• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

“You can’t just let people go out into the fields without telling them how to farm,” said Lesley Haddock, a UC-Berkeley student without any farming experience who joined the ambitious Take Back the Tract project. “But people just went out and started doing it — pulling weeds, roto-tilling. I was amazed. It was beautiful.”

At the end of the day, 15,000 donated seedlings had been planted and an occupation was emerging. Fifty or so people — complete with tents, a kitchen and a composting toilet — stayed on to protect the hard work of all the volunteers, including Albany residents, Occupy Oakland activists, UC students and community organizers.

The Gill Tract was once more than 100 acres but, thanks to encroaching commercial and residential development promoted by the university, very little of it remains. For more than 15 years, community organizers and citizens have tried to convince the university to preserve the land for agricultural purposes. According to Haddock, dialogue failed, so the farm occupation is their last-ditch effort to save one of the last pieces of good soil in the East Bay area.

“We are at the end of a struggle,” said Haddock, hopefully. She explained that formal communication with UC authorities about the tract has not occurred, adding, “Our communication is our occupation.” Last Wednesday, though, UC officials visited the farm and released a media statement demanding that the protesters vacate the land, along with allegations that occupiers were unsanitary in their handling of human waste (referring to the composting toilet, which is a viable method of ecological sanitation used globally). Take Back the Tract is inviting neighbors and the public to see for themselves what is going on with a “Farmland is for Farming Family Weekend,” including tours, teach-ins, activities and work opportunities.

There are no plans for this to be a long-term occupation. Take Back the Tract hopes that the university will allow them to use the land but is unsure what exactly it would take for a lasting hub for food production and education to permanently materialize. Take Back the Tract’s primary concern is food justice:

We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities. We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our East Bay communities make use of available land — occupying it where necessary — for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.

In his article “Occupy the Farm: A Model of Resistance,” San Francicso educator and urban farmer Antonio Roman-Alcalá helps contextualize food sovereignty and the Gill Tract occupation in an unjust food system:

[F]ood sovereignty demands local and democratic control over our public institutions. And instead of a historically and logistically impossible division of “government” on one side and “markets” on the other, food sovereignty promotes a market that is accountable and humane because it is built up from the lives and decisions of those who are affected by it. This may all sound very theoretical, but land occupations like the effort to Take Back the Tract make these ideas real, immediate, tangible, and imaginable.

Anna Ghosh, communications manager with Food & Water Watch, works on advocating for a fair Farm Bill for consumers, farmers and the environment. According to Ghosh, what needs to change is who makes the rules that allow unchecked market consolidation by a small handful of corporations. Food & Water Watch publishes a useful primer on the Farm Bill and the corporate control of the food system.

“The work Occupy the Farm is doing is really important,” wrote Ghosh in an email, “because not only does it help people access good food, but it offers a great opportunity for people to learn more about what it takes to raise food and what is wrong with our current system.”

Confronting the kind of political power behind the tightly-controlled food system — which includes universities, corporations and the government — increasingly seems to require direct action tactics like occupation. The Gill Tract farmers and residents feel they know better than the UC Board of Regents what their Albany community needs: a farm. And those who work most closely with the land — the farmers, the ecologists, the conservationists — usually know best what the land needs: a better food system.

As the Gill Tract occupiers were coping with having their water shut off by UC authorities, “Mad Farmer” Wendell Berry — advocate of a 50-year farm bill based on ecological principles — was in Washington, D.C., delivering the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. In his comments, Berry suggested that Americans may tend towards one of two inclinations: “boomers” and “stickers.” In the parlance of Occupy, the boomers are the 1 percent — those who, according to Berry, are “motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.” He continues, “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Those who occupy are stickers. They believe if something is the right thing to do, they have every right to do it. This is this sort of attitude that will foster food sovereignty and transform the system from a centralized, industrial one into a localized, sustainable model for living communities, economies and ecosystems.

Wendell Berry’s closing sentiments warned of the dangerous path we are on as the wheels of industrial agriculture and a corporate food system churn at breakneck speed. But, like the Gill Tract occupiers who’ve created a community farm in the shadow of commercial development, Berry tells us, “This has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

The 2012 Farm Bill will not go far enough in supporting a democratic food system because those who write it don’t have ties to the land or the neighborhoods that will be most affected.

