Ecological Commons

| |

Securing Common Property Regimes

There's an interesting amiguity that I struggled with when reading this report and it turns on the phrase "Collective Action."

This report was released by the International Land Coalition (ILC) in partnership with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)'s System-wide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRI) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). While I can't find anything amiss about the ILC -- in fact, their principles, mandate, and members are impressive -- the CGIAR and FAO leave something to be desired in terms of their ties to transnational agribusiness, and in the case of the former, in terms of its place at the WB as well as its historical agenda of promoting the Green Revolution in the Global South.

| | |

Territory, Autonomy, and Defending Maize

corn and machete

Originally published in GRAIN, Seedling, January 2005 (http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=315)

Aldo Gonzalez is an indigenous person from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where community organisations are leading a major resistance movement against the contamination of native maize by transgenic seeds. The movement is guided by the ancestral relationships between people and their natural surroundings. Politically, the resistance movement is linked to the struggle for autonomy by and for local communities, and is rooted in a particular indigenous vision of the world. In Oaxaca and in other Mexican states, defending maize is a cornerstone of defending a community’s autonomy.

Syndicate content