History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.
Despite the serious harm caused by agrochemical fumigation across South America’s Southern Cone, there is a surprising lack of debate and little media coverage on the issue. It has been an uphill battle to build grassroots movements to regulate– and eventually eliminate– certain practices that are prohibited in other countries, like aerial fumigations.
By Alfredo Acedo When Solón attended the COP16 last year in Cancun, Mexico, he still served as Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN and led his country’s delegation at the talks on global warming with a strong position based on the Peoples’ Agreement of Cochabamba. The Cochabamba Agreement firmly identified the underlying cause of the climate [...]
There’s a global consensus on what has to be done to stop global warming–cut back immediately on emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. But at the Durban COP 17, once again, the U.S. and other developed countries refuse to agree to an international framework for saving the planet.
The link between trade liberalization and food availability is becoming a critical factor that, far from improving living conditions, threatens to deepen and entrench the structural causes of hunger, violence and malnutrition in the region.
Since NAFTA, millions of Mexicans have joined the ranks of the hungry. Malnutrition is highest among the country’s farm families, who used to produce enough food to feed the nation.
The increase in the cost of food, especially basic grains, has serious consequences for southern countries with low incomes and dependency on food imports, and for the millions of families in these countries.