“An economy genuinely local and neighborly,” declares Berry, echoing the vision of the Gill Tract farm, “offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.” Take Back the Tract seems like the perfect antidote.

"Testimony of Zea Maize," via the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

On April 21, approximately 100 people came to a courtroom in Iowa City to attend a mock trial called the Monsanto Hearings, the second of five such events scheduled nationwide. The trial was modeled after a preliminary hearing, an attempt to collect stories about harm caused by agribusiness giant Monsanto and determine if further public scrutiny is warranted.

The court’s five presiding judges — including a professor, a graduate student and an organic farmer — made no pretense of impartiality. “We are under no obligation to be even-handed,” they announced early on, “because in the court of public opinion, Monsanto is not even-handed. They have money for lobbyists, advertisements, corporate-funded research and media campaigns. The influence of this hearing, by contrast, depends on the power and truth of what is said.” The court, they explained, would not be considering legal violations, but rather violations of nature, ethics and human rights.

Untraditional as it might be, the hearing had an air of formality — the judges looked smart in their black robes, and witnesses swore to the truth before testifying, some in person and some over video. The first witness was a Vietnam veteran, trembling in a Hawaiian shirt, suffering from Hepatitis C linked to exposure to Monsanto’s Agent Orange (of which an active ingredient, 2,4-D, is a common lawn pesticide today); then a small farmer whose neighbor lost acres of organic crops due to pesticides drifting on morning fog; later, a garden and soil educator who brought a wooden box of soil and worms to the witness stand.

Other witnesses included professors, farmers, scientists and local activists. Their testimonies ranged from personal to technical, from stories of the approximately 200,000 Indian farmers who, indebted after Monsanto’s cotton seed prices rose from 7 rupees to 17,000 rupees/kg, committed suicide by drinking pesticide, to explanations of the influence of corporate agribusiness on U.S. land-grant universities and how minute manipulations of chemical structure have allowed Monsanto to sidestep health regulations. One man came dressed as a “superweed” — a plant that developed pesticide resistance after exposure to the chemical glyphosate — and lounged with his feet on the edge of the witness box. “I don’t give a fuck about Monsanto,” he said, swigging from a bottle marked “Roundup,” “though they do make a good drink.”

One common theme throughout the testimonies was the importance of adhering to the precautionary principle, which dictates that if an action (or, say, a pesticide or a genetically modified crop) has the potential to cause significant harm, it should not be implemented until it has been proven safe. The European Union mandates use of the precautionary principle when regulating chemicals and biotechnology, but the United States doesn’t, instead placing the burden on consumers to prove harm once the damage has already been done.

Which is, in a way, what the activists behind the Monsanto Hearings are trying to do. By using the courtroom as a public theater, they aim to spread knowledge and conversation within a region — the Midwest — that is heavily dependent on large-scale agriculture. I talked to the event’s main organizer, Sarah Kanouse, a member of the artist and activist group Compass. She cited a groundswell in public resistance to Monsanto’s products as an impetus for the hearing. “We wanted to see what an amateur legal proceeding would look like,” she explained.

The Monsanto Hearings are based on a robust international tradition of peoples’ tribunals that dates back 40 years to the Russell Tribunal, which examined human rights violations by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Because peoples’ tribunals are not legally binding, their main goal is to bring visibility to offenses that might otherwise go unseen or unrecorded, and to victims for whom legal protection has fallen short. By specifically adopting the mantle of a legal proceeding, a peoples’ tribunal can call attention to the insufficiency of the law when it comes to fostering social and environmental justice.

A similar Monsanto Hearing was held recently in Carbondale, Illinois, and more are planned for Chicago, Santa Cruz and St. Louis, near Monsanto’s headquarters. Footage from the Iowa City hearing will be shown this summer at dOCUMENTA13, an art festival in Germany, as a preliminary documentary, and a more polished documentary is also in the works.

• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Occupy the Food System—the day of action for food justice on February 27—could be the beginning of a broad-based food justice movement that is global in scope but local in action. A unique coalition of food justice workers, consumers, farmers and activists, organized by Rainforest Action Network, momentarily converged under the banner of ending the corporate exploitation of our food system for a day of protest and consciousness-raising.

Noticeably lacking, however, were the rural farmers. To be sure, a number of farmer-backed groups, like Family Farm Defenders and the National Family Farm Coalition endorsed the action, but endorsing is a far cry from nitty-gritty organizing that turns people out.

