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For Immediate Release
Contact:

Joao Da Silva, Outreach Coordinator
(646) 613 1440 ext. 203
joao@nacla.org

New NACLA Report Examines the Causes and Consequences of the Food Crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean

In response to the mainstream media's short-lived and sometimes superficial coverage of rising food prices, the May/June 2009 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas aims to reconsider the ongoing food crisis within its long-term context, focusing on the corporate monopoly on food production.

Key pieces in this Report, which can be accessed both in the print edition as well as at https://nacla.org, include:

NEW YORK

In response to the mainstream media's short-lived and sometimes superficial coverage of rising food prices, the May/June 2009 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas aims to reconsider the ongoing food crisis within its long-term context, focusing on the corporate monopoly on food production.

Key pieces in this Report, which can be accessed both in the print edition as well as at https://nacla.org, include:

"Food Sovereignty in Latin America: Confronting the 'New' Crisis" by Peter Rosset
The sudden crisis of high food prices in 2008 was the latest manifestation of a long-standing rural crisis that stems from the corporate takeover of agriculture. As we enter a new era of increasingly volatile commodity prices, food sovereignty offers the only comprehensive solution.

"Voices From Maputo: La Via Campesina's Fifth International Conference" by Annette Aurelie Desmarais and Luis Hernandez Navarro
More than 500 delegates attended the fifth conference of La Via Campesina, the transnational peasant movement, in October. High on the agenda was analyzing the food crisis, as well as codifying a statement on women's participation in the movement and denouncing sexist violence.

"Is Biotechnology the Answer? The Evidence From NAFTA" by Gerardo Otero and Gabriela Pechlaner
While biotechnology industry boosters would have us believe that more transgenic crops are what we need to solve the food crisis, the evidence of their effects on food consumption in North America offers little hope.

"Eating to Dream: A Tortilleria in Oaxaca" by Deborah Poole and Benjamin Alonso Rascon
Ramirez Leyva, a Mixtec restaurant owner in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, calls for a profound rethinking of the market-based models of profit and trade that lie at the heart of capitalist understandings of food policy.

"Soy: A Hunger for Land" by Evan Abramson
In this photo essay, small-scale farmers in the Paraguayan departments of Alto Parana and San Pedro face off with industrial soy over access to land. Large-scale Paraguayan landowners have, with government collusion, displaced thousands of families in the last decade for their sprawling soy plantations.

In addition, this issue includes pieces on the Venezuelan opposition, the World Social Forum, the strike in Guadeloupe, the mainstream media's coverage of Bolivia.

NACLA Report on the Americas has been published for the last 42 years by the North American Congress on Latin America, an independent nonprofit institution dedicated to analyzing political, social, and economic trends in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as U.S. policy in the region.

Editor Pablo Morales and Report authors available for media interviews.
Contact Joao Da Silva, Outreach Coordinator, at (646) 613 1440 ext. 203 or joao@nacla.org.

For more information about NACLA, visit https://nacla.org