Food Sovereignty Global

Being a member of the International Coordinating Committee of La Via Campesina: a woman peasant's perspective

2012-03-07T14:31:00.000+10:00

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 .....

Source: www.korea.foodsovereignty.com.au

A Korean Peasants Story: The importance of Farmer Solidarity in achieving Food Sovereignty A Korean Peasants Story: The importance of Farmer Solidarity in achieving Food Sovereignty

2012-03-06T14:29:00.000+10:00

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.

Source: www.korea.foodsovereignty.com.au

Jeomsook Goo tells her story about being a peasant in South Korea

2012-03-05T14:25:00.002+10:00

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.

Source: www.korean.foodsovereignty.com.au

Oral Intervention of FIAN International and La Via Campesina in the 8th session of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee

2012-02-24T18:37:00.001+10:00

Oral Intervention of FIAN International and La Via Campesina in the 8th session of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee

THURSDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2012 14:53

21 February 2012

Dear Mr. /Mrs. President,

La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, together with FIAN International, would like to commend the Advisory Committee for its final study on the advancement of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas.

Secure access to and control over land and productive resources are inextricably linked to the expression of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several regional and international human rights treaties. They include the right to adequate food, self-determination, an adequate standard of living, housing, health, culture, property and participation.

We note with grave concern that the current land grabbing phenomenon has been undermining those rights. Powerful foreign investors are signing backdoor agreements to take possession of or control land. Many of these agreements involve more than 10,000 hectares and several include more than 500,000 hectares. This land is very important for current and future food sovereignty in the host countries. The High Level Group of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security FAO estimates that between 50 and 80 million hectares in poor and developing countries has been negotiated, acquired and leased by international investors. All available studies that have examined the impact of this lust for land agree that large-scale land transactions are undermining the food security, endangering the livelihood and damaging the environment of the local population.

During an international conference held in the Nyeleni Village in Mali November 2011, we reiterated the Dakkar Appeal signed by over 900 organizations worldwide. It pledges to resist land-grabbing by all means possible, to support those who fight land-grabs, and to put pressure on national and international institutions to fulfill their obligations to ensure and uphold the rights of people.

The final study of the Advisory Committee plays an important role in addressing the problem of land grabbing. It also plays an important role in alleviating the longtime discrimination against peasants, especially women, in access to and control over productive resources such as land, water and seeds.

We urge the international community, including the development agencies and the United Nations, to make a significant policy shift toward the full integration of human rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. This policy shift includes policies that prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable people working in rural areas. It includes improvements in the implementation of existing human rights instruments that protect the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. We feel that the existing instruments are clearly insufficient to ensure the protection of our rights.

Violations of our rights to land are escalating, and hunger is still predominantly rural. These are the main reasons why we need further recognition and protection of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. Thus, the creation of a new mechanism to ensure international human rights for peasants and other people working in rural areas is crucial to overcome the problem.

The increasing impoverishment and marginalization of peasants and other people working in rural areas, in many ways, has significantly contributed to the degradation of the current food situation. Peasants and other people working in rural areas ought to be at the very core of efforts aimed at overcoming discrimination in the exercise of the right to food. If human rights are to prevail, the international community needs to be bold and act now to increase the protection of the human rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas.

Thank you, Mr. /Mrs. President.

Submitted by Javier Sáchez Anso, a member of International Coordinating Committee (ICC) of La Via Campesina

“Peasant Farming Can Cool Down the Earth”: An Interview with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of Haiti

2012-01-12T12:13:00.000+10:00

As Chavannes Jean-Baptiste points out in the interview that follows, climate justice and the proliferation of false solutions to the climate crisis, such as “Climate Smart agriculture,” carbon markets, and REDD, are a primary concern for La Via Campesina. La Via promotes food sovereignty, Chavannes says, not only to resolve the food crisis, but also the climate crisis.

Chavannes Jean-Baptiste (pictured) is the Executive Director of Mouvement Paysan de Papaye (MPP), [the Peasant Movement of Papay] the oldest peasant organization in Haiti, and, in Chavannes’ words, “possibly the oldest in the world.” MPP is the Haitian member of La Via Campesina. I interviewed Chavannes in Durban, South Africa, in English – not his native language – on December 11, just after the closing of COP17.

Jeff Conant: What are you doing here Durban during United Nations COP17?

