Filming Haiti’s Food Crisis and Grassroots Movement for Sustainable Agriculture (VIDEO)

By Joshua Levin on July 21, 2010

When I volunteered in Haiti after the earthquake, it was glaringly obvious that we were standing in the midst of a failed food system that had been collapsing for decades. Natural disasters strike annually all over the world. Yet Haiti’s post-quake humanitarian crisis is the ultimate test case of the dangers of food dependence and an urban-factory based development model. To truly get at the heart of how food affects the most vulnerable people and environments around the world, you must understand the Haitian story. Read more

Five Questions Monsanto Needs to Answer about its Seed Donation to Haiti

By Timi Gerson on May 17, 2010

Monsanto has donated $4 million in seeds to Haiti, sending 60 tons of conventional hybrid corn and vegetable seed, followed by 70 more tons of corn seed last week with an additional 345 tons of corn seed to come during the next year. Yet the number one recommendation of a recent report by Catholic Relief Services on post-earthquake Haiti is to focus on local seed fairs and not to introduce new or “improved” varieties at this time.

Some tough questions need to be asked and answered before we’ll know whether or not Monsanto’s donation will help or hurt long-term efforts to rebuild food sufficiency and sovereignty in Haiti. Here are five of them: Read more

Haiti: The Aid Masquerade

By Kerry Trueman on January 15, 2010

The horror in Haiti is beyond anything we can imagine in the U.S., but this apocalyptic catastrophe has something in common with Hurricane Katrina; in both cases, a terrible natural disaster was made infinitely worse by human negligence and incompetence. How many thousands of Haitians could have survived the earthquake if the country weren’t crippled by chronic poverty, shoddy infrastructure, environmental degradation and a host of other ills that have plagued Haiti for centuries? Read more