At last weekend’s MOSES conference, which is the largest organic farming conference in the nation, and two days before #F27, issues of food justice were buzzing. The conference is an interesting blend of technical information, policy analysis, community organizing, trade show, social networking and cultural celebration. Needless to say, I think someone from Occupy the Food System (OtFS) would have received a warm welcome alongside the other keynote presenters who spoke directly about food injustice and the need to democratize the food supply. But aside from a few handbills I stumbled upon at an unstaffed table, OtFS was not even a blip on the radar. A missed opportunity, I thought, for Occupy to connect with concerned and engaged farmers who know a thing or two about the food system.

Also on February 27, New York Federal Judge Naomi Buchwald delivered a blow to the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGTA) when she dismissed their suit filed against Monsanto that alleged that genetically-modified seed threatens organic agriculture. Organic producers, in the words of OSGTA President Jim Gerttison, “are under threat.”

The New York ruling reveals just how influential corporate interests are in deciding the future of food. Monsanto owns the genetic traits of 95 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn planted in the U.S. and has control of one-fifth of the global seed market (nearly all of which is genetically modified). Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), Cargill and Bunge control 80 percent of the world’s grain. James Bovard, of the Cato Institute, reports that

at least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.

The small acts of resistance that made up OtFS—seed exchanges, coop gatherings, film screenings, guerrilla gardening and seed bombing—are great ways to build community, spread awareness and reduce an individual’s reliance on corporations. But is that the kind of activism capable of confronting the global hegemony of corporate food or addressing the consequences of poverty and hunger?

Food First, an endorser of OtFS, is in the business of connecting movements. As a think tank that believes people go hungry because of injustice, Food First “analyzes the root causes of global hunger, poverty, and ecological degradation and develops solutions in partnership with movements working for social change.”

I spoke with Eric Holt-Giménez, Food First’s executive director, about an op-ed he penned, “Occupy the Food System: Construction or Protest” and the need for food movements to converge at the individual, institutional, and structural level to end the corporate control of our food system. “We need social movements,” Holt-Giménez said. “It is important to find avenues of convergence and [Occupy the Food System] is a good example of that.” His perspective is that if the food justice organizations at the individual and institutional level—organizations like your neighborhood coop, Food Corps and other local alternatives—synthesize with the Occupy movement’s structural analysis of the corporate control of democracy, then something big will happen:

People are trying to construct alternatives that help us weather the ravages of the market, without changing the rules affecting the market. These rules are made for big corporations, not for us. And the Occupy movement is saying that to change rules, you have to change the system.… The future of Occupy will depend on whether or not it can actually establish relationships with other movements. And then Occupy becomes a tactic for those movements, bringing increased and broader support from other people.

One organization, Land Stewardship Project—not officially an endorser of OtFS—reflects that kind of transitional movement between food-focused, locally-based alternatives and politically-engaged struggle for structural change. In a phone interview, Anna Cioffi told me that LSP

farmers are engaged in food justice in direct ways: food shelves, alternative practices, etc. Also, as a food democracy organization, LSP does a lot of work against corporations that are trying to control the food market, that are harming farms, small family farms. We are against the centralization of the food system and trying to get [LSP farmers] a greater advantage in the market.

It is a little more difficult for farmers to be actively involved in the Occupy movement, especially if they are far from city centers. Cioffi added that farming can often be lonely, isolating work and that “being connected to organizations, other farm networks with like-minded folks” can be a way to “stay involved in the movement.” Many Occupies have already begun the delicate work of partnering with other organizations, particularly those at the local level. In terms of food justice, it is mutually beneficial for the Occupy movement, with its militant activism and savvy use of social media, to be connected with the stable, grassroots organizations, like LSP and Food First, that have proven to be effective and long-lasting in terms of connecting people to social change. If marginalized people—including farmers—feel like Occupy is looking out for them and willing to fight for their interests, Occupy the Food System will gain traction, focus on structural problems, and, ultimately, chip away at the corporate control of food—all the while enjoying a cup of fair trade coffee at a community screening of King Corn at the coop.

