Almost a century after the first declaration of the universal rights of children, Gaza is witnessing infants dying in numbers unseen since the Second World War — a failure which betrays the weaknesses of the original declaration itself. For the last two months, I’ve been witnessing a genocide unfolding on my phone, above the heads of my sleeping children. Two nights…

June 13, 2024 For a moment it looked like the COVID-19 pandemic would be the event that would change the world. Or, at least, enough things would be different so that we could see the start of something new and, why not, better. But the global response to the pandemic will not be remembered as an example of how to…

The country’s political disintegration offers a glimpse into how Western democracies could fail. In Cape Town on 2 January 2022, a mysterious fire broke out in South Africa’s parliament. According to the subsequent testimony by Zandile Christmas Mafe, the man accused of torching the National Assembly, he said that he started the fire to prevent President Cyril Ramaphosa from delivering…

Defendendo a aliança preta, indígena e popular, a Teia dos Povos transforma a luta por terra e território no centro de um projeto revolucionário que se propõe a encarar a emergência climática com propostas concretas e práticas inovadoras. A Teia dos Povos é uma articulação de comunidades que aproxima movimentos sociais organizados em territórios para criar e fortalecer laços de solidariedade entre…

Since 2019, two separate political processes developed simultaneously in Sudan: one at the state level and the other at the grassroots. Today’s war originates in the predominance of the former over the latter. For the past few months, the news coming out of Khartoum resembles the coverage from almost 20 years ago when war first broke out in Darfur. The…

A premise which has its roots in traditional knowledge and ecological principles, some people may find the term agroecology mysterious or esoteric. However, far from being an abstract concept, agroecology can be a lifeline for long-lasting food systems, providing a route that links the welfare of people with the health of the land. Agroecology is not just about farming and…

Food production and consumption are, by their very nature, internationalist concerns. Economic stability, political relations, the social reproduction of labour, and health care are not determined solely within a nation’s borders. The interconnectedness of food requires a careful internationalist strategy for re-thinking and the coordination of access to, and distribution of food as well as what humanity should be eating…

The early stretch of the 21st century has been partly defined by recurring food crises, food price volatility, and uncertainty over agricultural production and distribution. Much of the world over the past two decades has seen acute agricultural crises, both in terms of food security and the certainty of farmers’ livelihoods. The age of hyper-globalisation was supposed to precisely address…

Historically and still today, imperialism has had, and continues to have, devastating effects on global agriculture. This is particularly evident in Iraq, which has suffered the consequences of a modern war as well as the long, slower burn, of imperial colonisation. Therefore, although the effects of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq have been catastrophic, the USA is not the…

Interview with Karel Swart from the South African agricultural trade union CSAAWU. Introduction It is impossible to understand the agricultural sector in South Africa without taking into account the country’s long history of slavery, land-grabbing, and colonialism. Farmers in the Western Cape Province have exploited cheap Black and Coloured labour since the 17th century. Later, white farmers would represent an…

Let us begin by listing the crises. Today, there are currently 120 armed conflicts ongoing around the world. In many cases the devastation wrought by these conflicts is exacerbated by the increasingly existential threat of climate change. In Africa alone, at least 15,000 people died in 2023 as a direct result of extreme weather. Most individual states’ capacity to manage…

We are now in the midst of a major worldwide food crisis characterised by rising hunger in a context of increasing ecological fragility. This crisis in food must be considered as one part of a wider polycrisis, in which the climate emergency interlaces with an economic and debt crisis, a health crisis, and a geopolitical crisis. That these different crises…