Insight / Climate Justice
For New York Climate Week, about 80 people gathered outside the headquarters of the Teachers’ Insurance and Annuity Association with chants, speeches, banners, and signs. We demanded that TIAA stop using clients’ retirement savings in business deals that hurt the climate, the environment and local communities. Black farmers from the…
Blog Post / Climate Justice
This summer, ActionAid USA joined more than 100 climate justice and human rights organizations to launch a months-long civil disobedience campaign at Citibank headquarters in New York. At ActionAid USA, we work for human rights and social justice in coordination with the global ActionAid federation in over 70 countries. We…
Insight / Land Rights
TIAA, the retirement fund manager with $1.3 trillion in assets, continues to refuse to divest from fossil fuels and farmland, even as climate campaigners rallied in NYC that was choked with apocalyptic smoke. On June 7, we teamed up with TIAA-Divest and the Stop Land Grabs campaign to mobilize an…
Blog Post / Land Rights
In a tearful interview in a Q’eqchi Indigenous community of Rio Zarquito in Alta Verapaz Guatemala, Florinda Noemí Xol, told Prensa Comunitario why her 25-year-old son, Byron Lopez Xol, had left to migrate to the United States and had perished along with 38 other migrants abandoned to die in a…
Insight / Land Rights
Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the “Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) Act into both houses of Congress. Another group, also bipartisan but predominantly Republican, has expressed support for the Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act. As journalist Lela Nargi has pointed out, both of these bills…
Insight / Land Rights
Many of us are still learning how to celebrate the harvest holiday of Thanksgiving with a new understanding of our history that embraces our collective future without relying on a national myth that has covered up the reality of land grabbing and genocide. We must recognize and stop the new…
Blog Post / Land Rights
Recently, we welcomed a delegation of Indigenous leaders from Guatemala who were visiting Washington, D.C., to present their case for territorial rights in Guatemala to the Interamerican Human Rights Commission. Momentum against corruption in Guatemala’s justice system and favor of land rights was stopped by the Trump administration and some…
Insight / Land Rights
We at ActionAid are joining Stop the Money Pipeline’s demand that Wall Street divest hundreds of billions of dollars from fossil fuel corporations that largely contribute to the heating of the planet, threatening our future. In doing so, we are also targeting the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions:…
Insight
University of Iowa employees recently passed a resolution rebuking the financial company TIAA, which manages the retirement savings for employees at the University of Iowa, for its connections to deforestation, land grabbing, and corporate agriculture in the US and Brazil. The resolution also calls on the University of Iowa to…
Insight / Land Rights / Right to Food and Agriculture
As soon as Bill and Melinda Gates announced their separation, the media began speculating on how they would split their farmland. It had only recently become public that Bill and Melinda Gates are the world’s largest individual owners of farmland. The couple has accumulated a “portfolio” of 269,000 acres of…
