The World Development Movement and the Haiti Support Group will be giving a workshop entitled Food and the Multinational Takeover: The Global Fight for Food Sovereignty.
The event is to be held at the aptly named Empire Café, a space which allows visitors to explore Scotland’s relationship with the North Atlantic slave trade through coffee, sugar, tea, cotton, music, visual art, academic lectures, poetry, debate, workshops, historical walks, film and literature.
The Empire Café will be based in the Briggait (home of the Merchant’s Steeple) in Glasgow’s Merchant City from 24th July – 1st August 2014.
Additional activities on the day include a bustling marketplace by Glasgow Local Food Network where growers from across the city will be selling their produce, alongside workshops, talks and cookery demonstrations.
Workshop Details:
The UK government and agribusiness corporations are trying to take control of Africa’s food. Come and learn about the World Development Movement’s campaign to stop UK aid money being used to help corporations slice up African agriculture – something African civil society is calling ‘the new colonialism.
For our case study, we turn to the Caribbean and learn from the Haiti Support Group how attempts by foreign governments and international donors to open up Haitian markets for western businesses and agro-industrial corporations led to the implementation of disastrous policies on agriculture with dire consequences for Haitian civil society. A lack of investment in small scale farming and the slashing of tariffs on foodstuffs has meant that in just thirty years Haiti has become the third hungriest nation in the world (according to the Global Hunger Index) where 57% of the population is now undernourished and Haitian farmers are now struggling to survive.
There is a solution to this broken food system, supported by small scale farmers and producers across the globe: food sovereignty. Come along to the workshop to learn how you can get involved in campaigning on this issue.
Date: Sunday 27 July 2014
Time: 1.30 – 2.30 p.m.
Venue: The Empire Café, 141 Bridgegate, Glasgow. G1 5HZ.
Please click here to book a place at the workshop.