A Honduran-owned and foreign-financed company has been attempting to build a dam on the sacred Gualcarque River in the Lenca community of Rio Blanco.
Harvesting Justice
"We won't let the government or foreign companies own or exploit our resources," says Saul Atanasio Roque Morales, a Xoxocotla indigenous man from the state of Morelos, Mexico.
Multinational corporations are moving into Central America to exploit gold and other minerals, rivers, forests, and agricultural lands. One area of high interest in the corporate feeding frenzy is the indigenous Lenca region in the southwest of Honduras.
Economists never seem to connect the eco in economy to the eco in ecosystem; but as financial, economic, and climate collapse continues, people must rise to change our world's direction.
'What we Garifuna face is largely the same things faced by people all over Latin America, and in fact the world.'
On vivid display there is the search for solutions to the problems addressed in this Harvesting Justice series: the piracy of land, indigenous territories, agriculture, food systems and the global commons.
When individuals are forced to travel outside their community for groceries, not only does their access to healthy food suffer. The economy does, too.
Just Food in New York City is nimbly doing just what its name suggests: building food justice.
New Mexicans are focused on creating a 'regional foodshed,' a local food ecosystem that bases its boundaries on ecological parameters like water flow, rather than on arbitrary state lines.
The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United aims to fundamentally shift the power structures that allow the inequities to exist in the food industry in the first place.