Chavannes Jean-Baptiste: I am here with the Via Campesina delegation in Durban. La Via Campesina is promoting food sovereignty as the way not only to resolve the food crisis, but also the climate crisis. There are a lot of studies to show that peasant agriculture, agro-ecological production, can cool down the earth. Around the world, La Via Campesina is fighting against industrial food production, which is responsible for more than 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. We are fighting against agrofuel production, and agribusiness consortiums like Monsanto that are destroying the soil, and the biodiversity with pesticides and GMOs, and killing native seeds in developing countries. A lot of peasant organizations and NGOs came to Durban to say no to REDD, no to agriculture in the negotiations, and no to the carbon market.

JC: What is the struggle of peasant farmers in Haiti?

CJB: In Haiti we are fighting against agrofuel production, jatropha plantations, and GMO seeds. It’s a big struggle because industrial agriculture wants to kill peasant agriculture, to kill our native forests with REDD, REDD+, the carbon market, and other false solutions. Now a Brazilian company is planting jatropha to produce agrodiesel. We see this as a big land grab, and we’re fighting it.

Haiti is a very small country, and about eighty percent of Haitians are peasants. After independence we had about thirty percent of our native forests left, and now we have less than two percent. Climate change in Haiti is a major problem – the environment is in very bad shape. We can go six months without rain, and then we have flash floods, where we lose crops, animals, houses… We have between one and three hurricanes every year; in 2008 we had three hurricanes in three months, destroying everything.

Haiti used to be sovereign in food production. Now we produce only 40 percent of our food. Every day we depend on food from the Dominican Republic, and from the USA, where farmers receive a lot of subsidies, and are dumping a lot of their cheap food on us. Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, and now we import eighty percent of our rice. With rice flooding in from the U.S., small farmers in Haiti can’t afford to produce.

Right now our big fight is to defend native seeds. For more than 200 years, peasants in Haiti have produced seeds to plant; now we are working to select and preserve seeds. We are using natural pesticides, we have seed banks, we use organic methods to produce food. We are doing a lot of work with soil conservation, water management, reforestation, and now we have a program to help families produce enough food around the home, to have food for the family and put the rest into the local market.

But the problem now is that the government, after the earthquake, has a plan to give a lot of land to a big corporation from Asia, to make an Export Processing Zone, to produce goods for export. The point is to use the labor of our workers; the Export Zone agreement pays very low wages, and the workers can’t defend themselves, because no laws apply.

JC: Here in Durban the Clinton Foundation held a high-profile to promote REDD carbon forestry projects. We know that Clinton is deeply involved in Haiti, and has been for a long time. If you could speak to Mr. Clinton, what would you say?

CJB: Bill Clinton has this project, he’s trying to take our land and to give it to this big corporation from Asia. So the message we would send to Mr. Clinton is, we don’t want your project promoting REDD, we don’t want your agribusiness projects. We need our land to produce food, we need our land to rebuild native forest. So we would ask Mr. Clinton to keep his money. We don’t want him to kill our country. The Haitian people know what the Haitian people need.

JC: How do you see the relationship of La Via Campesina to the United Nations Conference of Parties?

CJB: La Via Campesina always goes to all the places where the UN, the G8, or the WTO, or anyone else are making decisions about our lives. Because it is a question about our lives, and it’s a question of the destruction of the planet. We are very concerned because small farmers represent about three billion people, producing about seventy percent of the food for all of the world’s seven billion people. The United Nations process is not about the climate crisis, it is about big business, because the rich countries with their big corporations want to put all the world’s resources into the market. This is why it is very important for La Via Campesina to be spokespeople for the peasant sector – to be the peasant voice.

So we are here to say NO to the false solutions: industrial agriculture, land-grabbing, carbon markets, REDD, REDD+. We are here to say we don’t want agriculture on the table of the negotiations because agriculture is too important for life for it to be a business. We can’t put agriculture on the table where the big corporations are discussing how they can continue to pollute the planet and get more money. We are here to say agro-ecology can cool down the planet, to say that food sovereignty is the way to resolve the climate crisis. The biggest problem for the climate is industrial agriculture. With agro-ecology we can produce food for the world, develop local markets, and cut off the industrial process. The studies are very clear: industrial agriculture and the industrial food system are responsible for 57 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

JC: We have just heard this term “Climate smart agriculture” – a new approach being pushed here in Durban. What can you tell me about this?

