ORFC Global 2021 Workshop

The community of Shashe in the central Masvingo province of Zimbabwe is home to 500 farming families. The agricultural calendar here is marked by four seasonal ceremonies and as well as many other rituals that celebrate the relationship of soil and water, that is key to their food sovereignty.

Shashe leader, Nelson Mudzingwa, says, “The soil is very important because every living organism is dependent on it. We were made of soil, live in the soil and walk on the soil. We build on the soil and we farm in the soil, and when we die we shall be returned to the soil. We are soil.” Water is also essential as “it is the blood of the soil and must flow within it, not above it. A living soil should be moist with life in it, allowing germination of plants and their growth. In our bodies water is also important as well as in all other living things that respire or transpire”.

Join Nelson Mudzwinga, La Via Campesina General Coordinator, Elizabeth Mpofu and Vongai Dube to talk about the spiritual beliefs that guide their farming practices.

Speakers:
Elizabeth Mpofu
Vongai Dube
Nelson Mudzingwa

#ORFCGlobal
https://orfc.org.uk/

Climate change is increasingly posing a challenge to agriculture development in Africa. The destruction caused by floods and the devastation by droughts across the continent demonstrate the threat posed by the unpredictable weather patterns.
This year, Zimbabwe is expecting its biggest harvest of maize in 20 years, a sign that the country could be ending its cycle of food deficits due to successive droughts and a troubled land reform program undertaken in the early 2000's.
Official data shows the country will harvest about 2.7 million metric tons of the staple grain. This would be almost 200 percent higher than last year.
Maize is a staple crop across much of eastern and southern Africa - and it's not just climate change that's causing problems, the Fall Army Worm is too. It's actually the caterpillar of a moth, native to the US. But it hasn't stayed there - the pest is spreading around the world, ruining harvests, like in southern Africa in 2017. But one project in Ghana is helping farmers to fight back against the hungry caterpillars with a smartphone app.
The Global Hunger Index says the western African country of Cameroon experiences moderate levels of hunger - but here conflict is the main reason for food insecurity. Farming has been greatly disrupted in the country’s Far North region where the army is fighting against a Boko Haram insurgency and the West where English speaking separatists are trying to create a breakaway state.


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#Africa #ClimateChange #Agriculture

This film presents an account of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities that had previously been covert, including actions in Iran, Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba, and Guatemala. The film includes interviews with CIA director Allen Dulles and Dick Bissel.
From archive.org/US National Archives.
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As described in the book,
Into the Fray: How NBC's Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News By Tom Mascaro

https://www.amazon.com/Into-Fr....ay-Washington-Docume

The Science of Spying, marked the arrival of Bob Rogers as a field reporter-producer. The program aired May 4, 1965, and tracked the roots of U.S. covert operations back to the 1950s, providing a stark account of clandestine initiatives in a time before public disclosures, congressional investigations, and Hollywood movies made the 1970s a difficult time to be an American spy. The "Pentagon Papers," the Pike and Church Committees, and thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor eventually revealed the CIA's complicity in assassination plots and interna-tional meddling, which Yates and Rogers had already seen up close. NBC management stood firm when The Science of Spying attracted criti-cism. Ad reps from Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBD&O) screened it and advised their client B. F. Goodrich Company to withdraw.31 BBD&O issued a statement saying the program violated the Goodrich advertising policy "in that it treats a controversial public issue in a way which may do harm to the government of the United States?" NBC countered that the documentary "fell within the broad outlines of the program policy origi-nally submitted to and accepted by the B. F. Goodrich agency, BBD&O."33 The CIA watched the program and tracked subsequent reactions in the national press. Viewers wrote to President Johnson complaining NBC News had given America's enemies negative propaganda.34 Yates may have antici-pated some adverse reactions to the program, but he never expected to be frightened by what he discovered. "

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