We shouldn't forget that the "Arab Spring" started when Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street food vendor, set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his produce and the humiliation he suffered at the hands of municipal authorities. (Worldview reported on food's role in the Middle East uprisings last summer in this James Beard Foundation Award-nominated segment.)
Lebanese agronomist Rami Zurayk has charted the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East since the 1980s. In his book Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, Zurayk explores how the region’s politics have affected food production. He rarely pulls his punches when identifying the obstacles to effective and sustainable development:
While recognizing the potential of civil society, I remain extremely critical of its work, its approaches, its capabilities and its achievements...However, I believe that civil society organizations, and especially NGOs, can contribute to social change if they are willing to take radical positions, to involve themselves in politics, and to steer clear of donor dependency…
Zurayk tells Worldview how escalating food prices and growing food insecurity contribute to the political instability of the Middle East. Go to WBEZ.91.5 to hear the full story.
Leading environmental campaigning organisation Friends of the Earth International and La Via Campesina have released two videos showing how projects financed by World Bank funds have allegedly led to African land grabs.
The videos, posted on YouTube, feature personal stories of how land privatisation and corporate policies backed by the World Bank, have caused Uganda and Mali farmers to lose their land and threaten local communities.
The short films, issued by Friends of the Earth International and the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, have been released at the same time as the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty that is being held in Washington this week (from April 23-26).
The Mali film and Uganda film document various human rights infringements and environmental damage caused by land grabs after the locals have been thrown off their land.
The films show the effect that massive increases in palm oil projects are having in Africa, where up to 227 million hectares have been bought or leased over the last few years to produce food and fuel mostly for developing countries.
The scheme is supposed to promote agriculture through foreign investment, but instead it has destroyed villages, prevented locals from finding food and caused hundreds of families to move, the campaigners say.
In Uganda, the World Bank is alleged to have caused a large expansion of the palm oil industry by providing millions in funding, to the detriment of food and forestry. Almost 10,000 hectares have been planted on islands near Lake Victoria with three times more proposed. Locals have also lost access to farm lands, according to the two organisations.
The World Bank conference involves governments, investors and large financial institutions in land governance issues. But the environmental groups claim that earlier World Bank policies of communal land rights being turned into private land titles, backing the buying land investment through private finance and providing policy support has set up the conditions for a massive land grab.
The voluntary scheme 'Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment' (RAI), backed by the World Bank has been criticised for being toothless and powerless to stop the land grabbing.
La Via Campesina represents 200 million farmers worldwide and includes 150 local and national organisations in 70 countries.
Conclusions of the 3rd Special Conference of the movements for Food Sovereignty
Francisca Rodriguez from the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC-VC) assesses the results of the Special Conference of the social movements for Food Sovereignty.
The Conference that ended on Sunday was considered a new landmark in the conceptualization of Food Sovereignty as a common platform that gathers peasant movements and groups of artisanal fisherfolk, pastoralists and indigenous people from the entire planet.
In the Latin American and Caribbean region, a growing number of movements are getting closer to this concept, that does not only include food production models (agriculture, cattle farming, fisheries) but it encompasses aspects such as the tenure of natural goods for said production, and it its a truly political concept.
“We are many more”
In this way, Francisca Rodriguez, from Chile, said this conference meant the growing of the processes and highlighted the decision to turn the International Planning Committee (IPC) into a Continental Alliance for Food Sovereignty. The new name, in addition, would imply the broadening of member organizations in each country, decided the Conference.
The Anamuri leader (National Association or Rural and Indigenous Women) of Chile also highlighted the work by the organizations at the FAO Committee on World Food Security in the Civil Society Mechanism.
“The basis of all these victories has been the support, capacity building, mobilization, resistance and pressure”, said Francisca. “A very important alliance was created which will be a significant contribution for all social movements. Because the flag of Food Sovereignty is of the entire people, not just peasants".
But in addition, the movements are preparing for the Peoples Summit that will take place before the Rio+20 Summit: “we want governments to understand that we are not going to participate in the Rio Carnival”, said Francisca. “This is why we also contribute by creating alliances more determined than yesterday’s. Back then, we built them to know what we were against. Today we know what we are against: a system that is trying to greenwash everything while keeping their basis intact. They are trying to greenwash capital and blame us”, said Francisca in the video interview with Real World Radio.
GENEVA, Mar. 9, 2012 (IPS) - Decades after peasants’ networks have advocated for a new legal instrument to protect the rights of small farmers to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of their production, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) may decide to start drafting a declaration on peasants’ rights next week.
"The idea of an international declaration on peasants' rights comes from our (base) because many small farmers don’t have access to land, work, water and seeds," Henry Saragih, the general coordinator of Via Campesina, a movement representing more than 200 million small farmers around the world, told IPS.
