Published on May 14, 2013
- Reports:
Food & Water Watch closely examined five years of State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the strategy, tactics and U.S. foreign policy objectives to foist pro-agricultural biotechnology policies worldwide.
Published on December 04, 2012
- Issue Briefs:
Whenever you read a report or hear on the news that the economy is growing, what you are hearing is that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing. But while GDP measures economic activity, it does not measure the distribution of the wealth created by that activity, or the quality of our air and water, or the quality of our schools. Yet, when we hear GDP is growing many of us believe that the country is doing better than it was. Given that economists, politicians and the media treat GDP this way, it is no surprise that we think this way.
Published on August 16, 2012
- Fact Sheets:
Enbridge Inc., Canada's largest transporter of crude oil, claims to no longer be pursuing its 'Trailbreaker' plan as first proposed in 2008: to run Canadian tar sands oil through an aging pipeline that stretches across northern New England from Montreal, Canada, to Portland, Maine. Yet given that efforts to send tar sands oil south to refineries in Texas through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — as well as efforts to send the oil west from Alberta to British Columbia — have face stiff opposition and stalled, New England remains at risk.
Published on July 27, 2012
- Fact Sheets:
The United States and the European Union are moving toward privatizing their fisheries management systems through catch shares, while Iceland, with one of the world’s oldest and most comprehensive catch share programs, is struggling to find a way to dismantle its program. Why? The answer is that catch shares have failed Iceland’s fisheries and the nation as a whole.
Published on July 02, 2012
- Reports:
Europe Report: By supporting factory fish farming, the soy industry could not only help to expand an industry that degrades marine environments, threatens wild fish populations and damages coastal communities, it could also extend its own negative impacts. Already, industrial soy production has led to the prevalence of genetically modified crops on U .S. farmland and in consumer food-products, caused massive deforestation in South America and displaced indigenous communities living in areas now used to grow soy.
Published on May 09, 2012
- Reports:
The United Nations General Assembly declared in July 2010 that access to clean water and sanitation is an essential human right, calling on countries and organizations to help provide access for the 884 million people currently without safe drinking water and the more than 2.6 billion people without basic sanitation.
Published on March 07, 2012
- Reports:
Within the past decade, technological advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” have enabled the oil and gas industry to extract large quantities of oil and natural gas from shale formations in the United States. However, the practice has proven controversial. Pollution from modern drilling and fracking has caused widespread environ- mental and public health problems and created serious, long-term risks to underground water resources.
In this report, Food & Water Watch reviews the risks and costs of shale development that have been demonstrated in the United States, including economic costs that run counter to industry-backed claims about the economic benefits of the practice.
Food & Water Watch then summarizes the state of shale development in six selected countries: France, Bulgaria, Poland, South Africa, China and Argentina.
Published on January 09, 2012
- Fact Sheets:
From June 20–22, 2012 in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, heads of state, UN agencies, and global stakeholders will convene for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) — commonly known as “Rio+20.”
The world is at a crossroads: the convergence of global economic meltdown and unchecked global warming is driving action in the streets, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. We must seize this momentum and use Rio+20 to force a paradigm shift.
Published on April 20, 2011
- Reports:
Veolia Environnement est la plus grande entreprise de services d’eau au monde. Depuis son siège social à Paris, Veo- lia opère sous de nombreux noms, dans des dizaines de pays et à travers des centaines de filiales. Mais en dépit de sa présence internationale, le cœur de ses activités reste en France.
Published on February 07, 2011
- Reports:
Europe: Globalization has fundamentally changed agriculture across Europe. The idyllic image of small farms with sustainable agriculture has been replaced with agricultural cogs producing food-ingredient inputs for international industrial agri-businesses. The pork chops and chickens on European tables begin their lives far away on soybean plantations in Latin America, where the feed for European livestock is harvested.
Published on September 22, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
Basée à Paris, en France, Veolia Environnement est la première entreprise mondiale dans le secteur de l’eau et de traitement de l’eau usée, générant en 2009 un chiffre d’affaires de 50 milliard $ et un revenu d’exploitation de 2,9 milliard $. La société offre un service de distribution d’eau dans 66 pays et détient Veolia Water North America, le plus important fournisseur en eau aux Etats Unis, servant plus de 14 millions de personnes dans environ 650 communautés nord américaines.
