Fair Trade & Social Justice
OCA's New Fair World Project
The Organic Consumers Association launched the Fair World Project (FWP) in September 2010 to promote fair trade in commerce, especially in organic production systems in developing countries as well as at home, and to protect the term "fair trade" from dilution and misuse for mere PR purposes. FWP fills the critical need for a watchdog of misleading fair trade claims, and a cheerleader for dedicated fair trade mission-driven companies.
The U.S. and Canada Are Preparing for a New Standing Rock Over the Trans Mountain Tar Sands Pipeline
On May 29, the Canadian government announced that it would nationalize the Trans Mountain pipeline to assure the expansion would be built, putting up 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.5 billion) to acquire the pipeline and other assets from the Texas-based energy giant Kinder Morgan.
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“Genetically Modified Children,” a new one-hour documentary, exposes how Philip Morris and Monsanto have exploited generations of impoverished Argentinian farmers since 1996, when the Argentinian government authorized the use of genetically engineered crops to withstand the use of
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Thomas Burrell, a soybean grower for more than 50 years, noticed something was off last August, two months before harvest: The soybean pods planted in about 2,000 acres in the northern Mississippi Delta were flat and not maturing. But when he saw other soybean fields that used a more familiar seed variety, he said, they were vibrant and fuller.
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In the U.S., children under the age of 18 are legally barred from purchasing cigarettes or other tobacco products. But they are allowed to harvest tobacco on farms. Despite a worldwide decline in production, tobacco remains North Carolina’s most valuable crop. In 2017, the total value of tobacco produced in the state was just under $725 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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On July 1, leftist politician Andres Manuel López Obrador—often referred to with the acronymic AMLO—won the Mexican presidency in a landslide. When he takes office in December, with his party in control of both houses of the Mexican Congress, Mexico's drug policies are likely to see some radical changes.
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Reverend Brown of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore led a delegation of his members on a tour of Browntown Farms in Warfield, Virginia and the Coalition for Healthier Eating food hub in Bethel, North Carolina. For Brown, the founder of the Black Church Food Security Network, the day trip was a concrete step toward solidifying strong relationships between Black residents of East Coast cities and Black farmers in the rural south.
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Why do we cook? First, we cook to sustain ourselves and our families. But in the current culture of food-as-art-form, we also cook to express ourselves. Cooking may seem like an act of self-preservation, an act that is both self-serving and necessary, but if you look beyond the immediate and beyond the narrow definition of what cooking is, you can see that cooking is and has always been an act of resistance.
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In a unanimous decision, state regulators in Minnesota approved a controversial new pipeline that will increase the flow of tar sands crude oil from Canada to refineries in the United States. The long-anticipated ruling is a victory for Canadian pipeline owner Enbridge and a significant blow to environmental and Native American advocates who opposed the pipeline through northern Minnesota in a region rich in wetlands and wild rice lakes.
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On a small plot of land on the outskirts of Chicago, a farm collectively owned by gender-non-conforming immigrants will cultivate produce and a younger generation of food justice activists. That’s the vision that Viviana Moreno, Nadia Sol Ireri Unzueta Carrasco and Jazmín Martinez, organizers and farmers based in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, are working to turn into reality.
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The Associated Press revealed this month that Amazon — owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos — forced Seattle to repeal a newly enacted tax on corporations designed to help the city’s homeless population. To make matters worse, the widely respected monitoring organization China Labor Watch also blasted the company recently for horrendous working conditions in its supplier factories building Kindles and Echo speakers.
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