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| Volume 3, Issue 21 -- October 27, 2006 |
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From the JPIC Office Through the blessing of the arrival of our daughter, who is now seven weeks old, my mind and heart turn to reflect on the miracle and sacredness of life. In the Spanish language, the expression for giving birth is dar a luz or “to give light to.” What a powerfully spiritual image of moving from darkness into light and the pain and uncertainty that connect the two. For me this image is compounded by the fact that literally our labor began in the darkest hours of night under a full moon and ended at the break of dawn with our daughter’s cries heard for the first time to the rise of a beautiful sun. But I ask myself, has my daughter really come into the light, or is she in some way just beginning her journey into the darkness of life? Will I not spend the rest of my life trying not only to give her the best possible life I can, but also to protect her from the hurt and pain that inevitably finds us throughout life? Perhaps this is why for the past seven weeks I have thought little about the injustices, big and small, that scar our world every day. I have chosen to block them out, but not so much as an attempt to protect my daughter, for certainly she is oblivious to anything but her most basic needs for food, clothing, shelter and love. Instead, I have chosen to “disconnect” for a while as a way to share in my daughter’s innocence. And I find that it is all too easy to stay in my small world and forget about the pain and suffering of so many other people around the world. This Sunday at Mass, the day before I returned to work, the opening hymn was “We are Called.” Here are the lyrics:
I was comforted by this song as I prepared to go back to work. I was reminded that part of what it means to give the best life I can to my daughter and son is to “act with justice, love tenderly, serve one another, and walk humbly with God.” I was reminded that until we are all united in peace and justice, there can be no freedom for any of us. I realized I would be doing a disservice to my children if I tried to shield them entirely from the injustices of the world. As part of the Catholic Church, they too are called to live fully in this world, which means to live in solidarity with those less fortunate and work for justice and peace when they can. While they are too young to understand what this means now, it is my responsibility to lead by example. So, as I write this piece, and return to my responsibilities in the office, I am reminded that this work is not one that can be turned off and on like a light switch, but that it is a calling, and that it is mission, one that I must share with my children. And while it would be easy to live blind to the darkness of the world, we are called to be light for the kingdom and to shine with joy and love of the Lord. I asked at the beginning of this reflection whether or not my daughter is in some ways just beginning her journey into the darkness. On second thought, I believe that with God’s grace, she has just been “given to the light.”
Message from the Border
Border Social Forum Builds Cross-Border Links
By Kent Paterson In response to a call that “another world is possible without borders” about 1,000 people gathered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, from October 12-15, 2006. Hailing from Mexico, the United States and other nations, representatives from immigrant rights, environmental justice, campesino, ex-bracero, Chicano, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific Islander, left, and human rights organizations attended the first-ever Border Social Forum (BSF). Helping kick off the BSF was a “reality tour” of Ciudad Juárez neighborhoods and industrial sites. Former maquiladora plant worker and tour guide Veronica Leyva of the Mexico Solidarity Network led two busloads of visitors through the dusty and flood-prone streets of the Felipe Angeles, Anapra and Lomas de Poleo colonias. Situated in the high desert where company buses transport workers back and forth to the factories far below in the city, Lomas de Poleo is the focus of a land ownership dispute between long-time residents and members of the prominent Pedro Fuentes Zaragoza family. The once-marginal shantytown is now a potentially lucrative parcel of real estate abutting the zone where the state governments of Chihuahua and New Mexico plan the new bi-national border city of San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa. Monitored by two guard towers that rise above the desert shrub, as well as the vigilance of two municipal policemen parked in patrol cars nearby, dozens of visitors listened to two residents accuse authorities of permitting a campaign of violence and intimidation against them to proceed unimpeded. Residents charge that the land conflict is behind house burnings and three deaths in Lomas de Poleo during the last two years, including the deaths of two young children in a mysterious fire. Displaying gunshot wounds, one young man said his friend, Luis Alberto Guerrero, was killed and another companion wounded in a confrontation last year with alleged Zaragoza gunmen. “The people who were responsible for this act are roaming free,” he charged. “The law doesn’t do anything.” In the 1990s, Lomas de Poleo gained international notoriety as one of the clandestine cemeteries where the multiple bodies of young female murder victims were discovered. Of the eight crosses erected in honor of the murder victims, only two were visible by the time of the 2006 BSF. One of the remaining crosses was defaced by gang-related graffiti. Convened just weeks after summer flooding provoked widespread destruction in Ciudad Juárez, the BSF featured one session in which residents of the Luis Olague colonia and other poor neighborhoods reiterated their complaints about uncertain relocation plans, the theft of flood relief aid, inadequate official support for reconstruction, and the spending of public money on monuments instead of flood control. Some explained how they now suffer anxiety attacks every time the skies thunder and the rain starts dropping.