Championing food sovereignty and fair prices for farmers (i.e. re-working commodity subsidies and enforcing anti-trust laws) might be a way for the Occupy movement to continue developing local support, particularly in the Midwest, and address the real needs communities are facing, suggests Holt-Giménez. “The bane of populism is that it does not have a political north. It will take political will on the part of Occupy to solve the very real, immediate issues that communities are facing, such as food, shelter and violence.” he said. “This has happened in other parts of the world and it can happen here. If local people jump on Occupy, then it’s unstoppable.”

Home demolitions are a common practice for large landowners in Honduras. If a family is not residing on the land at the time when their land dispute comes to a hearing, they no longer have a case. Photo by La Voz de Los de Abajo

Most of what is found in the news regarding Honduras tends to converge on a single resounding theme—the deepening corruption of the state. Officials resign over scandals of embezzlement, police officers moonlight as armed robbers, entire state arsenals are found empty, supposedly the work of drug cartels. Carolina, one of many strong and energetic matriarchs who helps run—along with many other women and men—the June 10th Women’s Movement Farming Cooperative, has a different theory about the stolen arsenals. When a delegation I was a part of visited the farm last week, she told us:

The government only wants the United States to buy them more weapons, while they hoard the others. All those weapons are a direct threat against farmers. The government knows where they are hidden, and they will try to use them against us.

Communities like Carolina’s have good reason to suspect cynical motives. A week earlier, in the early morning of February 8, armed private guards of the Standard Fruit Company (Dole) invaded the campesino farming co-op of Salado Lis Lis and forced close to 500 families off the land. They had only enough time to grab their children and a few belongings before a Caterpillar bulldozer ripped through about 600 meager houses and tore wide, barren stripes through their crops.

On February 12, several brave families returned to Lis Lis to pick up the pieces of their lives in order to rebuild. When I arrived there on February 16, I saw that the bulldozer did not leave them with very much. Implosions of sticks, twine, and tin panels sat baking in twisted piles. “We also lost many animals,” said Luisa, who stood with her 4-year-old daughter in front of the littered patch of ground that used to be their home. “Chickens, dogs, cats, pigs—most of them were killed.” The loss of livestock and food crops is sure to worsen the problem of hunger in the community, where many are afraid of running out of food.

The history of Salado Lis Lis goes back at least to 1992, when a 100-year lease granted to Standard Fruit should have expired. Instead, the company remained illegally, then abandoned the land after much of their operation was destroyed by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Shortly thereafter, the families who now live there had come to clear the destruction of Mitch and to cultivate rice, corn, yuca, beans, coconuts and plantains.

An agrarian reform that was passed by the National Congress in 2008 started the process of granting title to the families who were using and improving the land for citizens’ benefit, but the military coup in 2009 and the repeal of the reform in 2010 made it easier for a foreign fruit company with a questionable title to evict small-scale farmers. Indeed, the case of Lis Lis is only one of about 50 evictions that armed agents have carried out within the last year and a half. As Luisa explained, “Honduras does not live in peace. It’s a country full of risks for us, the poor ones.”

Those risks hang like a cloud over Lis Lis—even though the campesinos are back on the land, they know that the guards could return at any time. If we don’t take back our community, if we don’t put all our efforts into keeping it, the government will never simply give it to us,” said Pablo Alberto, another associate of the co-op. In order to sustain this presence, the families have begun to rebuild and replant. The bulldozer left them with nothing more to eat than coconuts, so they have been hunting wild game until other crops can be harvested. Children are the first to be fed, then the women, then the men. They have pooled their resources in order to buy vegetables and milk from the town about 2 miles away. The campesinos showed us two intact buildings which used to be their school, and which they are now using for mothers and small children to sleep in, away from the threat of crocodiles.

The fact that the families are doing what it takes to remain living on their land, and reaching out to tell their story to outsiders, is all they can do right now to deter another violent eviction. They are showing the power of their resilience to the well-connected company that wants them off the land. As Pablo explained, “we feel fear, but also we feel the pride and the warmth of defending our community.”

You can call Dole Fruit Company toll-free at 800-356-3111 to object to the way it is treating small-scale farmers in Honduras.

The names of all people quoted in this article have been changed in concern for their safety.

Before and after the mining in Yanacocha. Image via Servindi.

