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With three quarters of the world's 852 million men and women who suffer from hunger depending on farming for survival, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has invited Latin American leaders to a conference next week aimed at forging strategies to help lift millions out of their grinding poverty.
The five-day International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) will be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil from 6-10 March, the FAO said, stressing that new development opportunities in rural areas would offer an escape from hunger by providing more equitable access to basic land and water resources. "We have just 10 years to reach 2015, the target date set by the international community to reduce by half the number of hungry people in the world. Since the very poorest are landless farmers everywhere it will not be possible to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) unless we find sustainable solutions to the challenge existing in the world's rural areas," said Parviz Koohafkan, Executive Secretary of ICARRD. The MDGs are a set of eight targets that were established at a 2000 UN Summit aimed at reducing major global ills such as poverty, illiteracy and hunger by 2015. The FAO said that the Conference should foster alliances between governments, small farmers' organizations, international institutions, donors and civil society as a means of assisting the world's poorest people to gain better access to basic productive resources. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf will attend the gathering, to which heads of state of all Latin American countries have been invited. Mr. Diouf has urged FAO's Member States to take an active part in ICARRD in order to identify options and opportunities for reducing poverty and hunger in rural areas. FAO said that the Conference, which will receive financial and logistical support from the Brazilian Government, will involve meetings and debates revolving around five main themes, which will then be the subject of case studies and papers. These themes will include policies and experiences that have improved resource access for the poorest; how to improve local natural resource planning and management capabilities; identifying new development opportunities; combining such concepts as agrarian reform, social justice and sustainable development, and the primary role of food sovereignty. FAO said that the Conference, which will be opened by the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, would conclude with a final declaration and plan of action. UN - www.un.org
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
---should listen carefully to what is said at the conference and not try to give lessons to others where they themselves failed !