From Mali to Missouri: True/False Film Festival is Going Well in Columbia

I've traded in my short-sleeve shirts for my wool cap with ear flaps, going from over 100 degree temps to twenty-something and snowy here. I'm in town for the fourth annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. Started by the team that brought this cool, college town RagTag Cinemas, the Festival has grown into an amazing tribute to some of the year's best documentaries. I first met some of these folks when I was in town for Grub research, so it's been fun to return and see many familiar faces and to hear about all of the ongoing great local foods work still alive and well here. Tomorrow morning, we head out for the "Reel Gone Round-Up" screening of KING CORN in a closed-down stockyard auction house where I'll introduce the filmmaker and producer and do a Q&A. Just saw our first films: Sari's Mother and Enemies of Happiness, about a courageous, amazing Afghani woman who ran for a seat in Parliament and despite multiple assasination attempts, survived and won.

Listening to Ali Farka Toure & Settling Into My Time Zone

I’m home. It’s grey outside. The rain is coming down softly now. From my office window, I can see the brownstones across the street and in the distance I can just make out the outline of the Empire State Building across the borough, and the water. Before I left Bamako yesterday, I bought the last two CDs Ali Farka Toure produced before he passed away last year. I’m listening to his music now and remembering Cheikh’s translation of the lyrics. The songs were about Ali Farka Toure’s childhood in the Timbuktu, where Cheikh was raised as well. Ali Farka Toure was singing the suffering of the people of the desert, Cheikh explained, the suffering that he experienced, too. Sang Ali Farka Toure: When my hunger kept me up all night, I would lie awake, unable to sleep, and count the stars.
I think about these words now as my mind goes back to the hundreds of people I met at Nyeleni, a community five-continents-large of people fighting to ensure that no one, anywhere on our planet lies down at night with an empty stomach, and that everyone, someday, will be able to fall asleep, the stars remaining uncounted.

Image: A village on the road from Nyeleni to Bamako.

Dispatch from Mali on Worldchanging.com

Read my dispatch, "Food is Power," here on WorldChanging.com.

A Visit to a High School in Bamako

In Nyeleni, I interviewed two young men about a program they had started in a Bamako high school to encourage girls’ education. The program includes a scholoarship program for girls as well as a curriculum about agriculture and agroecology. The idea, as the director of the program explains, is to encourage the girls interested in agriculture as a way to support their interest in working on development in Mali.

They arranged for Amadou Diop and Ben Burkett (both from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives) and me to speak to the students at Ecovie, the school that houses the program. I reached deep into my memory of French (I even remember how to say “precautionary principle”!) to give a talk to more than 100 high school kids about what food sovereignty means and why it is relevant to them. We began by asking if any of them knew what the term meant. One bold girl stood up. “It means people in a country being able to feed themselves and have enough to eat before they export all their food.” Not too bad as far as definitions go; that’s certainly a big part of it. Needless to say we were impressed!

Among questions they asked us were whether GMOs held promise to help feed Africa, what a healthy diet is, and what they could do practically to improve the economy and environment in Mali. On the GMO question, we shared with them what we know from our experience with GMOs here in the States: that all of the evidence so far raises serious concerns about the environmental and health impacts of the technology. We also stressed--as folks at the Forum had talked about--that another huge concern about the introduction of genetically modified foods in Africa is that it creates dependence on buying seeds and paying technology fees from the very farmers with the fewest financial resources in the world to do so. We talked about how this would disrupt the age-old traditions of seed saving and sharing that are the building block of successful farming.

Images: That's us, on the dais, and the banner for the talk.

The Misticas

Every morning of the Forum, a group of delegates has presented a mistica—a performance, often with song and ceremony, to celebrate food traditions and cultures. Today, more than two dozen pastoralists and nomads, in their traditional dress, proceeded down the aisle in the main amphitheater, chanting and singing. On stage, several of them sang songs, including shepherds from Italy and a pastoralist from North Africa. Yesterday, the Japanese delegation set up a beautiful tea ceremony and explained the rituals of the ceremony as they poured the steaming water into delicate cups. The first day we witnessed a display of seeds, representing the honoring of seed saving that dates back to the dawn of agriculture.

Dispatch from Mali on GNN.tv

Read my post on my brother's Guerrilla News Network here.

Who's Here?

Unlike the World Social forums, Nyeleni is an invite-only forum. Unlike most of the invite-only events out there, this isn’t exclusively for the rich or well-connected. The organizers made it a closed Forum so that they could control the size (already 600 people is an amazingly huge number to house and feed every day). It was also a closed Forum so that the organizers could ensure that the delegates were as diverse as possible, with a mix of regions (Europe, North America (Canada, USA, and Mexico), Latin America and Caribbean (without Mexico), Africa, Southeast-East Asia, South Asia, West-Central Asia) and sectors, and a balance between men and women. They succeeded.

Some of the delegates from Nyeleni...

Shasha Sail, World March of Women (India)

Muhammad Ikhwan, Federation of Indonesian Peasant Union (Indonesia)

Ayumi Kinezuka, farmer, Japan Family Farmers Movement (Japan)

Arthur Williams, Friends of the Earth (Sierra Leone)

Omer Doana, Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (Palestine)

Xiomara Agiular de Zelaya, Coordinadora Nacional de Officiales en Retiro (Nicaragua)

Sven Borkhus, Mayor of Alvdal, Norway

Fanta Sinayoko from Selingue, one of the masterminds of the meals for Nyeleni