CJB: This is a new term that we have heard here, where the President of South Africa was very forceful about the need to put agriculture on the negotiating table. But we know this did not come from Jacob Zuma [the President of South Africa]. It came from the World Bank. They call it smart agriculture, where they want to use GMO seeds, to plant tree plantations, to use soils in the carbon market, to put agriculture in the carbon market. All of this is very, very bad news. This is why we say here in Durban that this is not a conference to resolve the climate crisis; it is a conference to see that the companies make more money.

JC: So, what is the point of coming to the COP?

CJB: When we see the situation in the world we could say it’s impossible to do anything. But here in Durban I saw a lot of people coming, from the US, from the EU, from all over the world, to say, the planet is not for sale. Nature is not for sale. A lot of organizations from around the world give me hope that we can resolve not only the climate situation, but that we can change the capitalist system that is fighting everyday to make more money. It is a very long struggle – the next meeting is the Rio+20, and the same companies will be there to promote green capitalism, and what they are calling “the green economy.” We know this is just the next project to help transnational capital to make more money, so we will be there. Why? Because they are making decisions about our lives.

Jeff Conant is the author of A Poetics of Resistance: the Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (AK Press, 2010) and A Community Guide to Environmental Health (Hesperian, 2008), and lives in Oakland, California, where he works as Communications Director for Global Justice Ecology Project.

Source: Toward Freedom

"Not ONE step BACK!!" Elizabeth Mpotu, Zimbabwan Peasant speaks out at COP 17 Durban

2012-01-03T10:39:00.002+10:00

Elizabeth Mpofu warned that the new climate patterns are affecting peasant production, many time with totally unexpected and unprecedented events in certain times of the year. She said in October a heat wave affected Zimbabwe causing the temperature to raise up to 40°Celsius, which she had never witnessed in her entire life.

Hear her story and ideas now!!

Not One Step Back from Radio Mundo Real on Vimeo.

International tribunal finds agrochemical TNCs ‘guilty’ of violating human rights

2011-12-19T01:00:00.000+10:00

Based on evidence presented before it, the Tribunal found the defendant agrochemical TNCs “responsible for gross, widespread and systematic violations of the right to health and life, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as of civil and political rights, and women and children’s rights.”

By INA ALLECO R. SILVERIO

MANILA – In a momentous gathering earlier last week in Bangalore, India, The Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) laid down a guilty verdict against six of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont and BASF.

Jobert Pahilga, a Filipino lawyer representing the Sentro Para Sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo (Sentra) was among the legal counsels who helped the PPT arrive at the verdict. He stood as one of the prosecutors against the agrochemical firms.

The PPT, founded in 1979 in Italy, is an international opinion tribunal that looks into complaints of human rights violations. Borne out of the tribunals on the Vietnam War and Latin American dictatorships, the PPT has held 37 sessions so far using the rigorous conventional court format. While its verdicts are not legally binding, these can set precedent for future legal actions against Defendants, and can pressure governments and institutions.

The PPT session on agrochemical TNCs drew the support of individuals and organizations around the world. More than 400 organizations representing civil society and people’s organizations of farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, and indigenous peoples, as well as 7,000 concerned individuals signed on to an international petition circulated by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN).

Pahiliga, who also stands as the lead counsel of Hacienda Luisita farm workers, said the verdict upheld the people’s collective sentiment against agrochemical giants which have laid waste to the lives and livelihood of millions all over the world.

“The tribunal is a commencement of the people’s struggle against exploiting and destructive agrochemical giants. This verdict must be disseminated to the people for appropriate political and collective action,” Pahilga said.

In a statement, the PAN, the largest assemblage of groups critical of the operations of agro-chemical corporations also hailed the PPT’s verdict . Victims and survivors of the pesticide industry from all over the world, represented by PAN International, testified before a distinguished international jury to indict the “Big 6” for human rights violations.

Sarojeni Rengam, PAN Asia Pacific Executive Director, said the Tribunal’s verdict is a victory for peoples who have been most affected by the Big 6’s control over food and agriculture. She delivered the People’s Submission, or the response of people’s organizations that took part in the tribunal.

“We are elated with the verdict. It affirms what people all over the world already know and are experiencing: that the pesticide industry is to blame and should be held accountable for the systematic poisoning of human health and the environment, loss of food sovereignty and self-determination, and increased world hunger and poverty,” she said.

Based on evidence presented before it, the Tribunal found the defendant agrochemical TNCs “responsible for gross, widespread and systematic violations of the right to health and life, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as of civil and political rights, and women and children’s rights.”

