Good Food is Everybody's Business
Big agriculture is big business; too big, too distant, too reliant on the latest technology, and too focused on profit over good food. Expecting complex technology and genetic engineering to solve the problems of climate change, extreme weather patterns, water shortages, and dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, is not the answer. It is time to go back to the land, to restore our natural resource base and re-invest in our people.
Genet dreams of creating a cooperative with her Group Garden and diversifying the agriculture portfolio by adding animals and a possible dairy farm. “I don’t want my life to happen to my children. I want their life to be greater than mine,” she says.
Gohe Group Garden distributes over 40,000 seedlings for free to promote home gardens and win the hearts and minds of the community. After several years of considerable success with animal husbandry, the city rewarded Gohe—the city’s only HIV support association—with a honey filtration system to begin bee keeping and open a new stream of income for members.
Corporations, governments, even universities are enclosing indigenous territories. For the past two years we have been tracking the voracious land grab that is unfolding across much of the two-thirds world including Africa, Asia, and South America. These new enclosures are a destructive force associated with the plague of globalization and its marshaling and disciplining rationale of neoliberalism with its panacea of free trade and privatization.
Water is scarce in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. There is little difference between the dry and wet seasons, common in the tropics and the rest of Ethiopia. Usually by January, Tigray’s many villages dry up and become nests of desperation while families as well as the farmers depend on a series of small streams and wells.
Hispanics suffer more hunger than any other group in the US and on June 2, 2012, a group of over 100 gathered in Eugene, Oregon to celebrate services that have helped Hispanic families feed themselves. University of Oregon graduate student Chris Roddy and filmmaker, highlights three projects of Huerto de la Familia/The Family Garden: organic family gardens, the Small Farmers Project, and the Micro Enterprise Project.
Sometimes when Samson Aberra is working in the garden, planting seedlings or replenishing his nursery, onlookers gather to watch him toil. What they don’t know is that Samson Aberra is not “toiling” — he’s barely working. In fact, he is doing what he loves: gardening. Samson’s garden lies next to the main highway running through the Ethiopian highland town of Dessie, located in the northeast of the country. The garden forms a triangle between the main road and a contaminated stream that meanders through the city in its journey to the low lying plains below.
When 29-year-old China Dessale approached the Wain Hotel where she used to work as a commercial sex worker, carrying a basket teeming with cabbage, carrots, lettuce and eggs, the hotel owner couldn’t believe his eyes. He remembered China when she was 15 years old. In desperation, China had joined the same hotel to make a livelihood in Ethiopia’s risky commercial sex worker industry.
