Why does so much emergency and food aid fail?

Our hearts and wallets open up when emergency strikes—whether natural or by the hand of man. Yet so much humanitarian aid fails the most basic standard: do no harm.

In the face of crisis, too often we abandon our principles of what we know makes for good community development and human rights work: Local, representative organizations with deep community roots. In crisis, understandably, we focus on the service-delivery—food rations, medicines, shelter—rather than on the service deliverers.

The world's most powerful "leaders" meet today in Washington to debate what is to be done about the global financial crisis - a crisis they themselves were instrumental in causing. It is their blind devotion to a consistently failed ideology, outright greed, and a slavish willingness to be accountable only to their corporate backers (on the part of almost all that are gathering), and an ambition to get a seat at the table in the country club (on the part of the G-20 minus 7) that has created this toxic mix that we are all being forced to swallow.

Recently I returned from the Via Campeisna's Vth International Conference in Mozambique, followed by brief visit with social justice organizations in South Africa. Also in Mozambique, as delegate to the Via Campesina Conference, was Grassroots International colleague John Peck of the Family Farm Defenders and the National Family Farm Coalition. John wrote the article below just days after hearing the President of Mozambique, Armando Emilio Guebuza, address the Via Campesina Assembly. In his address, Guebuza unfortunately noted that his government would be supporting the expansion of jatropha plantations for agrofuels production.

Global food prices have almost doubled in recent years, in large part due to U.S. policies, and now nearly 1 billion people worldwide - including 50 million here in the U.S. - are facing hunger. Keep reading to find out how you can take action for change.

The food crisis is not a crisis in the availability of food.  In fact, there is more than enough food to feed everyone in the world.  Over the last 20 years, world food production has risen steadily at over 2% a year, while the rate of global population growth has dropped to 1.14% a year.  

As Haitian waters recede - at least for now - aid and relief efforts are also diminishing for the nearly one million people who are in desperate need of emergency food.  The wounds of this reality are particularly raw in the countryside where the majority is struggling to survive. 

Several of Grassroots International's partners and allies in Haiti released a statement following the disastrous wave of hurricanes. In their own words, they describe the deeply rooted obstacles they must overcome to rebuild a better Haiti.

Our partners in Guatemala have told us: the current food crisis will continue unless we guarantee the land, water and seeds rights of communities necessary to grow food. The same message is being echoed in Brazil, Mexico and many neighborhoods in the U.S.

In two separate statements, Guatemala's National Peasant and Indigenous Coordination (CONIC) and Brazil's Small Producers Movement (MPA) put forth food sovereignty as a solution to the crisis: the right of communities to produce food for local markets and for consumers to have access to local healthy foods. Both organizations denounce the expansion of industrial agriculture and growing control of agribusinesses for contributing to the hunger of urban and rural communities.

Dozens of people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced across South Africa in a wave of anti-immigrant violence over the past several weeks. This comes against a backdrop of growing impatience with the government's anemic efforts to overcome the chronic poverty and massive social inequality inherited from the apartheid era, now more than a decade and a half behind them, and in the face of rising political violence in neighboring Zimbabwe from where many of the 5-10 million "foreigners" come.

Grassroots International was selected as a finalist for the MySpace Impact Awards. Grassroots is in the final 3, with the winner receiving a $10,000 donation and extensive promotion throughout the MySpace website. If you are a MySpace user, please vote for us right now, then each day until December 24th and forward this to others: http://www.myspace.com/impactawards.

The impact of Cyclone Sidr on Bangladesh has been enormous. Over 3,500 people have been killed, tens of thousands are still missing, and millions have been left homeless. Crops have been devastated and livestock destroyed. The bulk of the devastation has been in the southern coastal region-including the vast delta of the Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers-where more than 40 million people live.

Grassroots International currently does not work in South Asia but our Staff, Board and supporters recognize that besides the widespread devastation and the impact on peoples in the region, groups engaged in ongoing struggles for social and economic justice are also affected.