Shopping to meet the locavore ethos ("eat local") is never simple, but taking a follow-the-money approach enables shoppers to support products that share their values. And this is where bananas come in. Buying Equal Exchange bananas from a local food co-op not only keeps money cycling through your community, but also ensures that communities of farmers in Ecuador and Peru are receiving a fair price for their products, which then keeps money flowing through their communities, as well. In a way, eating fair trade bananas gives you a local eater two-for-one, and you support both your community and the cooperative community of farmers that grew the fruit. It may not have been grown physically close to your co-op, but it creates an interconnected network of solidarity between communities.

In Beaten Down, Worked Up, former New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse devotes an entire chapter to the history of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), from the early strikes in the 1990s to the Campaign for Fair Food today, including a detailed look at the ground-breaking success of the Fair Food Program!

On Friday, August 9, 2019, after more than 18 months of illegal and very abusive detention by the U.S. and Canadian-backed Honduran regime, political prisoners Edwin Espinal and Raul Martínez were let out of a maximum security military prison. They are out on bail pending their “trial” on trumped up charges filed by the regime.

Two days after the November 2016 elections that brought him to office, president-elect Donald Trump had a 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. “We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful, some difficulties,” Trump told the media afterward. He later revealed that the major “difficulty” discussed was the North Korean nuclear threat.
 

By MARTHA MENDOZA and GARANCE BURKE, The Associated Press

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Four LGBT+ people are murdered every day in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to “alarming” new research released on Thursday by a regional network of gay rights groups.

At least 1,300 LGBT+ people have been murdered in the region in the past five years, with Colombia, Mexico and Honduras accounting for nearly 90 percent of all deaths, according to data collected by the network of 10 groups.

At least five union activists were murdered in Guatemala in 2018, and union leaders and members in Guatemala and Honduras suffered dozens of incidents over the past year for standing up for worker rights, including restriction of union rights, intimidation, harassment, illegal detention, death threats and attempted murder, according to two new reports.

‘Agroecology is a revolution! …we are killing the Earth…the most urgent task we face is the search for ways to protect it. ’ Marlen Sanchez, director, Latin American Agroecology Institute (IALA), Nicaragua

From 11 to 21 July, Friends of the ATC, a solidarity organisation with the Nicaraguan Rural Workers Association (ATC), hosted a ‘Solidarity with Nicaragua’ delegation with twelve participants from the US and UK.