Food Sovereignty and Sustainability

Agroextractivist José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo were murdered on May 23 in Nova Ipixuna in the southeast of Pará. The couple had been threatened by loggers in the region. The information was confirmed by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) of Maraba. Both were leaving the Praia Alta Piranheira Agroextractivist Settlement Project where they lived en route to the town center when they were trapped on a bridge and shot.

The Kaiowá Guarani indigenous group retook part of their traditional lands last Friday (13). They occupied a small section of the Laranjeira Nhanderu area in Rio Brilhante (Mato Grosso do Sul), from where they have been expelled for almost two years

By Valéria Nader
From this point forward, the agribusiness 'shock troops' can now count on the support of one of the most powerful speakers with the widest visibility and circulation in the country, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

By Vinicius Mansur

The "Permanent Campaign against Pesticides and Life" will be launched by the movements of rural workers and environmentalists on the World Health Day, Thursday, April 7, 2011.

The women of Via Campesina held a National Day of Women’s Struggle in light of March 8 - International Women’s Day – to denounce the extreme gravity of the situation in the Brazilian countryside.

Magali Moser's Blog
Santa Catarina

Throughout Brazil, the women of Via Campesina triggered the Day of Struggles of Women to condemn the excessive use of pesticides by Brazilian cultivation, the responsibility of the agribusiness production model.

To date, six states are mobilized to denounce the harmful effects on health and the environment of the annual use of over a billion liters of poisons, according to data from the National Association of Industrial Products for Agricultural Defense.

Brazil ranks first in the list of countries consuming pesticides since 2009.

Women workers from the countryside and the city this year again are carrying out national days of struggle around the 8th of March – International Women’s Day.

Earlier on Tuesday (March 1), about 800 women occupied the courtyard of Braskem, Odebrecht Group1 in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre.

The action is organized by the women of Via Campesina, Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD), the Youth and Inter-Union Mobilization and integrates the national day of women's struggles.

Written by Ronildo Brito