An agreement has not yet been reached between national and local authorities in Peru since I reported on the mining disputes there last December. While Newmont Mining Corporation stands by previous agreements with the government regarding the extraction of 11.6 million ounces of gold in Conga, the popular efforts against this and other mining mega-projects also stand resilient. The last meeting took place after a 10-day march that ended in Lima on February 10. This time, instead of solely objecting to the mining project, the protesters broadened their message to also ending the threat against their access to water.

According with Hugo Cableses, a former vice minister of strategic development in Peru, the mining projects in Conga will guarantee the disappearance of four lagoons that feed three rivers running to the Pacific coast and supplying around 210 villages—home to as many as 42,000 people—as well as the Amazon River Basin. While the environmental damage is already becoming evident, Newmont has offered to build four artificial pools that would replace the natural water sources, as they did in Yanacocha, where they replaced a natural lagoon with four tubes that provide people with two hours of dirty water a day.

The popular movement has still not succeeded, then, in making public needs and demands felt in the political sphere. Even after ensuring the resignation of 11 ministers and the presence of an international expert witnessing the project, the project will go on. The movement must demonstrate that the Peruvian economy doesn’t need to rely on exploitative mining. It must also show that, without water, whole regions and populations will lose their agricultural potential and food security, both within Peru’s borders and beyond them.

Throughout history, South American nations have had their futures decided by a small number of people. It began with the Spaniards, who, as soon as they touched ground, let two or three religious and political authorities rule from 5,000 miles away. Sadly, little has changed since then, except now the ruling few are the corporate elites, empowered through government deals like the recently ratified free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States, NAFTA, and thousands of illicit licenses given to multinational companies. But this trend is beginning to change, as protests in Peru over the last month have challenged the country’s largest mining project.

The story of this ambitious and dangerously exploitative project dates back to 1993, when the US company Newmont Mining Corp. arrived in Peru to open the Yanacocha gold mine in Cajamarca, a region located in the North of the country. Using a process called “micro-mining,” which requires large quantities of a dilute cyanide solution to capture minuscule pieces of gold, Yanacocha ended up contaminating the region’s water sources–a fact overloked by then-president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence strongman Vladimiro Montesinos.

When they left power in 2000, their many crimes over the years began to come to light. In regards to Yanacocha, it was revealed that Montesinos accepted bribes from Newmont to convince the Peruvian Supreme Court to allow its mining operations in Cajamarca.

For 18 years, the people of Cajamarca have used water that was contaminated with chemical waste to irrigate their crops and, in a chain of disasters, it has affected their animals as well. Farmers reported widespread livestock deaths and a 40 percent decrease in crop yields, since 2009. The contamination has also caused breathing illnesses in children, denounced by the inhabitants but continually denied by national health authorities.

“

Farmers from Cajamarca during a strike to protest the Conga mining project on November 24. (Click to enlarge)

Today indigenous people and peasants are fighting against the recklessness of the few by rejecting the new Yanacocha project Conga, which–due to the amount of water it’s expected to consume–will lead to the disappearance of  the region’s many lagoons. At least three have already disappeared due to Yanacocha’s over use of water.

The fight against the Conga project has been brutal, and even some violent uprisings have taken place. On the sixth day of protest, eight people were shot with pellets by the police, and three police were injured. The media insisted on covering these images, encouraging the institutional rejection to the protests. But nonviolence has prevailed among the demonstrators who condemn the contamination of water as a violent act coming from the private interests in collusion with the State.

Current President Ollanta Humala has used the issue to his advantage. Before being sworn in to office in July, Humala announced his total commitment to the protesters’ cause, insisting that “the lagoons of Cajamarca are not for sale, because you can’t drink gold, and you don’t eat gold.” But seven months later–in order to stave off protests and resume mining operations–Humala’s cabinet declared a 60-day State of Emergency for the Cajamarca region, suspending such constitutional rights as personal safety, home inviolability and freedom of reunion and association.

Given that seven percent of the Peruvian GDP comes from gold and mineral mining, companies like Newmont can rely on governmental support when dealing with protests and strikes. So far, 6,000 Yanacocha workers joined the strike that forced Newmont to suspend its operations for more than a week last month, which then led to the suspension of the Conga project.

The Peruvian movement against mining companies is growing in strength and along with the protests in Cajamarca, it has expanded to Puno in the South, and 14 other regions as well. If the government will finally decide to give up their claims in Conga, it will have to do the same across the country and the main threat will be over the national short-term finances.

