Links & Resources

• African farmers (including Malians) are actively rejecting GMO seeds.  www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0131-02.htm

• African farmers are joining coalitions with farmers from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and Caribbean island nations and they are receiving international attention.  West African farmers rallied together and sparked an international solidarity movement that effectively stalled the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun and has dealt a permanent blow to the WTO.
  http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=3953

• Check out the cool work being done by our friends in Northern Vermont through their organization “Seeds of Self Reliance”.  The co-founder, John Hayden, is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Mali. 
  www.seedsofselfreliance.org

• The organization of the Poor man G8 in 2002.  This grassroots meeting was held in rural Mali as a counter summit in opposition to the concurrent meeting of the G8 in Canada.  Participants from 7 West African nations met to discuss their common struggles and goals.
  http://www.geocities.com/ericsquire/articles/afr062602.htm
  

• There was also a great deal of education about the economic, environmental, cultural, and political dangers posed by GMO crops.
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4445824.stm
  
• Malian grassroots conference on GMO crops, cotton subsidies, and African agricultural : http://www.malikounda.com/nouvelle_voir.php?idNouvelle =283
  

• Malian villages producing their own bio-fuel from the jatropha plant
  http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L23480506.htm
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatropha
  http://www.malifolkecenter.org/lowersection/Dep3_NRM/jatropha/mfc_jatropha_intro.html
    and http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN /aln40/jatropha.html
  http://newenergynews.blogspot .com/2007/06/jatropha-energy -in-mali.html
  http://www.reuters.com/article /email/idUSL2348050620070523
  

• Mali hosts international World Forum on Food Sovereignty in February, 2007 resulting in the amazing “Declaration of Nyeleni”.  To learn more, go to http://www.nyeleni2007.org and click on the “en” tab a the top right-hand corner of the page for the English version of the site.