Action Plans Denouncing border walls from the U.S.-Mexico frontier to Palestine-Israel, Border Social Forum attendees expressed solidarity with the Oaxaca strikers, Pasta de Conchos mine disaster victims’ families, ex-braceros, and five Cuban prisoners currently held in the United States. They also called for an international group of observers to be present at Ciudad Juárez’s embattled Lomas de Poleo colonia in order to “guarantee protection and security” for residents. Organizers of the BSF came from many different groups in Mexico and the United States. Modeled after the World Social Forum initiated in Porte Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, the BSF is a prelude to the first U.S. Social Forum scheduled for 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people have attended the world and regional social forums. Veterans of the Ciudad Juárez gathering plan to take their movement to upcoming regional and international social forums, as well as to other events like the 2007 Border Governor’s Conference in Nogales, Sonora, where an “alternative border people’s summit” will be held. The above is an abridged version of the report-back from the Border Social Forum by Kent Paterson, editor of Frontera NorteSur. To read the full report, please visit www.december18.net/web/papers/view.php?paperID=4521&menuID=41&lang=EN Climate Change
Climate Change: The Cost of Inaction “The climate system has enormous momentum, as does the economic system that emits so much carbon dioxide,” said coauthor Frank Ackerman, an economist with Tufts University’s Global Development and the Environment Institute. “We have to start turning off greenhouse gas emissions now in order to avoid catastrophe in decades to come.” The authors contend the true costs of climate change are incalculable, but argue that relatively small amounts of money are needed to keep temperatures in check. Action to limit temperature increases to two degrees centigrade could avoid $12 trillion in annual damages at a quarter of the cost, the report said. “The world, as a whole, can just barely, cope with the impacts of the first 2 degrees of warming, but only if there are immediate, large-scale, and creative approaches to international equity and cooperation,” the report said. Global temperatures have already risen by 0.6 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. If emissions continue to rise unchecked global temperatures could increase by more than 4 degrees centigrade by 2100. The world is very likely to hit a 2-degree increase without rapid action, the report said, with an array of costly environmental impacts—including decreased crop yields in the developing world, as well as from widespread drought and water shortages. Other impacts include a near total loss of coral reefs, the expanded northward spread of tropical diseases such as malaria, and the potential extinction of arctic species including the polar bear. The report, “Climate Change the Costs of Inaction,” was compiled by economists at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute. The study brings together the very latest scientific and economic thinking on climate change. “This report demonstrates that climate change will not only be an environmental and social disaster: it will also be an economic catastrophe, especially if global temperatures are allowed to increase by more than two degrees centigrade,” said Elizabeth Blast of Friends of the Earth, which commissioned the report. The study warns that a 3-degree temperature increase will have further impacts on world food supplies, spread diseases and potentially cause the wholesale collapse of the Amazon River ecosystem as well as the complete loss of all boreal and alpine ecosystems. If temperatures rise 4 degrees by century’s end, sea levels will rise five to six meters, the report said, putting vast tracks of land underwater and producing millions of environmental refugees. Elsewhere entire regions will have no agricultural production whatsoever as a result of the changing climate. A temperature increase of more than 4 degrees, the report said, will bring a 50 percent chance that the ocean’s circulation system will shut down, removing the crucial currents that warm and stabilize the climate of Northern Europe. For more information, and to access the report “Climate Change: The Cost of Inaction,” please visit www.foe.org/new/releases/october2006/climatechange10132006.html Migration Agri-Food Industry’s Deadly Cycle Feeds Immigration
Americas Program, International Relations Center Just weeks before the elections, Congress is unable to agree on legislation regarding the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. Legislators are at loggerheads over such disparate proposals as conditional legalization, guest-worker programs and massive deportations. In a sad testimony to the lack of bipartisan leadership, the only thing Congress has authorized this year is the construction of a $2.2 billion, 700-mile fence on the Mexican border.
Remarkably, not one single U.S. lawmaker has addressed why an estimated 1.1 million people cross the border every year looking for work. This omission allows our politicians to divert public attention away from the way U.S. policies cause massive migrations. When the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs in the 1980s, government loans, marketing programs, and agricultural extension services disappeared overnight. Then the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its Central American cousin, CAFTA, flooded local grain markets with cheap corn, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and sold below cost of production. The region’s peasant farmers struggled, squeezing out every last ounce of family labor to compete in the so-called free market. Debts piled up. When droughts or hurricanes hit—as they frequently do in the tropics—the Green Revolution hybrids withered and died. In Mexico from 1994-2004, 1.3 million smallholders went bust. Abandoned by their governments, run over by the Green Revolution, broke, hungry, and exhausted, they joined the ranks of the dispossessed. Desperate to feed their families, dreaming of a better life, small farmers send their able-bodied family members to the United States to look for work. There their sons and daughters find jobs in poisonous fields harvesting vegetables, in deadly industrial slaughterhouses, and in grueling food-processing plants. The U.S. Farm Bureau estimates that immigrant labor adds up to $9 billion of the nation’s $200 billion annual agricultural output. Because they are undocumented, migrant farm workers are forced to sell their labor cheaply and receive no health or insurance benefits. This results in tremendous labor savings for an industry that already benefits substantially from agricultural subsidies. The agri-food chain depends on immigrant labor, and it requires migrants’ illegal status to realize its windfall profits. Immigrant working families make up a large portion of the 12 million food-insecure people in the United States who often do not know where their next meal is coming from. They cannot afford to buy the fresh fruits, vegetables or meat they produce. In order to obtain the necessary calories for survival, like most low-income people in this country, they substitute protein, fresh vegetables, and fiber for sugars, fats, and starch by eating the cheap processed food sold by the agri-food industry. These diets are the primary cause of the obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes epidemics afflicting the nation’s poor. Not only do immigrants give up their land and their labor to the agri-food industry, they sacrifice their health as well. But the story does not end here. Immigrants send an estimated $27 billion a year in remittances to their families. Remittances are the second largest source of income in Mexico and the largest contributor to GNP in Central America. Without these remittances, the economies of those countries and the markets for U.S.