Co-authored by Tory Field, Part 15 of the Harvesting Justice series

The Food Chain Workers Alliance has a goal of nothing less than full rights and fair wages for the 20 million workers who grow, harvest, process, pack, ship, cook, serve, and sell food in the US. Founded in...

Co-written by Tory Field

Part 14 of the Harvesting Justice series

As Wendy's shareholders convene their annual meeting in New York, farmworkers from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) are calling on the remaining, hold-out, major fast food corporation to commit to workers' rights and fair wages. On Saturday, May...

Co-authored by Tory Field

Part 13 of the Harvesting Justice series

For decades, farmworkers -- the more than one million men and women who work in fields and orchards around the country -- have been leading a struggle for justice in our food system. They have been building...

From the school cafeteria to rural tomato farms, and all the way to pickets at the White House, people are challenging the ways in which government programs benefit big agribusiness to the detriment of small- and mid-sized farmers. Urban gardeners, PTA parents, ranchers, food coops, and a host of...

"The only way we're going to... change the most basic attitude of policy-makers... is for you and me to become the policy-makers, taking charge of every aspect of our food system - from farm to fork," said Jim Hightower, the former agriculture commissioner of Texas.[i]

The need for us to...

Part 10 of the Harvesting Justice series

Heather Retberg stood on the steps of the Blue Hill, Maine, town hall surrounded by 200 people. "We are farmers," she told the crowd, "who are supported by our friends and our neighbors who know us and trust us, and want to ensure...

Inside the USAID-headquarters-turned-courthouse in Port-au-Prince, the case against former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was being heard, in a trial unlikely to bring justice to the hundreds of thousands killed and tortured by him and his father François.

Vexed by the circus show of judges and defense lawyers, I fled...

Co-authored by Tory Field

Just outside of the small town of Maumelle, Arkansas sits your run-of-the-mill American strip mall. And as in so many other box store hubs, a Walmart dominates the landscape.

But something is a shade different about this one; its big, looming letters are not the standard...

Co-authored by Tory Field

"We are the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. And reclaiming the democratic control over our food and water and our ecological survival is the necessary project for our freedom." -- Vandana Shiva, physicist and activist

The objective of much...

Three years after the deadly earthquake in Haiti, what has become of the commitments made on Red Cross billboards, the promises from telethon hosts, the moving declarations of Presidents Obama and Clinton? What has happened to the nearly $10 billion that was pledged to assist survivors and to rebuild, most...

A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism - the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color - manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and...

On this International Women's Day, we rerun a 2005 piece on one of our greatest heroines, Marie Simone Alexandre. Though she died eight years ago, her life and message remain as powerful and inspirational today as any we know.

"It was thanks to God and Sister Simone."...

Part 3 of the Harvesting Justice Series
Co-authored by Tory Field

Agricultural economist Peter Rosset is with the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico and the Land Research Action Network. He is also a member of the technical support team of Via Campesina. Beverly Bell talked...

Co-authored by Tory Field

The first group of protestors at Occupy Wall Street publically delivered 23 complaints, outlining the ways in which corporations control our daily lives. Number four asserted, "They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the farming system through monopolization."

How we feed...

Co-authored by Tory Field

"Over a half-century ago, Mahatma Gandhi led a multitude of Indians to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British Empire's monopoly on this resource critical to people's diet. The action catalyzed the fragmented movement for Indian independence and was the beginning of the...

In New Mexico, I drove into the thick haze of a forest fire. Across a long line of mountains, red flames flicked up like snake's tongues amongst dense black ropes of smoke. Where the blaze had worn down, thinner smoke wisps arose above charred, black land.

One...

While all eyes and ears are trained on the elections, Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this year, offers up another perspective on politics. In his poem "This Is Our Country," he wrote, "I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it was because I knew the...

Zero waste is both a goal and a plan of action. The goal is to protect and recover scarce natural resources by ending waste disposal in incinerators, dumps, and landfills. The plan encompasses waste reduction, composting, recycling and reuse, changes in consumption habits, and industrial redesign. The premise is that...

Co-written by Lauren Elliott

"At this very moment we have advanced our struggle. We succeeded in breaking the gate of shame in Vallecito!" wrote Miriam Miranda on September 13 in the latest communiqué from the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), a human rights organization...

Housing activist Reyneld Sanon is beginning a tour of key cities in the United States. The tour will raise awareness about Under Tents, the international campaign for housing rights in Haiti. The campaign is a joint initiative of Haitian grassroots groups and more than 30 international organizations that...