Are you hungry for justice? Do you want to resist the WTO, US Empire and
Corporate Globalization? Are you fed up with genetically engineered trees,
food, fish, future? Do you believe that access to healthy food and clean
water is a fundamental human right?

From June 23-25 in Sacramento, the US Department of Agriculture, the
Agency for International Development, and the State Department are hosting
government ministers from 180 nations and transnational corporate reps to
lay out the US government and agribusiness' vision for the future of the
world.

Their agenda? Genetically engineered foods, animals and forestsŠ
terminator seeds... agribusiness that drives family farmers off the land,
hijacks the global food supply and starves the poor... food
irradiation...privatization of waterŠcorporate patents on indigenous
wisdom, seeds, animals and plantsŠ pesticides and factory farming.

A major grassroots mobilization and convergence is planned in Sacramento
from June 20-25. This is an opportunity for people to say no to a
genetically engineered future, and to voice instead a living world vision
rooted in social justice and ecological sanity. It is also a chance to
stand in solidarity with the people's movements and hundreds of peasant
farmers groups from around the world that have called on social movements
in the US to denounce and protest this meeting.

"There are two ways that Empire spreads its tentacles", Indian activist
and author Arundhati Roy said in a recent interview on Pacifica Radio's
Democracy Now, "one is with cruise missiles and daisy cutters...the other
is with the checkbook." And though the checkbook may appear less dangerous
than the cruise missile or the gun, more people are killed by the economic
system enforced by the global elites than are killed by the military. In a
world which produces enough food to feed one and a half times the current
world population with an adequate and nutritious diet, corporate control
of the economic system means that a staggering 30,000 people die every day
from hunger, three quarters of whom are children under the age of 5.

Wars are being fought on many fronts, and the backroom deals which ensure
that the majority of the world's population are kept under the heel of
Empire are as much a target for people who believe in peace and justice as
opposition to murderous armies and bombing campaigns in Afghanistan or
Iraq. The Sacramento mobilization is time to show that we understand it is
not enough for those of us who live in the US to turn out in hundreds of
thousands at the outbreak of a military invasion - we need to be looking
for strategic opportunities to confront Empire on an ongoing basis to turn
this nation 180 degrees and walk together in a radically new direction.

And for all of you who went to Seattle, or who wish you had, Sacramento is
certainly a strategic place to take action. It is widely recongnized that
controversy over agriculture is the achilles heel of 'free trade'
agreements such as the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Area of
the Americas. Some have even suggested that the whole WTO process could
unravel at the WTO meeting in Mexico this september if there is continued
failure to reach agreement on agriculture. While the Sacramento ministerial
is not actually billed as a WTO meeting, the timing of this meeting to
gather support for the US position on agriculture in the run up to the WTO
ministerial in Mexico is no coincidence.

The US agriculture secretary Anne Veneman (who used to work for the
biotech company Monsanto) contends that the Sacramento ministerial is all
about the US sharing the benefits of genetic engineering and other
technological developments to help feed the world. Her rhetoric fools
no-one except the victims of the US corporate media machine. In the UN
recently, the US was the only country in the world to vote against the
human 'right to food'. And in every international forum where genetic
engineering has been addressed, the strongest resistance to genetic
engineering has come from the countries of the world with most hungry
people.

Replying to a Monsanto advertisement about genetically engineered food
which stated that "slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world
cannot afford", 24 delegates to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation
from 18 African countries, responded with the following statement: "We . .
. strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries
is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology
that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically
beneficial to us. We do not believe that such companies or gene
technologies will help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in
the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity,
the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our
farmers have developed for millennia and that it will thus undermine our
capacity to feed ourselves."

So, come to Sacramento! Join us for a festival of diverse resistance to
bioimperialism, the Bush Administration and 'free trade'. There will be
non-violent direct actions, marches, a rally, a teach-in, street theatre
music and more to confront the war on the earth and its people.

Plug IN to the convergence www.sacmobilization.org 916-497-1111