By GRAIN Staff, GRAIN
The picture often painted for us is that we need corporate seeds to feed the world: they are alleged to be more efficient, productive and predictable. Locally developed farmer varieties are painted as backwards, less-productive and disease-ridden. But those of us with our feet on the ground know that this is not the reality in Africa.
By Philip Loring, Ensia
Calls for strict science-based decision making on complex issues like GMOs and geoengineering can shortchange consideration of ethics and social impacts.
By Jean Willoughby, YES! magazine
The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to promote “people-to-people” reparations.
By Sean Keller, Local Futures
In Rojava, a region in Syria also known as North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological vitality is taking place.
By Wangũi Kamonji, Transition Network
I wanted to connect as many ‘honey peoples’ as possible because I felt that they had been forgotten. The ‘bee custodians’, as I like to call them as opposed to beekeepers, had held the space for bees throughout our previous generations. And yet the hunter-gatherer is pitched at the bottom of the strata of livelihoods.
By Ronnie Cummins, Common Dreams
At the recent regional Summit on Migrants and Returnees in Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala, October 20-21, a new and promising solution to the global “immigration crisis” emerged: the creation of local, grassroots-powered economic development projects based on regenerative food, farming and land-use practices. Regenerative food and farming is the new gold standard for climate and environmentally friendly agriculture and land use across the world.
By Andrea F. Schuman, UNRISD
Surely emphasis on increasing well-being should prevail over creation of investment opportunities that bring negative externalities and few benefits to the municipality. Other worlds are possible, and responsive policy making would be a chance to shape those possibilities.
By Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity
We call this regenerative mentoring. There's a mentoring process to this where you’re either in a peacemaking relationship or you’re mentoring towards that. Some people don’t feel like they have a connection to others, and so you have to really give them some surplus -- you have to get them on board and bring them into the game again.
By Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity
Cultural capital is rooted in society's values and traditions. Sadly, over the past few generations in the West, we have departed from the time-honored (and honed) customs and rituals of our ancestors, and adopted a much more "it's all about me" approach to life.
By Clifford Dean Scholz, Green Hand Initiative
Likewise, it looks to me like Standing Rock has devolved into an attempt on the part of big business to exterminate a particular kind of consciousness, demoralize it, demonstrate its weakness, and win recruits to a less feeling way of existing in the service of these business entities and the governmental agencies they have co-opted.
By David Bollier, Patterns of Commoning
Drive an hour northeast from Cusco, Peru, and you will encounter some beautiful high mountain lakes, historic Inca ruins, and the richest diversity of potatoes on the planet.
By Alix Wall, Civil Eats
The Native American tribes that live in the region adjacent to the Klamath River, which flows from Southern Oregon into the northern part of California, once subsisted sustainably off the land.