeting of the board of the Global Research Alliance (GRA) - an international organisation that seeks to align the efforts of its members with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals - in Sydney, Australia, this month that looked at new strategies for improving access by the developing world to science and innovation.

Press release
Pambazuka Press and GRAIN
17 May 2012

Pan-African publisher Pambazuka Press in collaboration with GRAIN, a small international non-profit that works to support small farmers, is to launch a vital text in the studies of food, land and climate, The Great Food Robbery: How corporations control food, grab land and destroy the climate. Available worldwide in May 2012, this publication marks the five-week countdown to Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

After the failure of the United Nations Climate Change Conference at Durban last December to formulate a united response strategy, there are mixed feelings on what Rio+20 will be able to achieve. But what is clear is that all participants will need to be well informed. ‘Everyone should read The Great Food Robbery – every citizen, every political leader – to understand how agribusiness, which has created hunger and disease, is now contributing to the biggest resource grab since Columbus,’ said Dr Vandana Shiva, physicist, internationally renowned activist and founder of Navdanya International. Shiva is one of many high profile academics from around the world who have endorsed The Great Food Robbery. Others include Dr. Hans Herren, Naomi Klein, Eric Holt-Giménez, and UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter.

Henk Hobbelink, of GRAIN, in his speech to the Swedish government upon receiving the Right Livelihood Award stated the latest trend in global land grabbing for outsourced food production is just one facet of a much greater attack. ‘Land grabs for mining, tourism, biofuels, dam construction, infrastructure projects, timber and now carbon trading are all part of the same process, turning farmers into refugees on their own land.’

The Great Food Robbery is an advocate for the rural communities that have fed the world for millennia. It examines how agribusiness is driving today’s global food crisis and highlights the culpability of the industrial food system regarding the climate crisis, revealing how land grabbing is being fuelled by a financial industry unconcerned by its exploitation of the world’s poorest.

GRAIN has collected materials on topics ranging from agribusiness and food sovereignty to land grabbing and the climate crisis to produce The Great Food Robbery. It is an essential introduction to understanding the powers that are controlling our food system and crucially offers the means to challenge the status quo. It will be of interest to activists, academics, students, journalists, development and NGO professionals.

???FOR INTERVIEWS:

Contact

- Aaron O'Dowling-Keane (Ms.)
Publishing and Marketing Coordinator, Pambazuka Press
Tel: +44 (0)1865 727006 x204
Email: [email][email protected]
www.pambazukapress.org

- Dexter X
Information worker, GRAIN
Tel: +1 (0) 514 585 3987
Email: [email][email protected]
www.grain.org

NOTES TO EDITORS:

GRAIN supports small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. In 2011, GRAIN was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Peace prize) for ‘its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests’.

BOOK DETAILS

17 May 2012
9780857491138
Paperback
GB pounds 14.95 / US dollars 24.95 / CAN dollars 24.95
216 x 279 mm
164 pp

On 10 May 2012, Egypt's first ever presidential debate took place between two presidential candidates, Amr Moussa and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh. The debate was three hours long and the candidates were asked questions on various topics such as human rights, health plans, the economy, foreign relations, sharia law, and the role of the military. Both Egyptians and Arabs around the region were tweeting the candidates' replies - a summary of the tweets is included in this post.

La Via Campesina has called on all the peasant organisations of the world and their allies to organise actions in the month of June. 'The advance of the capitalist system that has reached unprecedented dimensions in the past two decades is resulting in crises that are of equally unprecedented dimensions. The financial, food, energy and environmental crises are phases of the structural crisis of capitalism, which has no limits in its search for more profits. And, as in other structural crises, it impacts the peoples of the world and not the elites.'

The twelfth volume of Gender, Poverty and Environmental Indicators on African Countries is published by the Statistics Department of the African Development Bank Group. The publication also provides some information on the broad development trends relating to gender, poverty and environmental issues in the 53 African countries.

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On 30 April 2012, Chairperson of the Technical Committee On Drafting The Zambian Constitution (TCDZC), Justice Annel Silungwe launched the 2012 First Draft Constitution for purposes of wide consultation with the public. The committee started work on the draft charter on 1 December 2011 and was supposed to have produced the draft in February 2012 but failed to do so. Regardless, this first draft consists of several progressive articles and clauses on media freedom, freedom of express, right to access information and even freedom to state-owned media.

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Islamists who say they are being unfairly held in Moroccan prisons are staging hunger strikes to put more pressure on the new government to release them, according to campaigners who are in contact with the prisoners. Letters sent from jail by the inmates and shown to Reuters news agency by their supporters, describe a series of protests by prisoners, followed by punishments by their gaolers that include force feeding and torture.

On 7 May, police authorities in the Ugandan city of Gulu – a city located approximately 320km north of Kampala by road with 150,000 inhabitants – ‘dropped by’ a sex worker drop-in centre. They raided the small office and arrested two staff and three members of the Women’s Organization Network for Human Rights Advocacy (WONETHA), a duly-registered group that runs the centre. 'We find this to be an attack on WONETHA and sex workers’ freedom of association, assembly, speech and expression, and we strongly protest against this,' says a release by Macklean Kyomya, WONETHA’s Executive director.

Drawing on the Land Matrix database, this paper contains an in depth analysis of large-scale agricultural land transactions that entail a transfer of rights to use, control or own land, that have been concluded since the year 2000. It particularly focuses on (i) land acquisitions or investments targeting the Global South and Eastern Europe; (ii) transnational deals, excluding deals where only domestic actors are involved;(iii) and deals where the envisioned land use is agricultural.

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The WSF Free Palestine will be a global encounter of broad-based popular and civil society mobilizations.

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A UN report indicates that the rebels of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have killed at least 50 civilians in eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since the beginning of May. 'Since the start of this month, at least 50 people - including displaced persons - have been killed by presumed FDLR members under similar conditions,' the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said.

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