The State of Emergency was lifted on Friday after local leaders agreed to talks and suspended protests, but the prospect of negotiations yielding anything positive remain uncertain. First Minister Salomon Lerner recently resigned after a previous fruitless five day attempt at negotiations.

The demonstrators have stated their commitment to returning to the streets every time Newmont attempts to restart the Conga project without taking measures to prevent the destruction of their community’s environment, health, and ultimately, its future. For this, the Peruvian movement stands as an example to other Latin American countries, where mining projects are still in a negotiation stage and the prospect of short-term profits is still alluring.

Environmental victories are so rare that apparently even environmentalists don’t quite know how to kick back and rejoice. At a rally in Trenton, New Jersey on Monday, discussion veered between joyous celebration of Friday’s announcement by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to indefinitely postpone a vote that would have paved the way for 20,000 natural gas wells in the region and serious preparation to one day block their construction through nonviolent direct action.

These activists can be excused, however, for mixing business with pleasure because even more rare than an environmental victory is one that’s complete and total. Much like the recent announcement by the Obama administration to delay a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, the DRBC vote delay was hardly an indictment of extreme carbon-based extraction that poisons water and the atmosphere. If anything, it’s a temporary roadblock to something government seems all too happy to allow.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have already promised to vote “yes” for drilling in the Delaware River Basin–a region that provides drinking water to 15 million people. Corbett is no surprise because drilling–or fracking as it’s more commonly called–is already a common practice in Pennsylvania. New Jersey, on the other hand, does not have any natural gas deposits. But it does have Christie, who earned nearly $30,000 last year from selling his shares in a company whose clients include gas drilling operators.

The holdouts as of now are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Delaware Governor Jack Markell–neither of whom are sure bets to stay that way. Both would apparently switch their vote if the right regulatory processes were put in place. Nevertheless, Markell’s decision to vote “no” came as a surprise, since it is believed that the Obama administration–DRBC’s fifth and final voting member–was pushing the Delaware governor to vote “yes” so that it wouldn’t have to and thereby tarnish its environmental image.

Shrewd as that may sound, it’s not hard to believe given Obama’s tar sands pipeline non-decision. He has demonstrated a clear intention to avoid angering either side of the issue, as he enters campaign season. But it was only until recently that Obama realized he had to worry about environmentalists. As actor Marc Ruffalo told the crowd of several hundred gathered in front of Trenton’s Patriots Theater, “There’s no doubt that President Obama chose not to take this vote today because of what we did with the Keystone pipeline action in Washington D.C.”

Fittingly, perhaps, these two issues overlap in ways beyond just the activists and politicians involved. They represent desperate efforts to wring the planet of its remaining fossil fuels, which have until recently been cost prohibitive due to their inaccessibility. Fracking, which is short for hydraulic fracturing, is a process that requires mass amounts of water and chemicals to tap into natural gas reserves. Methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, is usually released as a byproduct, effectively counterbalancing any benefits of switching from coal. In turn, the tar sands industry uses enormous amounts of fracked gas and water to extract the oil from its reserves, which are second only in size to Saudi Arabia. Given that every barrel of tar sands oil emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil, it’s no wonder NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that further development would be “game over” for the climate.

Furthermore, the tar sands and fracking processes are known to contaminate water, poison the air, and, in general, diminish the quality of life. For many, these environmental health factors are the most pressing. Craig Sauter–a resident of Dimock, Pensylvania, which has been called natural gas drilling’s ground zero–spoke of his troubles getting Cabot Oil & Gas, the company that drilled on his land, to pay for poisoning his well water with methane, arsenic, barium, and uranium. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has also refused to help despite Sauter’s exhaustive efforts to engage them. The state capitol police are now threatening to arrest him if he calls the DEP one more time.

Upon hearing this, the crowd chanted, “We will call for you.” Plans are also in the works to for a protest in Dimock at the end of the month, when Cabot takes away the drinking water tank they provided Sauter, before shirking any responsibility.

Another stirring account was rendered by Stephen Cleghorn–an organic farmer from Pennsylvania’s Jefferson County, whose land was leased for natural gas extraction without his knowing. He offered a heartfelt, if not wrenching, story of testifying before an impotent Department of Energy subcommittee on natural gas, while his wife was dying of cancer.

“I have a power in my soul now to enforce a moratorium of one if I have to,” he said. “But I don’t have to, because we are building a mighty movement to stop this.”

