IRTF News

In Beaten Down, Worked Up, former New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse devotes an entire chapter to the history of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), from the early strikes in the 1990s to the Campaign for Fair Food today, including a detailed look at the ground-breaking success of the Fair Food Program!

Shopping to meet the locavore ethos ("eat local") is never simple, but taking a follow-the-money approach enables shoppers to support products that share their values. And this is where bananas come in. Buying Equal Exchange bananas from a local food co-op not only keeps money cycling through your community, but also ensures that communities of farmers in Ecuador and Peru are receiving a fair price for their products, which then keeps money flowing through their communities, as well. In a way, eating fair trade bananas gives you a local eater two-for-one, and you support both your community and the cooperative community of farmers that grew the fruit. It may not have been grown physically close to your co-op, but it creates an interconnected network of solidarity between communities.

On Friday, August 9, 2019, after more than 18 months of illegal and very abusive detention by the U.S. and Canadian-backed Honduran regime, political prisoners Edwin Espinal and Raul Martínez were let out of a maximum security military prison. They are out on bail pending their “trial” on trumped up charges filed by the regime.

Two days after the November 2016 elections that brought him to office, president-elect Donald Trump had a 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. “We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful, some difficulties,” Trump told the media afterward. He later revealed that the major “difficulty” discussed was the North Korean nuclear threat.