The World Food Day – bottom up approach?

Saturday we attended the event to commemorate The World Food Day 2010 arranged by ActionAid Tanzania, Oxfam and Haki Ardhi. 

It was a highly successful day!! We did the media stunt with the car, build together with volunteers from different organizations and university students around Tanzania, which was shown to all the participants including different media. The event shows and reflects how food security is compromised by foreign biofuel investments. 

In addition to that was our spokespersons were interviewed by BBC News. In the afternoon we had a world premiere on a short documentary presenting our key finding from the fieldtrip to Kisarawe and Rufiji. The documentary was prepared with help from DC Studio (we hope to be able to share it with all of you here on the side very soon!). 

Lastly but not least, we gave our speech (also posted on our blog) and presented a representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food security with a golden FOOD right FIGHTER Future Award! The idea behind the Future Award was to approach the stakeholders who are involved in the process of making the policies on biofuel investment in a positive and humorous way. Our message was clear: the stakeholders hold the Tanzanian future in the hollow of their hands and therefor they should start acting today – not tomorrow!

It was a long day (especially for those of us who unfortunately don’t speak Swahili) but worth the wait. Our approach really worked out very well and we are now in contact with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food security and arranging a dialogue meeting where we will hand them a report with our main findings and discuss what should be done in shorter and longer perspectives to Punch Hunger in Tanzania.

All the way through the training on the Global Platform we have being talking a lot about how important to the do the campaign ‘bottom-up’ and go to the streets, raise awareness and inspire people to ‘be the change’ and become FOOD right FIGHTERS themselves.

The World Food Day was the day we took action! After the event inside the walls of the Blue Pearl Hotel we took the media stunt with the car to the streets and the people. Some of the Swahili speaking students from the Global Change course explained the event and we talked to people who walked by on the streets (see the media stunt on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRkqDZ_9h-I&feature=player_embedded).


We experienced that, even though it is an upcoming issue in the media and newspapers like The Guardian and The Citizen have been writing about it, the ‘guy on the street’ did not know that the biofuel investments is a treat to food security in Tanzania.

But we cannot do this alone - and that is why we need YOU to take action! 

Our next public event is already next week on Tuesday the 26^th of October and you are ALL invited. We really want you to participate in the event and help us create public debate about biofuels in relation to the food security – how biofuel investment without a policy that ensures food security will increase poverty and hunger the Tanzania. Time and venue is on the drawing board but we will hopefully be able to post it on the blog later today – and you are of course always very much welcome to write us an email: msglobalchange2010@gmail.com