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SARA MERSHA

Sara Mersha is the director of grantmaking and advocacy at Grassroots International. She was born in Ethiopia but has spent most of her life in the US. Grassroots International is a non-profit organization that works all over the world to help small farmers and other small producers, indigenous peoples and women, win resource rights to land, water and food.

Do you think Grassroots International’s emphasis on resource rights requires reimagining democracy as a continually evolving process as opposed to a system where people just cast their vote in a ballot box every few years?

At its core, resource rights is about guaranteeing the human rights to land, water and food sovereignty as well as climate justice. To ensure these rights, it’s important for people to be able to exercise a deep level of democracy. For example, food sovereignty was defined at the Nyeleni Forum on Food Sovereignty as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’.

This requires respect for local processes, for community members to come together and discuss these issues so that they can decide together how they want their food systems to be set up – what kind of food is produced, who produces it, and how it is produced in a way that is healthy for people and the planet. Similarly, with rights to land, and with climate justice.

In February 2016, we came back from visiting our partners in Mexico – most of which are indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas who have a long practice of deep democracy. Each community or village has a general assembly where community members come together to make decisions. They name people to represent them as members of the communal authority, and those members see their role as serving their broader communities and implementing the decisions made by the general assembly. More and more indigenous communities throughout Mexico are using the power they have through their local assemblies and decision-making processes to create communal statutes to protect their natural resources (such as land, water, and food systems) from extractive industries such as mining companies.

In the US, there are other examples of communities passing resolutions at the local level to ensure food sovereignty (such as a number of local resolutions in Maine about the right to produce and sell food at a local level) and protection of natural resources (such as resolutions to prevent fracking or other forms of extraction, through resolutions on the Rights of Nature).

Why do you think NGOs have not been more eager to get input from grassroots organizations in the countries they are trying to help?

There are vast differences in the types of NGOs that operate at the international level. Unfortunately, the top-down model that has been used by large-scale institutions like the World Bank is often replicated among some large international NGOs and foundations. Our model at Grassroots International is about solidarity with social movements that are at the forefront of working toward the kinds of changes the planet needs. For that reason, it is important to us that we have close relationships with groups in each country where we work, and that they let us know what the priority areas are that they would like us to fund. We also have a reciprocal relationship based on mutual trust and transparency, so that they can also share their feedback with us about our work as a whole, including advice for our advocacy and education work in the US.

Many NGOs rely on commercials featuring starving children to get donations. Do you think this has a negative effect?

Grassroots International’s work is focused on solidarity, not charity. Our partners are powerful agents of change, and we strive to communicate about their work with others in a way that educates others about the amazing work they do, and about our responsibility, honor and opportunity to work to address the structural issues that are the root causes of the conditions that peasants and Indigenous peoples face throughout the world.

Depicting people in the Global South or impoverished communities as destitute and in need of help feeds into the North-as-savior myth that drives many international development models. This model ignores both the root causes of poverty and hardship (like corporate deregulation, unjust trade policies and a long history of economic and political piracy, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism, etc) and the power and resilience of local communities to develop and implement vibrant alternatives.

Why do you think access to water, food and land are often not cited as basic human rights, and do you see this changing any time soon?

While some may associate human rights more with civil and political rights, we have witnessed over the past decade a marked increase in the recognition of land, water and food (and other economic, social and cultural rights) as human rights. That said, rights to land, water and food are still too often overlooked because those rights stand in the way of increased commodification of natural resources for the profit of industries and private investors. Likewise, the loss of the commons (including water systems) is a necessary step to feed the neoliberal model. In such a system, a river’s utility is measured in its ability to generate power via a dam to energize mining operations or industrial agricultural projects, regardless of the human and environmental damage such schemes cause.

Many critics of globalization have been lumped into the so-called anti-globalization movement. Is your organization’s advocacy of globalization from below an attempt to counter that negative term?

Grassroots’ partner La Vía Campesina is one of the social movements that has promoted the idea of what movements can and need to globalize – their slogan is ‘Globalize the Struggle, Globalize Hope!’ The importance of linkages between social movements across geographies and across sectors is also key to our philosophy and theory of change.

What would trade agreements look like if grassroots organizations in the Global South had the same influence over the terms of the agreements as corporations and pharmaceutical companies?

I think the short answer is that if grassroots organizations in the Global South had their way, there would be no free-trade agreements at all! Some of our partners and allies work towards the goal of fair trade – based on the principles of the solidarity economy. ■