Diaspora Earthcare Coalition – United Nations Decade for People of African Descent.

An Earthcare Coalition of organizations from throughout the African Diaspora is working under the banner of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent to encourage people of African descent to own and make full use of the means of food production against the backdrop  of climate change and resource depletion.

A group of networked activists with no time for either megaphones or the politics of “silos,” and an evolutionary vision, have locked arms and pledge to serve the most vulnerable populations. Soberly, they understand that climate disruptions, whether due to prolonged power grid outages, floods, drought, or extreme weather incidents are becoming more frequent and intense. They seek to ensure that people who have become completely dependent on industrial agriculture’s distribution systems create alternatives for themselves and have local access to food and water as climate change dials up.

The goals the Earthcare Coalition mobilizing around “the Decade” is food sovereignty — the right of people to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. Most importantly, the Earthcare Coalition underscores the need for people of African descent to define, own, and manage their own food and agriculture systems.

The Coalition intends to propel food sovereignty onto the front burner of awareness among the 200,000,000 people in the African Diaspora. The group is generating conversations which strengthen bonds within the Diaspora and yield Afrocentric food production solutions. In 2017, the group will initiate an ongoing series of coordinated events at the United Nations and beyond to build and prepare diaspora networks for concerted action.

Another primary goal that frames the Coalition’s work is the healing of schisms which have divided people of African descent in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa for four hundred years. Centuries of deliberate and methodical fragmentation for profit has scattered people of African descent like seeds across the globe. This systematic division has had both geographical and deep psychological consequences. The vestiges of the latter have perhaps inflicted the worst wounds

In the final analysis it is the quality of our relationships that will get humanity through the eye of the climate change needle. The Coalition’s solutions-driven focus is generating transnational conversations which strengthen bonds among African Americans and their counterparts in the Diaspora to yield food production strategies.

The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) will provide a platform from which the Earthcare Coalition working on the International Decade for People of African Descent can reach the Diaspora in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. The Coalition raises awareness about how relocalized food systems might ideally look and how people in the Diaspora can share and implement Afrocentric solutions. In July of 2017 the Earthcare Coalition will offer and televise the first in a series of events at UN Headquarters and locally throughout the Diaspora at the UN High Level Political Forum (HLPF). A succession of Diaspora-wide events will build and prepare networks for concerted climate change action in the domain of food production and water management.

The HLPF is a UN forum which brings together all member states and specialized agencies for official meetings, special events, side events, and educational sessions. The HLPF is the primary mechanism for the review of countries’ implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by UN member states in 2015.