Our newsletter, the Defender, comes out on average twice a year. A subscription is one of the benefits of being a member, when you contribute at the $25 level or greater, so if you would like to be added to our mailing list please join us! The Defender already reaches over three thousand individuals and organizations in all fifty states, as well as two dozen countries spanning the globe.
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If you would like to receive multiple copies of the Defender for grassroots organizing in your own community, please contact the FFD office (#608-260-0900) and we'll get them to you. Limited quantities of various back issues are also available. We usually request a $1 donation per copy to help cover printing expenses and postage.
Below is a limited selection of articles from recent issues of the Defender. You are welcome to republish or redistribute any of this material as long as you attribute the source. We would also appreciate knowing about when and where our articles reappear.
Stray Voltage - An Unrecognized Health Hazard
By: Kurt Gutknecht
printed in the Spring 2006 issue of the Defender
Like the vast majority of Americans, I thought it was a rare phenomenon, an unfortunate consequence of “bad wiring” or something. I was woefully mistaken. As the editor of an agricultural magazine in Wisconsin, I had occasionally interviewed farm families and dutifully recorded their complaints about stray voltage without thinking too much about the topic. Some of their complaints seemed unusual. Some families said electrical conditions had driven them out of their homes. They blamed stray voltage for depression, heart attacks and numerous other ailments. Their lives had been ruined. Their cows and other livestock had died in droves, after suffering from a harrowing cluster of ailments – birth defects, misshapen limbs, unusual metabolic disorders.
My response wasn’t too different from that of most Americans. I heard these farmers but I wasn’t really listening. read more...
Agrarian Reform in Venezuela - Excerpt From a Trip Diary
By: Stephen Bartlett, Agricultural Missions and Family Farm Defenders board member
printed in the Fall 2005 issue of the Defender
During an August visit to Venezuela, after all the meetings where I worked interpreting for North American delegates to various social movement assemblies, I finally got to go out with Venezuelan, Peruvian and Ecuadorean campesino activists to learn what was happening with the Agrarian Reform Program now on-going in the Revolutionary Bolivarian Venezuela. Getting control of Venezuelans oil production and channeling the profits for the benefit of the impoverished majority was not the only thing going on in Venezuela these days, although a huge breakthrough; the Chávez government was also in the midst of a very confrontation, dangerous and truly revolutionary process of land redistribution and policy reform through an agricultural cooperativism movement and government support of sustainable agriculture to feed the nation. read more...
The Struggle for Food Sovereignty and Rural Justice in East Timor
By: John E. Peck, executive director, Family Farm Defenders
printed in the Fall 2005 issue of the Defender
In August 2005 I had the unique opportunity to participate in a sister city delegation to East Timor, a small island nation of about one million people north of Australia. Since Feb. 2001, Madison Wisconsin has enjoyed formal sister-city ties with Ainaro, a district capitol in Timor’s southern mountains. This grassroots solidarity relationship stretches back over a decade to 1992 when concerned Madison residents formed a local chapter of the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) to support the indigenous independence movement seeking to overthrow Indonesian occupation. When Portugal abandoned its colonial empire in 1975, Indonesia staged a brutal invasion of East Timor with the tacit approval of the United States, Britain, Australia and other western powers, leading to the genocide of close to a third of the nation’s people. In 1999 East Timor finally won its independence through a U.N. sponsored referendum but not after Indonesian troops and their paramilitaries committed mass atrocities and destroyed 70-80% of the nation’s infrastructure. For many Timorese, political independence remains bittersweet as long as the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity remain at large. read more...
The Molasses Stir – Off: Fair Trade Fundraising for Today’s School Children
By: Lori Matthews, Lowell Home and School Association, Madison, WI
printed in the Summer 2005 issue of the Defender
When I was a kid the word fundraising meant The Molasses Stir-Off, the annual community gathering where locals converged on John Stuffle’s farm to make molasses. Volunteers would strip cane, feed the stems into the press and skim the top of the bubbling brew as it made its way through the cooking troughs. read more...