Immediately following these testimonials, the crowd marched to the New Jersey State Legislature, demanding they “ban fracking now.” Of course, New Jersey’s legislature was the first of any state in the country to ban fracking. It passed overwhelming, but Governor Christie vetoed it, proposing a one-year moratorium instead. Nevertheless, activists seem hopeful that the legislature might overturn Christie’s ruling. And why not? They’re starting to get the kind of momentum leaders were hoping for years ago.

In his address, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue, reminded the crowd of one such leader, the recently imprisoned Tim DeChristopher.

“Three days ago, I got a call from a guy named Tim DeChristopher in a federal penitentiary on his 30th birthday… He says to me, ‘I feel really isolated in here. I feel one step behind everybody.’ And I said, ‘You were five steps ahead to begin with. And he was looking at all the things that have happened, the victory of the KeystoneXL. And his birthday happened to be the day that we won this [the fracking vote delay]. And he was looking at Occupy Wall Street. And he said, ‘I feel like we’re headed toward something much much bigger than this.’ And we are. He said, ‘You know that sound when you walk into the opera house and you hear all the violins and everybody tuning up? And everybody’s starting on a little bit of a different note, but they’re trying to get to the same note. All these strands are coming together. We’re fighting extreme energy. We’re fighting KeystoneXL. We’re fighting mountaintop removal. We’re fighting the banks that finance these things. So we’re tuning up this orchestra and we’re going to be here for a really long time.’”

In keeping with the mood, however, Fox made sure to follow up this feel-good sentiment with a hard-hitting call to action, saying, “When it comes time to blockade the well-sites, we’ll blockade the well-sites.” And before the day was over, the crowd retreated to a nearby Quaker meeting house, where nonviolent direct action trainings began–assuring that this movement, if the time has come to call it that, is not about to let any amount of success go to its head.

• A few hundred protesters marched on Waikiki Saturday as leaders of Pacific Rim nations gathered for a summit to discuss free trade agreements and other issues. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana spent almost 45 minutes repeatedly singing his new protest ballad “We Are the Many” instead of the expected instrumental background music. Over a dozen heads of state, including President Obama, heard Makana’s message that included lines such as “The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw…. And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw.”

• Police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday after clearing parks occupied by demonstrators for weeks. 50 were arrested after refusing to leave one of the parks. The demonstrators regrouped in the streets, blocking traffic for hours.

• Twenty-seven “Occupy St. Louis” protesters were arrested early Saturday morning after defying an existing park curfew.

• Portuguese civil servants and soldiers staged an anti-austerity protest in Lisbon on Saturday, a sign of the rising social tensions in debt-hit Portugal over deep cuts in spending.

• Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday against oil legislation that could cost the port city and surrounding state billions of dollars in revenues.

• Angry over a range of environmental issues, about 250 protesters erected a mock coal-fired power station on the steps of Australia’s Parliament House before marching backwards to Treasury Gardens, arguing the government’s policies have taken Victoria backwards.

• More than 350 people linked arms to form a “human chain” on the Stirling Bridge in Fremantle, Australia on Sunday to protest the live animal export trade.

• About 100 peaceful marchers sent a clear message Sunday to vandals who torched cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. The march included about 25 people from the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan, which put out a statement condemning the vandalism.

• More than 2,000 students marched through London last week to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in tuition fees.

• Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets across Yemen on Sunday to demand the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh on the anniversary of his rise to power in  1978.

• Dozens of tents have been erected in Tel Aviv, with plans for further encampments in other Israeli towns and cities, to protest high house prices.

• Several Indian and Pakistani citizens Saturday gathered near Rajghat, Delhi and formed a human chain on Saturday to protest the July 13 Mumbai blasts that left at least 19 people dead and injured 130.

• Journalists at the BBC walked off their jobs Friday to protest planned job cuts as a result of lower government funding.

• Greenpeace activists dressed as polar bears occupied the Edinburgh offices of Cairn Energy on Monday as the environmental group stepped up the pressure on the company over its Arctic exploration plans.

• Around 2,000 farmers, backed by student groups and academics gathered in front of the presidential office in Taipei late on Saturday to protest government proposals that would make it easier for farm land to be forcibly turned over to developers.