The Tribunal also found agrochemical TNCs responsible for violation of indigenous peoples’ human rights, and further found that “their systematic acts of corporate governance have caused avoidable catastrophic risks, increasing the prospects of extinction of biodiversity, including species whose continued existence is necessary for reproduction of human life.”

Jurors for the PPT Session on Agrochemical TNCs are Indian legal scholar Upendra Baxi, British scientist Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, African environmental lawyer Ibrahima Ly, German economist Elmar Altvater, Italian professor Paolo Ramazotti, and PPT Secretary General Dr. Gianni Tognoni.

TNCs and government-states guilty of destructive collusion
The Tribunal said that the home States of the Big 6, namely the United States, Switzerland, and Germany, “failed to comply with their internationally accepted responsibility to promote and protect human rights,” by not adequately regulating, monitoring and disciplining these corporations.

The Tribunal further said that these States have “unjustifiably promoted a double standard approach prohibiting the production of hazardous chemicals at home while allowing their own TNCs unrestrained license for these enterprises in other States, especially of the Global South.”

The Tribunal also found host States responsible for failure to protect the human rights of its citizens by offering “magic carpet type hospitality” to agrochemical TNCs and therefore not adequately protecting social movement activists or independent scientists from harassment, not limiting the “global corporate ownership of knowledge production in universities and related research sites,” “not recognizing the value of indigenous knowledge and social relationships they create and sustain,” and “not fully pursuing alternative and less hazardous forms of agricultural production without having learnt the full lessons from the First Green Revolution.”

The Tribunal also found that the policies of World Trade Organization (WTO) in relation to Intellectual Property Rights are “not balanced with any sincere regard for the grave long-term hazards to humans and nature already posed by the activities of agribusiness and agrochemical industries.”

International financial institutions, named in the indictment as the International Monetary Fund-World Bank, do not follow “a strict regime of human rights conditionalities” and “have yet to develop policies concerning their support for hazardous manufacture, application or process,” said the Tribunal.

The Tribunal recommended that national governments should “prosecute the Defendant agrochemical companies in terms of criminal liability rather than civil liability.” It also urged governments to take action to “restructure international law” to ensure the accountability of transnational corporations, to “accept a less heavy burden of proof on the victims and to fully commit to and legislate for the precautionary principle,” and “to prevent TNCs from directly or indirectly harassing and intimidating scientists, farmers and human rights and environmental defenders.”

It also urged international organizations and intergovernmental institutions to uphold human rights and the welfare of populations, and protect of biodiversity and ecosystems by subordinating the interests of corporations pursuing patents.

“The Tribunal’s recommendations must immediately be acted upon, for they echo what civil society and people’s organizations have been demanding for a very long time.”

In the People’s Submission, Rengam said, the prosecution of the Big 6 must be started to bring justice to fruition for the thousands of victims and survivors of the pesticide industry. The precautionary principle must be put into place and the patent regime abolished, as recommended by the Tribunal.

“That is the only way to stop these human rights violations, which continue every day without impunity,” she said. She went on to say that the PPT’s verdict marks the beginning of an escalated international people’s movement against agrochemical TNCs.

“The next step towards justice and liberation from the Big 6’s control will be determined by the people’s unity, strength, and determination to stand up against corporate greed and aggression, just as was shown in this victorious PPT Session,” she said.

Victims of agrochemicals companies speak

Victims of the agrochemical firms also spoke out.

“The testimonies of these witnesses clearly show that the Big 6 is guilty of gross, systematic, and widespread violations of human rights by what they have done and what they have failed to do. They are guilty of wilful manufacturing and selling products that have harmed humans and the environment, of manipulating science and the truth, of violating the sovereign right of peoples. They are guilty of evading responsibility for their crimes and denying victims proper redress,” said Pahilga as one of the prosecutors.

In her testimony, Petrona Villasboa, the mother of eleven-year old Paraguayan Silvino Talavera who died last January 7, 2003 because of exposure to glyphosate being applied to Monsanto’s genetically engineered RR soybeans,said they had proof that there was poison in the boy’s blood.

“We want Monsanto accountable for the death of my son,” she said.

Nagama Raman, a former oil palm plantation worker who was forced to resign because of ill health caused by paraquat spraying, told the Tribunal: “Paraquat is banned in Switzerland (Syngenta’s home state), why then is it still sold and used in Malaysia?”