Published on July 26, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
Formal recognition of the human right to water by the United Nations is a vital first step to ensure that all people have access to this most basic human need. Yet the United States government has historically opposed this movement. It is time for the administration of Barack Obama to take a stand for human rights and throw its support behind a U.N. resolution that codifies the human right to water.
Published on June 16, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
The open water aquaculture and salmon industries tout fish farms as an opportunity to create jobs. Given current economic struggles worldwide, any potential for a new industry to increase job opportunities is hard to dismiss. Viable, gainful employment is badly needed. So we decided to investigate these claims. Unfortunately, we found that the jobs created by fish farms are unstable, in some cases undesirable, and are very few in number related to the number of fish produced. In fact, the trend in the industry has been to cut jobs to increase “efficiency” (meaning profit), and to abandon communities if better sites arise elsewhere. Moreover, due to pollution, escapes of farmed fish, and other problems that negatively impact wildlife or aesthetic values of the area, open water fish farms can threaten previously existing jobs in tourism, recreational fishing and commercial fishing. Open water finfish farming (including salmon farming) is a failed promise that offers nothing more than some short-term advantages to the local economy at the cost of long-term environmental, social and economic damage.
Published on June 06, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
Factory fish farming in the ocean, a practice also known as offshore aquaculture, is the mass production of fish in huge, often overcrowded cages in the open water. Over the past decade, the fish farming industry, the U.S. Congress and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have discussed creating a plan for expanding offshore aquaculture to federal waters. Proponents of this industry have often boasted that it will lead to increased seafood for our country, or even the world.
Published on June 03, 2010
- Reports:
Des débordements d’égout à Milwaukee, Wisconsin, à l'eau potable contaminée à Gloucester, dans l’état du Massachusetts, de sérieux problèmes ont affecté les municipalités à travers les Etats-Unis suite au transfert de la gestion de leur eau ou égouts vers United Water, succursale de Suez Environnement.
Published on March 06, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
Over the past five years, a little-noticed wave of investors has been snapping up fields and forests in some of the poorest developing countries. Governments, sovereign wealth funds and companies from rapidly industrializing or oil-rich developing nations have purchased or leased millions of acres of land in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The trend is likely to continue. In June 2009, representatives from 200 financial and agribusiness firms gathered in New York to discuss agricultural investments in the developing world. These investments in some of the most productive agricultural land threaten to further undermine food security and sustainable rural economic development in the developing world.
Published on March 04, 2010
- Fact Sheets:
In June 2009, the Paris City Council announced that the city’s water system would revert to public control at the end of 2009, after a century of private control. Paris is one of more than 40 French municipalities and urban communities that reclaimed public control of their water systems over the last decade to reduce prices and improve services.
Published on December 19, 2009
- Fact Sheets:
The Peru Free Trade Agreement is based on the same flawed agriculture policies that have already threatened U.S. tomato, bell pepper and cucumber growers in the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Peru FTA would provide permanent access to the U.S. market for Peruvian fresh and processed vegetables as well as other crops. American vegetable farmers would be especially vulnerable to Peruvian fresh and processed vegetable imports since Peruvian asparagus, green pea, and onion imports are already significant and growing. American vegetable companies are already investing in processing plants in Peru to take advantage of lower farmland, labor, and environmental costs.
Published on December 07, 2009
- Fact Sheets:
We all know that driving a gas-guzzling SUV contributes to climate change, but did you know that what you put on your plate could too? Here‚ how your food choices affect climate change and what you, as a consumer, can do about it.
Published on November 04, 2009
- Reports:
Its waters covering about 50 square miles5 of Kenya‚ Great Rift Valley, Lake Naivasha (elevation 6,200 feet) sits 62 miles north of Nairobi. Communities thrived along its shores 4,000 years ago. The Maasai people long grazed their cattle along the lake‚ banks.6