• Around 200 people gathered at the Jordan Press Association headquarters earlier today to denounce an attack on journalists by riot police on Friday.

• Greek taxi drivers blocked roads to Athens’ airport and main harbor today, holding up thousands of tourists at the start of a two-day protest against plans to liberalize their trade.

• Several hundred people attended a protest march against the EU-IMF austerity programme in Dublin on Saturday.

• A small group of mass transit activists against freeway expansion unfurled a banner overlooking the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday that read “L.A. Beyond Cars.”

On Saturday, rallies against genetically modified food were held in cities across the United States. The Millions Against Monsanto campaign, which is organized by Organic Consumers Association, is now planning on taking their effort to the next level. On World Food Day, October 16, they are calling for a million people to come out in a nationwide day of action.

While mobilizing a million people sounds like a daunting task, they have broken it down in a unique way. They are forming 435 local chapters, one for each congressional district, and are seeking to attract 2,300 supporters in each location. If they can reach this goal, they will have a million people in the streets.

I like this approach in that it reminds me of the way that military contractors influence legislators. Boeing for example manufactures the F-22 in 44 different states, which had made it next to impossible to muster the votes to cut its funding.

The Millions Against Monsanto campaign is not calling to make these genetically engineered foods illegal, but simply to make GMO labeling mandatory by law. They believe that if people knew which foods were genetically modified they would buy less of them and instead go organic. This is apparently what has happened in Europe, where there are almost no genetically modified foods in grocery stories because labeling is required.

The above video lays out the group’s strategy and also gives some advice on how to start a chapter in your area. To sign their petition click here and join a local chapter if one already exists.

Over at UN Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg has an interesting post on how world food prices, which reached an all-time high in December and could be at a similar level for January, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), are a contributing factor in the protests in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. As Goldberg explains:

So what does this chart have to do with the riots in Egypt?  Several commentators have noted that the high price of food staples contributed to the overall feeling of discontent in Tunisia.  There have already been protests over the sharp increase in food prices in Jordan earlier this month.  Reading the writing on the wall, the Algerian government even put in a huge rush order of wheat.This is not to say this is the cause of the civil unrest in Egypt today. But these questions of political economy really cannot be ignored when trying to understand the protests across the Middle East and North Africa.  If this trend in the Food Prices Index continues, it is not unreasonable to expect that civil unrest will spread to several other countries.

And at Climate Progress, Joe Romm has an interesting piece looking at how this rise in food prices is connected to climate change.

President Obama and the State Department are considering the permit for a 2,000-mile dirty tar sands oil pipeline, known as the Keystone XL, that would run from Canada through six US states to refineries along the Gulf Coast. With 900,000 barrels of dirty oil flowing across the heartland every day, public water supplies, crops, and wildlife habitats will be at great risk.

Opposition to the pipeline has already begun to take shape, with protests, town hall gatherings and press conferences taking place in Detroit, Chicago, Lincoln, Houston and Missoula. There’s even a TV ad (shown above) calling on President Obama to “prevent the next oil disaster” that’s set to air on CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central.

For more information, check out the No Tar Sands Oil campaign website.

• Tens of thousands of union members, social activists and students gathered in Seoul Sunday to protest the Group of 20 economic summit meeting that begins on Thursday.

• Tens of thousands of government employees marched in Portugal’s capital on Saturday to protest an austerity budget that would slash their salaries.

• Thousands of protesters in France and Germany have attempted to block a train carrying nuclear waste. Some protesters chained themselves to the train tracks while others drove trucks on to the tracks. Hundreds of protesters have been detained.

• On Sunday, Cafe de Coral, Hong Kong’s biggest fast-food chain, said it had ditched plans to scrap paid lunch breaks for its employees after a public and Facebook campaign was mounted boycotting its restaurants.

• Hundreds of gay and lesbians protested the Church’s position on gay marriage by kissing publicly as the pope passed by on his way to the  Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on Sunday.

• In Oakland, police arrested 152 protesters who streamed through the streets Friday after a white ex-transit officer received the minimum two-year prison sentence for fatally shooting an unarmed black man on a California train platform two years ago.

• A group of 400 survivors of the Bhopal disaster have been protesting Obama’s visit to India. In addition, the cotton growers of Vidarbha, who are suffering immensely due to the prevailing agrarian crisis, staged candlelight protests ahead of US President Barack Obama’s India visit on Friday.