Cocoa Bans and Palm Oil Militias Squeeze Global Smallholders
August 12, 2026
Ghanaian cocoa regulations and Honduran state crackdowns criminalize smallholders while palm oil syndicates and climate-driven heat waves devastate rural communities. Against this enclosures of the food commons, peasant cooperatives in Indonesia and Brazil mount localized resistance through alternative land distribution and agroecological organizing.
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Is Ghana saving cocoa or criminalising 800,000 farmers under sweeping new protections?
The world’s second-largest cocoa producer wants to shield it from mining and decline, but sweeping new protections risk turning ordinary farming choices into serious crimes.
- geopolitics
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A Fragile Food Regime
As food inflation worsens, governments intervene while growing unrest challenges the inequities embedded in global food systems. The post A Fragile Food Regime appeared first on Phenomenal World.
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‘Danger no longer only comes from the hitmen, but from the state’: the Honduran farmers labelled terrorists for protecting their land
After another massacre of smallholders – who are subjected to violence from palm oil firms and drug traffickers – the country’s new Trump-backed government has criminalised community leaders Sitting on the back of the motorcycle, 15-year-old Orlean* heard gunshots. A moment later, the bike crashed.…
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Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back
For years, John Deere had actively made repairing their tractors near-impossible for anyone but itself and the few “authorized” repair shops—regardless of the ability of its customers to actually visit such shops. Now, in a major win for farmers and right to repair advocates, John Deere must soon pr…
- media and technology
- AI governance
- structural power
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Migrant Workers Face Housing Crisis in Summer of Fire
Fleeing farmworkers are allowed only two nights at emergency shelters.
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CLOC Mesoamerican Encounter Highlights Popular Peasant Feminism and Calls Against Fascist Policies
In its collective declaration, the Mesoamerican Women’s Articulation of CLOC-LVC denounced what it described as fascist policies expanding across the region. The post CLOC Mesoamerican Encounter Highlights Popular Peasant Feminism and Calls Against Fascist Policies appeared first on La Via Campesina…
- food sovereignty
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Indonesia: SPI inaugurates Coffee Plantation Cooperative, Reinforcing the Agrarian Reform Struggle
The plantation was established on land won through peasant struggles, and the cooperative forms part of SPI’s strategy to strengthen peasants’ economic institutions. The post Indonesia: SPI inaugurates Coffee Plantation Cooperative, Reinforcing the Agrarian Reform Struggle appeared first on La Via C…
- food sovereignty
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Brazil: The collective role of arts and culture in the fight of the MST
“We need to connect this production, this creative action of the people, to a society project where we overcome the exploitative relationships faced by the working class." The post Brazil: The collective role of arts and culture in the fight of the MST appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
- food sovereignty
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Fields, greenhouses or vertical farms: what is the best way to grow food in a changing climate?
Aaron Watkins/Shutterstock When most people picture British farming, they probably imagine fields of wheat, potatoes or vegetables stretching across the countryside. But some of the food on supermarket shelves is produced in environments that look very different. A tomato might spend its entire life…
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Amílcar Cabral linked soil health to human freedom – the Guinea-Bissau leader’s ideas matter more than ever today
Up to 80% of Africa’s cultivated land is now degraded by intensive farming and climate change. Together with development economist Carlos Lopes and earth politics researcher Lesley Green, environmental researcher Anselmo Matusse recently co-edited a book of translations of agronomist and liberation…
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Pesticide exposure at work may increase motor neurone disease risk – new study
Huntstock/Getty Being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, can be devastating. ALS is the most common form of motor neurone disease, a neurodegenerative condition that affects people’s ability to speak, eat, breathe and swallow. It is debilitating a…
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Canada’s last peach breeder is growing fruit for the future
As you bite into a juicy peach this summer, thank Niagara. The southern Ontario region grows more than half of Canada’s tender fruits: more than 70 per cent of our peaches, plus many fragrant baskets of nectarines, plums, pears, cherries, grapes and apricots. Despite the bounty, climate change is ta…
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Why rice crops could be in for a weird year
Researchers explain how El Niño and global warming are combining to create "the haves and the have-nots."