The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, an organization dedicated to assisting Palestinian farmers in the fight for sovereignty over their trade and their land, was born in 1986. ElRahman, the organization’s board chairman, visited the United States for the first time this year to receive the Food Sovereignty Prize from the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance on October 15 in Des Moines, Iowa.

When President Barrack Obama stated in his recent State of the Union address that one avenue to advance the economy was to increase U.S. agricultural exports, I cringed.  Right out of Milton Friedman, export agriculture is the neo-liberal free market capitalist approach to agriculture that, if anything, has been successful in destroying family farmers. Obama’s announcement was yet another death-knell to the world’s family farmers. It was a gift to corporate agribusiness. It meant yet another wave of family farmers throughout the world being forced off the land resulting in another period of rural repression and dislocation. Don’t think when you read this that the scenario is somewhere other than the United States. This is a U.S. story as well.