Real World Radio
Real World Radio (RWR) services social movements around the world as part of the communications of Friends of the Earth International. Created in 2003, RWR is based in REDES – Friends of the Earth Uruguay offices in Montevideo.
RWR produces information in Spanish and English with a popular environmental approach. It focuses on the struggles of peasant movements, indigenous organisations, women’s groups, unions, environmentalists and fisherfolk, among other actors, in defence of the territories and peoples' rights.
Our agenda covers Friends of the Earth International's key areas of work. We follow the agendas of social movements and organisations across five continents as they resist corporate abuses and human rights violations, trade and investment agreements, and the adverse effects of international financial institutions.
RWR exposes the consequences of the industrial agricultural model, including land grabbing, attacks against local communities, GMOs and agrotoxics.
Together with peoples' organisations and the global movement for Climate Justice we inform on the severity of the climate crisis and false solutions promoted by the business sector and governments in the Global North. Moreover, we highlight the need for a radical transformation of the current energy system based on fossil fuel extractivism that generates environmental destruction and devastates local communities.
RWR exposes the processes of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the privatisation, commodification and financialisation of nature.
We join with people in denouncing the patriarchal capitalist system that uses gender injustice to reproduce itself. We denounce the advance of capital on the territories that has dramatically increased the number of persecutions and murders of defenders of the environment and the peoples' rights.
Our journalistic work promotes peoples' solutions
We support a binding treaty that forces companies to respect human rights; solidarity and a feminist economy; peasant and indigenous production of food, agroecology and food sovereignty; energy sovereignty and the need for genuine emission reduction; and community forest management to name a few.
Our work towards these goals takes us to a multitude of spaces. We travel to the territories themselves, we join local struggles, attend peoples' summits, occupy national spaces where discussions are debated and made and we reach multilateral events where international negotiations occur, such as the United Nations.
Ultimately our goal is always to work for and with social movements and organisations. Their voice is central to our daily tasks. Most of the time, our reports, interviews and event coverage are produced together with social actors, community radio and popular media around the world, through shared and bottom-up communications work. For instance we share the Social Movements Communications Convergence space in Latin America with La Vía Campesina, the World March of Women and ALBA Social Movements, among others.
For RWR's 15th anniversary in 2018, we relaunched the radio as a multimedia channel with a new website, offering not just written articles and radio interviews, but also audiovisual materials, photo galleries and special designs. This relaunch aimed to give greater visibility to our radio, to our production, to the presence of the people in each report, interview and all our coverage.
