Films on Farm Worker Organizing
Onwards to New Delhi – a farmer’s protest
Satnam Singh, a farmer from Punjab in northern India, is worried about his livelihood. New legislation is set to liberalize the sale of agricultural produce. Hundreds of thousands of farmers head for the capital in protest.
Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley
It is June 28th, 2009. The people of Honduras are preparing to vote in their country’s first-ever referendum. However, instead of waking up to ballot boxes they rise to find their streets full of soldiers. The first coup d’état in Central America in three decades.
An unprecedented nationwide resistance movement is born, known simply as La Resistencia. Without question, the most daring arm of the movement is that of the farmers of the Aguan Valley. With the president that promised to help them get their land back overthrown, they decide to take control of their own destiny. In a matter of minutes they seize control over 10,000 acres of palm oil plantations belonging to the country’s most powerful landowner. Located on some of the most fertile land in all of Central America, the farmers announce that they have no plans of ever giving the plantations back.
MST – Landless Movement of Rural Workers of Brazil
30 years ago, in the face of starvation and poverty, the MST was set up to push forward the case of land reform where “occupation is the only solution”
#WeUnite – The 12-minute film ‘We Unite’ is a window into the lives of two organic farmers and the reasons they join the yearly ‘We are Fed-Up’ demonstration in Germany .Along with hundreds of other farmers, they drive their tractors into the heart of Berlin where they unite with thousands of citizens calling for a better food and farming system for all.
Articles on Farm Worker Organizing
The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers
The Indian Farmer Protests: A Rare Concession
India’s farmers’ protest: “This is history in the making”
How the MST maintains its radical vision while winning practical reforms
Films on Sustainable Farming
Brazilian Landless Movement & Agroecology
This film examines a cooperative of the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) in the South of Brazil, which struggled for access to land and then transitioned to ecological agriculture, or agroecology. This MST cooperative is demonstrating the possibility of an alternative model of flourishing rural life, which provides thriving livelihoods for farmers, produces high quality and low cost food for the region, and rehabilitates the earth.
Natural Farming With Masanobu Fukuoka: Minimal Effort And Abundant Yields
Masanobu Fukuoka is a farmer/philosopher who lives on the Island of Shikoku, in southern Japan. His farming technique requires no machines, no chemicals and very little weeding. He does not plow the soil or use prepared compost and yet the condition of the soil in his orchards and fields improve each year. His method creates no pollution and does not require fossil fuels. His method requires less labor than any other, yet the yields in his orchard and fields compare favorably with the most productive Japanese farms which use all the technical know-how of modern science.
Books about Food Production and Food Worker Organizing
The present corporate food regime dominating the planet’s food systems is environmentally destructive, financially volatile and socially unjust. Though the regime’s contributions to the planet’s four-fold food-fuel-finance and climate crises are well documented, the “solutions” advanced by our national and global institutions reinforce the same destructive technological path, the same global market fundamentalism, and the same unregulated consolidation of corporate power in the food system that brought us the crisis in the first place.
The slogan “Yes we can”—in the form “¡Sí Se Puede!”—doesn’t originate with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. It goes back more than four decades to the heyday of the United Farm Workers, an organization that at its height won many labor victories, secured collective bargaining rights for California farm workers and became a major voice for the Latino community, which was previously excluded from national politics. The UFW was once a transformative political force of a kind now largely lost in contemporary America.
Drawing on a rich trove of original documents, tapes, and interviews, Miriam Pawel chronicles the rise of the UFW during the heady days of civil rights struggles, the antiwar movement, and student activism in the 1960s and ’70s. From the fields, the churches, and the classrooms, hundreds were drawn to la causa by the charismatic Chavez, a brilliant risk-taker who mobilized popular support for a noble cause. But as Miriam Pawel shows, the UFW was ripped apart by the same man who built it, as Chavez proved unable to make the transition from movement icon to union leader. Pawel traces the lives of several key members of the crusade, using their stories to weave together a powerful portrait of a movement and the people who made it.
MASSolidarity.org 