02/14/12–Dr. Eric Holt-Gimenez:
Excerpt from the Preface of Food Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform our Food Systems: Whether it was due to growing pauperization, growing inequality, growing unemployment, or growing precariousness, it's only normal that people started resisting, protesting, and organizing around the world. Social movements are by and large still on the defensive, facing the offensive of capital to dismantle whatever they had conquered in the previous decades. But even if perfectly legitimate social movements of protest are growing everywhere, they remain extremely fragmented. What is needed is to move beyond fragmentation and beyond a defensive position into building a wide progressive alliance emboldened by the force of a positive alternative. Dr. Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First, will address the idea that the balance of forces cannot be changed unless these fragmented movements—such as the movements for food sovereignty, food justice, and food democracy—forge a common platform based on some common grounds.
