Posts Tagged ‘Angus Gillis’
Children Playing at Angus Gillis
In November and December, two of IDEX’s partner groups in South Africa were featured in the news!
Angus Gillis was featured in the most recent edition of Business Link out of South Africa. The article highlights their great work in grassroots community development in Grahamstown, SA and the many facets of Angus Gillis’ efforts in health, education, and self-help groups. (To read the article in its original format click on http://www.businesslink.co.za/magazine/ and flip to page 8.)
South African corn is a diverse crop- GM seeds would reduce farmers' ability to harvest and save their seeds, degrading that diversity and endangering farmers' independence.
Biowatch, another IDEX partner out of South Africa, was in The Ecologist. Biowatch speaks out against the co-option of local seed by big agribusinesses Monsanto and Dupont, specifically in stopping a current proposal for a merger between Dupont’s subsidiary, Pioneer Seed, and Pannar Seed that would expand their control of the seed business.
Biowatch and other activist groups argue that allowing foreign corporate control of South Africa’s seed supply would erode the availability of traditional conventional seed varieties, hurt export business with countries opposed to biotech crops, and force farmers deep into debt to pay for expensive seeds that are the patented properties of the U.S. corporations.
IDEX has recently selected 4 new partners in South Africa:
We will be sharing news from these partners in the coming weeks and months.
For those of you who are in South Africa, don’t miss the next episode in the Masupatsela Series, which features the work of Angus Gillis.
“Game reserves in South Africa have an unpleasant legacy of people being thrown off land in order to turn the area into a playground for the rich. Kwandwe Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape near Grahamstown has decided to do things differently. The Reserve was formed by combining three agricultural farms into 20,000 hectares of land and restocking this land with wildlife. The farm workers living on the land form part of the Reserve’s community and are trained through various program to become staff members or to develop skills that they can use to advance their families and communities.”
Read more here and watch the trailer below.
