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.
After the US Civil War, newly emancipated Black growers won a share of the agricultural landscape. They did so despite fierce backlash and the ultimately failed promises of Reconstruction. By the 1910s, around 200,000 Black farmers owned an estimated 20 million acres of land, mostly in the South.
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"World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050" is a major report predicting global agricultural trends (Alexandratos & Bruinsma, 2012). It was produced by the economics division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In its abstract the FAO authors make a prominent disclaimer. Its projections, they stress (both on p. i and p. 7), are not to be used for normative purposes; that is, their report is not a prescription of how the global food system should develop.
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Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.
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"I say to the Walton family: Get off welfare," declared Sen. Bernie Sanders in response to the government study he commissioned. "Pay your workers a living wage—at least $15 an hour."
Pinpointing a reality denounced as "morally obscene" by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a new government study shows how some of the nation's largest and most
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It took them 20 minutes to reach their goal. The campaign ultimately raised nearly $55,000. Tepirah Rushdan was talking to her best friend about how they could help Black people in Detroit own the land where they farmed, and they just decided to go for it. The two urban farmers decided to create a GoFundMe to raise $5,000 to do that.
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After 33 years in Okanogan County, Wash., there is nowhere else Lael Duncan would want to be — considering the Okanogan River, which churns with salmon in the fall; the rare mix of forest and highland desert; and the jagged peaks of the North Cascades Mountains, often referred to as the Alps of North America.
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In 2013, when Enviva Biomass opened a new plant near Belinda Joyner's community in Northampton County, North Carolina, she already knew what to expect. As the Northeast Organizer for Clean Water for North Carolina, she'd met with residents of a small, majority Black town called Ahoskie, 40 miles from her home. Enviva had built its first North Carolina plant there two years before.
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Amrita Gupta is the communications lead for the Agroecology Fund and Daniel Moss is its executive director. Anna Lappé directs the food and democracy program of the Panta Rhea Foundation and is a member of the fund.
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Climate change has joined racism, sexism, and related aggressions in creating a new dynamic demanding redress of America’s inequalities and defining its divisions. On the Republican right, President Donald Trump’s constituencies pursue restoration of an idealized American “greatness” lionizing the superiority of nativist White, aged, wealthy, Christian, publicly avowed heterosexual men to exploit the environment at will.
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For family farmers like Hans Breitenmoser, the odds of catching COVID-19 on the job are slim. Social distancing is not exactly a challenge when you’re farming more than 1,300 acres in rural Wisconsin. But Breitenmoser is one of many Wisconsin farmers who are showing solidarity with others in the food supply chain who are at the pandemic’s epicenter — meatpackers and food processing plant employees.
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