For the Indonesian activist, labelled by some international media as "one of the twenty green giants of our world", next week could mark the first victory in a battle that has gone on for more than a decade: the UNHRC will discuss a study of its Advisory Committee that recommends the elaboration of a new legal instrument on the rights of peasants, on the basis of a declaration proposed by the expert body.
This instrument would be modelled on the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that has been replicated in some national constitutions and local tribunals.
It would complement another long-term battle of Via Campesina: the recognition of the principle of food sovereignty, namely the right of each country to decide what to produce locally and how much to rely on international trade, with a priority given to local production and consumption.
"Since 2001, we have brought the issue of peasant’s rights to Geneva," Saragih continued. We have found understanding by some governments, non-governmental organisations like CETIM and FIAN, the expert Christophe Golay and the former rapporeur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, (along with his successor), Olivier De Schutter. And after the 2008 food crisis, the world has become more sensitive to the problems of the small farmer."
"Today, almost one billion of the world’s people suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Among them, 80 percent live in rural areas and 50 percent are peasant families," Melik Özden, director of the Geneva- based NGO CETIM (Centre Europe Tiers-Monde), told IPS.
"These violations are due, among others, to the lack of agrarian reforms and aid to family farmers, forced displacement of peasants, confiscation of seeds by transnational corporations through the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the criminalisation of activists and peasant leaders."
He adds that in recent years large scale land grabbing by some foreign governments and transnationals, wide-scale production of agro-fuels and stock market speculation on agricultural commodities have significantly worsened peasants’ lives.
"Year after year, Via Campesina has alerted the HRC about the violations of the rights of peasants, their limited access to justice in most countries and the scarcity of complaint mechanisms at the international level," Christophe Golay, author of the first drafts of the study and of the declaration told IPS.
"But it has also become clear that some important rights were not included in any available instrument, such as rights to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of agricultural products."
Africa Mthombeni, from the Landless People Movement (LPM) in South Africa and also a member of Via Campesina, is convinced that a favourable decision in Geneva would be an important step forward. "The HRC is the intergovernmental forum that guides national policies and a declaration on the rights of peasants would oblige governments to take them seriously," he told IPS.
"Land reform in South Africa is too slow," he continued, "and as a result poverty and unemployment are very high. The majority of our people live on social grants. The land question in South Africa has improved only insignificantly since the end of apartheid and more than thirty million people are still landless."
He explained that 100,000 commercial farmers and big corporations own 80 percent of arable land, with 13 percent left to traditional communities. Only seven percent of land has been transferred since 1994, yet the government pledged to release 30 percent by 2014. And most of this transfer takes place in the form of cash, not real land delivery.
But while most developing countries seem to be in favour of a declaration – particularly states like Indonesia, South Africa, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba – many industrialised nations are rather sceptical if not openly against the proposed declaration.
While officially these countries have declared that there is "no need" for a new instrument, NGOs believe the indsutrialised world is rather scared by the implications of the Advisory Committee’s draft declaration; especially clauses such as the right to reject intellectual property rights on resources and certification schemes established by transnational corporations.
The WTO has also declared its opposition to a model of agriculture that is hardly compatible with the current system of "free" trade.
The outcome of the discussion is still open. Jean Feyder, ambassador of Luxembourg to the U.N., considers it is "very important to support small farmers that were marginalised for so long. Therefore, we would be very satisfied if we could get a group of countries from all continents to support the proposal of the Advisory Committee and agree on a process: either the creation of a working group to draft the declaration, or the appointment of a special rapporteur on peasants’ rights."
"This declaration would be very important for us," Saragih concluded. "It would help us monitor the way in which countries respect peasants’ rights. Many international institutions have repeated it over and over again: to feed the world, we need to support small scale farmers."
Yoon, Geumsoon is a member of the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) of La Via Campesina as well as being a member of the Korean Women Peasants Association and other political organisations. In this interview, Geumsoon talks with great passion about her responsibilities as a member of the ICC, and the successes that the LVC have had over the past few years. An engaging and fascinating .....
Lee Gwangsuk is the President of the Korean Peasant League (KPL) in South Korea. This interview took place on the day of a mobilisation organised by the KPL against the Fair Trade Agreement between South Korea and the USA. Gwangsuk talks about why he joined the KPL, his role as President, what the KPL is trying to achieve and how they go about this. They have had some small but significant successes at local level. This is an inspirational story about the value of peasant solidarity in facing the challenges that neoliberalism has on small scale farming.
JeomSook is a peasant in South Korea. She also holds the position of Secretary-General with the Korean Women Peasants Association. In this first video she tells her story about why she and her husband made the decision to become farmers, and the responses from her family and neighbours when they stopped using chemicals and started to use organic methods. The influence JeomSook and her husband has had on their neighbour's decision to transition to organics is an inspiration.
