Global News and Analysis

Source: Civil Eats

Imagine a country where ideologues bent on land reform turn agriculture into the plaything of the world’s richest investors, and poor local farmers are locked out of millions of acres prime agricultural land. Then stop imagining some African country run by a despot and his friends and start picturing the United States. Rural America is on the cusp of one of the greatest transfers of land in its history and no one’s talking about it.

At its worst, land reform lets plutocrats kick poor people off their ancestral land. But land reform is not only the tool of dictators. At its best, sensible policies about how land is used, transferred, and owned can make it possible for young people to farm with dignity, a living wage, and a future. It can help poor people stop being poor. It can let young farmers who want to farm break through the barriers to entry. It can provide a secure retirement for America’s older farmers. It can happen and should happen in countries as democratic and as rich as the United States. read more

Source: The Guardian, CIF

Regeneration boosters praise cities that ‘bounce back’ from poverty. The reality is poverty just gets bounced elsewhere

It’s no secret that today’s big cities are massively unequal, and gentrification is now the predominant form of neighborhood development. In countless urban districts across the world, affordable housing is on the decline and displacement is on the rise. This is especially true in New York and London, where observers are straining to find sufficient prefixes (mega, hyper and super have all been aptly applied) to describe the pace at which gentrification is changing the city.

But most of the discussion about gentrification doesn’t do justice to everything at stake.

Here’s how gentrification talk typically goes: poor neighborhoods are said to need “regeneration” or “revitalization”, as if lifelessness and torpor – as opposed to impoverishment and disempowerment – were the problem. Exclusion is rebranded as creative “renewal”. The liberal mission to “increase diversity” is perversely used as an excuse to turn residents out of their homes in places like Harlem or Brixton – areas famous for their long histories of independent political and cultural scenes.

After gentrification takes hold, neighborhoods are commended for having “bounced back” from poverty, ignoring the fact that poverty has usually only been bounced elsewhere.

In an insidious way, the narrative of “urban renaissance” – the tale of heroic elites redeeming a city that had been lost to the dangerous classes – permeates a lot of contemporary thinking about cities, despite being a condescending and often racist fantasy.

When gentrification is criticized these days, it tends to be done in terms that muddle the issues. The least useful way to criticize gentrification is to obsess about an area’s character, coolness, or even worse, “grit”. Lamenting the proliferation of cupcakes and cappuccino is a staple of reporting on places like Williamsburg or Dalston. But this kind of story reduces something that’s all about inequality to middle-class agonizing over authenticity.

It’s beyond time that policymakers, planners and urbanites de-gentrified their thinking about cities.

This will require abandoning a number of pervasive myths which have helped to legitimize inequality and contribute to gentrification’s colonization of the urbanist imagination. read more

Source: The Progressive Magazine

As Lily Tomlin has noted, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

For example, imagine if a prestigious group announced that this year’s “World Environmental Prize” will be awarded to BP for its unique contribution to the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. Too absurd, you say?

Right, but try this one: An Iowa group announces that the “World Food Prize” will go to Monsanto for pushing its patented, pricey, genetically-tampered Frankenseeds on impoverished lands as an “answer” to global hunger. This would be so morally perverse that the “cyn” in cynical would be spelled S.I.N. Yet, it’s actually happening. read more

Source: The Nation

Precious few political parties have spoken out against the military or its assault on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Khaled Dawoud worked hard to remove Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, from office.

As the spokesperson for the National Salvation Front, a loose coalition of non-Islamist parties and groups formed last November, he was a well-recognized voice of opposition to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the weeks leading up to June 30, Dawoud traveled across the country, helping to drum up support and organize logistics for the massive anti-Morsi protests. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Honduran authorities want Berta Cáceres in prison. Even more, they want her dead.

Berta, as she is fondly known by her many friends in Honduras and beyond, is a Lenca indigenous woman, and one of the founding directors of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). She is now the face of social movement resistance in Honduras, which in recent months has seen an escalation of state repression against social movement leaders, indigenous peoples’ organizations, environmentalists, and political dissenters. She went into hiding on September 20. read more

Latin American leaders are reclaiming a right to differentiate their views from Washington’s—and refusing to render it diplomatic tribute.

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Without a doubt, the 68^th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy.

What failed to make the headlines, however, could have the longest-term significance of all: the Latin American rebellion. read more