The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Maude Barlow -
Recently, I had the honour of speaking at a fundraiser for the victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa, organized by local health-care providers Dr. Farook Hossenbux and his nurse and partner Geri Hossenbux. Speakers included a representative from Doctors Without Borders, local groups raising money for the cause and local artists. Several mentioned the phenomenon of "donor fatigue" in this case and puzzled about why it was so hard to raise money for a crisis threatening as many...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa's agricultural landscape remains essentially unchanged. Landed white farmers pursue an industrial farming model that relies on high external inputs. Farm ownership patterns have changed little, despite continual promises. Food security remains unresolved. Significant sectors of our people, particularly women and children, remain under or malnourished. To top it off, the ecological impacts of our farming – soil erosion, high water use and abstraction, overuse of chemicals,...
Saliem Fakir -
Land reform in South Africa is back as a lead item on the government’s agenda. It is a tacit admission that the process over the last seventeen years was a failure. The issue must also be seen in the light of growing food insecurity, as food prices seem to only go up rather than down.
South Africa’s land reform policy is not only a way to redress past loss but also an attempt to diversify farming as mainly white farmers dominate farming. However, in opening up the space...
Glenn Ashton -
Rooibos is as uniquely South African as Champagne is French and Parmesan Italian. It should be one of our roaring success stories while providing a platform for the upliftment of its traditional owners, the indigenous people who introduced it to the colonialists from its home range of the Cederberg Mountains. But while the Rooibos market has grown over the years, indigenous emerging farmers remain largely marginalised and have yet to reap their just rewards.
Under apartheid a Rooibos tea...
Glenn Ashton -
South African agricultural policy is obsessed with market driven agricultural models while disproportionately high numbers of our people remain hungry. This is a hangover from our historical legacy, which continues in the form of internal and external neo-liberal pressures on government to conform to the tyranny of the market.
Sure, lip service has been paid to evolving small farmers and pursuing food security. In 1992 a policy called the Integrated Food Security Strategy was...
Stephen Greenberg -
An important question facing humanity at present is how to ensure enough food is produced so that everyone has enough. There is a distribution issue that is unresolved in a capitalist system: the market distributes, and those without the resources to participate in the market are excluded. This produces the reality of obesity in some countries side by side with starvation in others, and surplus production that goes to waste or is fed to animals, side by side with food deficits in other...
