Mexican Farmers Visit Alma for Common Table Forum
A contingent of 15 farmers, indigenous leaders and agricultural
representatives from Mexico will visit Alma June 15 to 21 to
participate in the second annual Common Table Forum, an interchange
between Mexican and U.S. Midwestern farmers.
Sponsored by Alma College with a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, the
Common Table Forum strives to increase binational understanding of
agricultural conditions, share best practices, discover common ground,
and develop proposals that address the common needs of farmers in the
United States and Mexico, says Ed Lorenz, the Alma College faculty
member who is organizing the forum.
“The invited Mexican participants are from the State of Chihuahua and
represent various agricultural sectors in northern Mexico, commercial
farmers, farm advisors, and campesino farmer-ranchers and subsistence
indigenous farmers from the Tarahumara culture of the Sierra Madre,”
says Lorenz.
During the week the Mexican group will tour Alma College and the city
of Alma, local farms, and the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College and
Cultural Center in Mount Pleasant.
The public is invited to a free keynote speech launching the Common
Table by award-winning Michigan filmmaker Christopher Bedford, who
produces advocacy films to help farmers and consumers promote the
transition to a humane, sustainable local food economy.
His presentation at 7 p.m. Monday, June 16 in the Swanson Academic
Center Room 113 at Alma College will include a showing of “What Will We
Eat?" a 26-minute film that reveals the growing crisis in industrial
agricultural and how a grassroots coalition of consumers and small
farmers is inventing a healthy, humane, homegrown alternative.
The keynote presentation is jointly sponsored by the Common Table and
the Environmentally Concerned Citizens Organization (ECCO).
The Common Table Project was developed in 2007 to initiate a global
perspective on the cultural, economic, environmental, political, social
and technological challenges and impacts on agricultural practices and
rural life, especially on the sustainability of food supplies and
survival of rural communities and indigenous cultures.
“Recommendations will be developed to make rural life, migration and
agriculture more humane, with renewed respect for life, human
communities and human rights,” says Lorenz. “The Common Table
Project positions Alma to play a pivotal role in the global discussion
of agricultural change and the current food crisis. The Alma meeting
will follow by 10 days the United Nations meetings in Rome on the
global food problem.”
The first Common Table Forum occurred in Chihuahua in August 2007.
Funding for the forum is provided in part by a grant from the W.K.K.
Fund of the Grand Haven Area Community Foundation, supported by the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation as part of a trustee mini-grant program
designated by Dottie Johnson, the wife of former Alma College Trustee
Mart Johnson.
ECCO is a local educational organization dedicated to informing the
public of the environmental, health, economic and ethical impacts of
agricultural practices. Its goal is to do on the local level what the
Common Table is attempting globally — to bring together farmers and
other rural residents to promote sustainable and otherwise responsible
agriculture.
Posted: Thu, June 5th, 2008 at 11:18AM
