Full programme
Struggles for life: supporting people's movements on agriculture, food and biodiversity.
GRAIN's programme is called Struggles for life: supporting people's movements on agriculture, food and biodiversity.
It is divided into four areas of work:
- Biodiversity, corporations and the international food system
This programme area focuses on the increasing corporate control over biodiversity and the international food system. It involves research, information work, capacity sharing and movement building. It currently includes targeted work on food safety standards, the global food crisis, hybrid rice, bird flu, free trade agreements, multilateral agencies setting new rules for biodiversity management, trends in intellectual property affecting communities' control over biodiversity and local knowledge, and so on.
- Communities first: the fight for food sovereignty
Here we focus on supporting people's movements towards more biodiverse and socially just food and agricultural systems -- what is often referred to as food sovereignty. It involves monitoring, research, information work and especially movement building to support people-led policies and practices on the ground. Current activities include targeted work on capacity sharing with Via Campesina's Seeds Campaign, network building in Asia, Africa and Latin America, exchanging strategies to prevent and confront GM contamination, supporting grassroots approaches to seed saving and building common fronts of action among diverse sectors (agriculture, health, education, art, independent media, free software, libraries, indigenous peoples, etc) fighting intellectual monopoly regimes such as patents or copyright, to name a few.
- Cross-cutting information work and outreach
Under this heading we bring together all of GRAIN's general information activities and outreach. This includes the production of regular periodicals such as Seedling, Biodiversidad and Semences de la Biodiversitá, as well as occasional publications such as in-depth briefings or our Against the grain series. It also includes work to maintain and further develop GRAIN's website, produce multimedia outputs and improve our overall communications and outreach strategies. Translation work is a big part of this programme area as well. GRAIN regularly produces material in French, Spanish and English. But we are also translating more frequently into Portuguese and Mandarin, and increasingly into Hindi, Lao, Arabic and other languages.
- Programme and organisational development
This last cluster is about building GRAIN's internal resource base, learning with partners, monitoring and evaluating our work and programme building. This includes focused activities in terms of staff trainings, cross-visits and internships (work visits to each others' offices or staying with partners), programme evaluation and planning with our Board and partners, exploring new funding opportunities and enhacing GRAIN's horizontal and participatory management practices. Much of this learning and development is shared or done directly with partners.
