Lucy Medina Serrano grew up with nine siblings in El Castaño, a tiny village along a river on El Salvador’s border with Guatemala. Her family has always relied on local groundwater from the well outside their home to grow tomatoes, peppers, yuca, aloe, basil, papaya, bananas and more. But for years, sugarcane processing plants upriver …
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Misael was born into a family of Indigenous farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico — his connection to the land goes back generations. Today, he works for Flor y Canto, an AJWS grantee organization that mobilizes local communities to fight for their rights to land, water and other natural resources. In 2005, the Mexican government restricted farmers’ …
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After a five-year struggle, AJWS grantee Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (ProDESC) secured a major win in June when federal energy authorities in Mexico announced they had definitively cancelled a massive energy project slated to be built on the lands of an Indigenous community. The project — “Gunaa Sicarú” — was awarded to a …
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Although the majority of Burma’s people live off the land, few Burmese laws give them any control over it. In most cases, the government owns the land, and it’s not difficult for government officials and agencies to take it back—or let a major corporation step in to develop it for their own profit. It’s particularly …
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The rapid growth of mineral mining across Mexico has ravaged local communities. Poverty and disease have soared for workers and people who live near mines and other development projects. The digging has stripped local land—ruining it for farming—and polluted sources of drinking water, multiplying health problems and miscarriages.
Read MoreParashat Beha’alotcha contains one of the many episodes of grumbling during the Israelites’ journey through the desert. Lamenting their limited diet of manna, they nostalgically remember the variety of food they ate in Egypt. A close look at their complaint, and the symbolism of the foods they crave, can shed light on the contemporary issue of global hunger and the current debate over how international food aid from the United States should be delivered.
Read MoreParashat Vayikra catalogues the slicing, pinching, quartering, flaying, scooping, sprinkling and burning that comprised ancient Israel’s practice of korbanot—sacrifices offered in expiation, celebration or thanksgiving to God. Ritual sacrifice was a thoroughly hands-on affair, with both offeror and priest physically participating in the labor. Such gritty involvement in the process must have channeled primal drives …
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