"Against the grain".

Against the grain is a series of short opinion pieces on recent trends and developments in the issues that GRAIN works on. Each one focuses on a specific and timely topic.

A food system that kills - Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague (239 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: April 2009

Mexico is in the midst of a hellish repeat of Asia's bird flu experience, though on a more deadly scale. Once again, the official response from public authorities has come too late and bungled in cover-ups. And once again, the global meat industry is at the centre of the story, ramping up denials as the weight of evidence about its role grows. Just five years after the start of the H5N1 bird flu crisis, and after as many years of a global strategy against influenza pandemics coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the world is now reeling from a swine flu disaster. The global strategy has failed and needs to be replaced with a public health system that the public can trust.

Rice land grabs undermine food sovereignty in Africa (51 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: January 2009

Mali, like several other countries in West Africa, recently went from being a net rice exporter to being a major importer. Now the government has embarked on a multimillion-dollar national rice initiative that is supposed to restore self-sufficiency by helping the country’s farmers to produce more.

Food exports and free trade agreements (46 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: October 2008

In FTAs little attention is paid to clauses like the following one: "... no Party may adopt or maintain any prohibition or restriction on the importation of any good of another Party or on the exportation or sale for export of any good destined for the territory of another Party...". In other words, governments know that they are renouncing their right to control food exports and imports when they sign FTAs.

Making a killing from hunger (104 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: April 2008

The world food crisis is hurting a lot of people, but global agribusiness firms, traders and speculators are raking in huge profits. The fundamental cause of today's food crisis is neoliberal globalisation itself, which has transformed food from a source of livelihood security into a mere commodity to be gambled away, even at the cost of widespread hunger among the world’s poorest people.

Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard (151 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: February 2008

The "Global Seed Vault" buried in a frozen island in Svalbard, Norway, is sadly the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant approach to crop diversity conservation. The Vault gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.