-based agri-food products would crash. The tragic irony is that the lion’s share of remittances is spent on processed food packed with high-calorie corn syrup, produced and distributed by the agri-food industry. The impact on the health and family economy of immigrant families is devastating. The vicious cycle of dispossession, appropriation, and substitution is complete. With help from the Green Revolution, U.S. economic policies, and subsidies from the U.S. taxpayer, the agri-food industry profits from every step of the immigrant dream. Eric Holt-Gimenez ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California (www.foodfirst.org). He is author of Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture and an analyst for the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org). Economic Justice On World Food Day 2006, 852 million lack adequate food. Access to food, and enough food to lead a healthy, active life, is a basic human right. In recognizing World Food Day on October 16, the anniversary of the establishment of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), several new reports were released documenting the extent of hunger in the world, and demonstrating the negative impacts neoliberal economic reforms have on food security. The statistics are shocking. Millions of people die each year due to hunger-related causes, including 6 million children. According to the FAO, 852 million people lack adequate food. Yet, FAO studies demonstrate that there is more than enough food in the world to adequately feed the existing population, while emergency food aid reached record-setting levels in the Sahel region of Africa last year. Why, then, so much hunger still? The problem is not a lack of food production, but rather a question of access to and use of food supplies. A large portion of food being produced is fed to livestock, while many people simply cannot afford food. Seventy percent of those suffering from hunger worldwide live in rural areas and have traditionally been able to support themselves through agriculture. But free-market reforms mandated by trade agreements and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), restructure markets to favor large agri-business exporters, while opening local markets to competition from subsidized goods from the United States and Europe. Small-scale farmers simply cannot compete, and are driven out of production and pushed off their lands. One year ago, more than a quarter of Niger’s population, in the Sahel region of Africa, was starving. The famine was blamed on drought and locusts. However a new study by the Oakland Institute shows that agricultural production was only moderately affected. In fact, Niger was exporting foodstuffs during the crisis. However, structural adjustment policies dictated by the IMF and World Bank drove the cost of basic grains beyond what most of the population could afford, such that the price of millet on the local market was higher than the price of rice in American supermarkets, according to the Oakland Institute. At the same time, Niger had been forced to abandon grain reserves saved for years of lean harvests, creating the conditions for a “free-market famine.” (Read the report at www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/379). The Oakland Institute report on the famine in Niger is a window to what is happening in terms of food distribution in many other countries, where land is concentrated in the hands of large agribusiness firms and markets are structured for export. Such countries have been prevented by international financial institutions from implementing economic and trade policies that would support local, small-scale producers, who form the basis of food security. According to Laura Carlsen, of the International Relations Center’s Americas Program, free market policies that prioritize profits over people ignore “both the plight and potential of small farmers. Without protecting their livelihoods, they will remain in poverty and constitute the ranks of the hungry. Without recognizing the contributions they make to society—not only in food production but also in ecosystem conservation, social cohesion, traditional knowledge, and cultural diversity—we stand to lose irredeemable public goods.” For more information, please visit www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35177 Action Alerts There is a growing crisis in our nation’s fields, where farmworkers work under grueling conditions for sub-poverty wages. The Student-Farmworker Alliance has declared October 27-28 as national days of action in support of fair wages and decent working conditions for farmworkers. In coordination with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization of farmworkers that promotes their fair and just treatment, activists are calling on McDonald’s Restaurants to require higher wages, improved working conditions and an enforceable code of conduct from their growers. (For more information, please visit CIW’s website at www.ciw-online.org). According to a letter sent by Bishop Nicolas DiMarzio, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Domestic Policy Committee, to the McDonald’s CEO, “McDonald’s and other major food companies do not directly set farm workers’ wages and working conditions. But with your substantial purchasing power, you can insist that your produce suppliers meet high ethical standards in how they treat their workers. Farm workers should participate in setting and monitoring those standards, as workers know best the conditions to be remedied. In the ‘Responsible Purchasing’ statement on its website, McDonald’s states ‘we know we can work with our suppliers to help improve their practices and set an example for other companies.’ I urge you to apply that standard to how your produce suppliers treat farm workers. Given the competitiveness of global produce markets and the significance that your company’s business constitutes for any individual grower, I hope that you will agree that McDonald’s is in a position to require and enable suppliers to meet the standards you set.” Support CIW’s struggle for fair wages and decent working conditions by sending a letter to McDonald’s: www.allianceforfairfood.org/index.html Contact Us
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