"Against the grain".

Against the grain is a series of short opinion pieces on recent trends and developments in the issues that GRAIN works on. Each one focuses on a specific and timely topic.

Food exports and free trade agreements (46 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: October 2008

In FTAs little attention is paid to clauses like the following one: "... no Party may adopt or maintain any prohibition or restriction on the importation of any good of another Party or on the exportation or sale for export of any good destined for the territory of another Party...". In other words, governments know that they are renouncing their right to control food exports and imports when they sign FTAs.

Making a killing from hunger (104 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: April 2008

The world food crisis is hurting a lot of people, but global agribusiness firms, traders and speculators are raking in huge profits. The fundamental cause of today's food crisis is neoliberal globalisation itself, which has transformed food from a source of livelihood security into a mere commodity to be gambled away, even at the cost of widespread hunger among the world’s poorest people.

Faults in the vault: not everyone is celebrating Svalbard (151 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: February 2008

The "Global Seed Vault" buried in a frozen island in Svalbard, Norway, is sadly the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the dominant approach to crop diversity conservation. The Vault gives a false sense of security in a world where the crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that plague the international ex situ system.

Bird flu in eastern India: another senseless slaughter (237 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: February 2008

The carnage of poultry, in which 3.7 million birds were culled, in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal is a striking testament to the failure of the global response to the bird flu crisis. In a flash, one of the world’s most dynamic areas of poultry farming has been practically ruined, a priceless stock of biodiversity wiped out, and the livelihoods of millions of poor families pushed to the brink. This has been caused not so much by bird flu as by the response to it.

IRRI Inc. (81 kb)
Author: GRAIN Date: November 2007

Consultative Group's rice research institute goes into business. On November 9, 2007, in the midst of the Asian Seed Congress, IRRI announced the formation of its Hybrid Rice Research and Development Consortium. This lays the foundation for a direct relationship between IRRI and private seed companies: IRRI supplies the parent lines and corporations, who gain exclusive rights to the varieties, handle the marketing.