GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

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GRAIN statement at the joint GRAIN-La Via Campesina media briefing

November 2009

Stop the global land grab!

A press briefing prepared at the People's Food Sovereignty Forum held in Rome.

At GRAIN, we are extremely concerned that today's global land grab is making the food crisis worse. It pushes an agriculture geared toward large scale monocultures and fossil fuels; not an agriculture that will feed everyone. It's an agriculture that feeds speculative profits for a few and more poverty for the rest. Of course we need investment. But investment in food sovereignty, in a million local markets and in the four billion rural people who currently produce most of the food that our societies rely on -- not in a few mega-farms controlled by a few mega-landlords.

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The new farm owners

October 2009

Corporate investors lead the rush for control over overseas farmland

With all the talk about "food security," and distorted media statements like "South Korea leases half of Madagascar's land," it may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today's global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations. So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies are the ones getting control of the land. And their interests are simply not the same as those of governments.

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Small farmers can cool the world

October 2009

The October issue of Seedling, now available online, is devoted to the climate crisis. It looks at the role of industrial agriculture in creating the climate crisis and examines how this contribution has been seriously underestimated. The global food system is, in fact, the most important single factor behind global warming, responsible for almost half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, as this issue of Seedling also documents, agriculture can in the future become a powerful tool for mitigating the crisis.

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CGIAR joins global farmland grab

September 2009

An internal document recently posted on the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) website reveals that IRRI has been advising Saudi Arabia in the context of its strategy to acquire farm land overseas for its own food production.

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Seedling July 2009

July 2009

In this issue of Seedling:

The other 'pandemic' - Recent figures show that today more people than ever - over one billion - are permanently hungry. It is shocking to realise that 80% of these people are either farmers or farm labourers. Yet those in power continue to support an international food system that doesn’t feed the hungry but, instead, deprives even more people of adequate food.

Saying 'no' to mining - Over the last decade communities around the world have become more vociferous in their opposition to large mining projects that destroy their way of life, damage biodiversity and exacerbate the climate crisis. In this special feature, activists from India and Ecuador describe their struggles.

Empty coasts, barren seas - In this article, GRAIN investigates how Asia’s small fishers stand under the proposed EU-ASEAN free trade agreement (FTA).

GRAIN interviews Xue Dayuan - Xue Dayuan is Chief Scientist for Biodiversity at the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences in China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Update on swine flu - Following our report on the swine flu outbreak in April 2009, we provide a short update here (July 2009).

and more....

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New land grab website

June 2009

 GRAIN is launching today a new website that offers the most comprehensive information tool on the global land grab for outsourced food production: http://farmlandgrab.org.

This new site is an improved version of the site initiated by GRAIN last year, which provides an open, up-to-date and easy to search library of over 800 articles, interviews and reports on farm land grabs around the world published since the outbreak of the food crisis in 2008. The new site is open-publishing, and anyone can register and upload material. 

To read the news release click here

http://farmlandgrab.org

A food system that kills - Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague

April 2009

Mexico is in the midst of a hellish repeat of Asia's bird flu experience, though on a more deadly scale. Once again, the official response from public authorities has come too late and bungled in cover-ups. And once again, the global meat industry is at the centre of the story, ramping up denials as the weight of evidence about its role grows. Just five years after the start of the H5N1 bird flu crisis, and after as many years of a global strategy against influenza pandemics coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the world is now reeling from a swine flu disaster. The global strategy has failed and needs to be replaced with a public health system that the public can trust.

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What's on IRRI's table?

April 2009

With IRRI increasingly forming alliances with the private sector to plug its funding gap, GRAIN took a visit round IRRI and produced this little photo slide show / video.

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Corporate candyland - The looming GM sugar cane invasion

April 2009

One of the most destructive developments in agriculture over the past two decades has been the boom in soya production in the southern cone of Latin America. The corporations that led that boom are now moving aggressively into sugar cane, focusing on large tracts of land in southern countries where sugar can be produced cheaply. If these developments are not resisted, the impacts are likely to be severe: local food production will be overrun, workers and communities will face displacement and exposure to increased levels of pesticides, and foreign agribusiness will tighten its grip on sugar production. We look at the intersection between the development of genetically modified (GM) sugar cane and transformations in the global sugar industry.

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Seedling April 2009

April 2009

In this issue:

Corporate candyland - corporations are moving agressively into sugar cane, and in particular GM sugar cane.

Melaku Worede - we interview Dr Melaku Worede is an Ethiopian plant geneticist who has been a pioneer in shifting perceptions and attitudes globally towards recognising the vital importance of on-farm diversity as a strategy to increase and conserve biodiversity.

Corporations are still making a killing from hunger - In April 2008 GRAIN published a short report on the huge profits that agribusiness was making from the food crisis. Another year has passed. More financial results are in. So has anything changed?

Indonesia fights to change WHO rules on flu vaccines - The WHO’s global surveillance system acts as a free virus collection and R&D department for the world’s largest vaccine companies, yet gives very little benefit back to the developing countries in terms of available vaccines. Angered by the inequity, Indonesia decided in 2007 to suspend its sharing of viruses with the WHO.

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The soils of war

March 2009

In this Briefing, we look at how the US’s agricultural reconstruction work in Afghanistan and Iraq not only gives easy entry to US agribusiness and pushes neoliberal policies, something that has always been a primary function of US development assistance, but is also an intrinsic part of the US military campaign in these countries and the surrounding regions. Seen together with the growing clout that the US and its corporate allies exercise over donor agencies and global bodies – such as the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres, which influence the food and farm policies adopted by the recipient countries – this is an alarming development. These are not unique cases born from unusual circumstances, but constitute a likely template for US activities overseas, as it continues to expand its “war on terror” and pursue US corporate interests.

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