Dr. Abou Thiam from Africa, testified that there are 100,000 tons of prohibited and obsolete pesticides in the region which are often stored in deteriorating and leaky containers. He said the obsolete dumps in Africa “are like ecological bombs waiting to go off.”

A former child labourer from India, Ashwini, testified that she worked from the time she was seven years old up to her 11th year in cotton plantations. There, she applied pesticides for $0.50 a day.

It is estimated that around 170,000 children, mostly girls, are exposed to Bayer’s endosulfan, monocrotophos, and other toxic chemicals while working in cotton plantations.

In the meantime, an American scientist Dr. Tyrone Hayes conducted studies linking atrazine to the feminization of frogs. He testified during the tribunal that Syngenta asked him to manipulate data, hide data, or purchase his data.

When Hayes refused to do so, he said that he was threatened and harassed repeatedly by the company.

A British beekeeper Graham White testified that queen bees that used to live two to three years now only live two to three months because of Bayer’s neonicotinoid pesticides. This has serious effects not only on the livelihood of beekepers but on food security as well.

PAN International recommended to the PPT the elimination of highly hazardous pesticides, the protection of genetic resources, the advancement of food sovereignty and ecological agriculture, restructuring of international financial institutions, and upholding the precautionary principle.

“This overwhelming show of support from around the world bolsters the legitimacy of this Tribunal as a recourse for people who have been denied justice by their own governments and international institutions that aid and abet chemical companies in their war against all forms of life,” said Rengam.

In March 2007, the PPT held its Second Session on human rights violations in the Philippines. Organizations Hustisya!, Desaparecidos, Selda, Karapatan, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, Public Interest Law Center, Peace for Life, Philippine Peace Center, IBON Foundation, Ecumenical Bishops Forum, and the United Church of Christ in the Philippines in the name of the Filipino people and of the national minorities testified against the President of the Republic of the Philippines Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and its representatives; the President of the United States of America George Walker Bush; the International Monetary Fund (IMF); the World Bank (WB); World Trade Organization (WTO); Multinational Corporations (MNCs) and Foreigns Banks doing business in the Philippines.

The First Session on the Philippines, in the meantime, was in 1980 in Antwerp, Belgium on the violations of the fundamental rights of the Filipino People and the Bangsa-Moro minority by the Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship. The complaints were brought to the judgment of the PPT by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

No pesticides day

The PAN AP in the Philippines also led local actions coinciding with the PPT Tribunal in India and to commemorate ” No Pesticides Day.” The group said agrochemical companies and plantations should be held accountable for chemical disasters in the Philippines.

December 3, dubbed as World No Pesticides Day, is the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy in India wherein the chemical spill of the pesticides company Union Carbide (now Dow Chemicals) in 1984 caused the instant death of 8,000 people and injured more than 500,000.

The campaign kicked off in Mindanao. Villagers victimized by pesticide use in nearby banana plantations in Mindanao attended two forums jointly hosted by local farmer organizations and PAN AP titled “Pesticide Poisoning and Corporate Accountability: Remembering the Bhopal Tragedy.*

Dr. Romeo Quijano, president of PAN Philippines and a professor of the University of the Philippines, talked on the adverse effects of pesticides on health and the environment.

Dr. Quijano is currently battling in court a damage suit filed by Lapanday Agricultural Development Corporation owned by former Agriculture secretary Luis Lorenzo Jr., for an expose’ on the banana plantation’s harmful pesticide use affecting a nearby village in Digos, Davao del Sur called Kamukhaan. The Kamukhaan case has gained wide public support since it was first published in 2000, yet until now the villagers continue to fall sick, having no respite from the plantation’s pesticide use.

Hundreds of villagers who attended PAN AP’s forums in Digos and Nabunturan, Davao del Norte, related well to the yearly commemoration of the Bhopal tragedy, since they find it similar to their situation living near or working in banana plantations using highly toxic pesticides. For instance, paraquat, produced by Syngenta Corporation, have been used by plantations such as AMS Farming Corporation, Davao Agricultural Ventures Corp, Del Monte Fresh Produce Phils., Dole Philippines Inc, FS Dizon & Sons Inc., Kenram (Phils.), Inc., Lapanday Foods Corporation, Marsman-Drysdale Agribusiness Group, Oribanex Trading Corp, Stanfilco,Tadeco, Tri Star Group of Companies and Tropifresh, most of which are found in Mindanao.

Paraquat is part of the “Dirty Dozen” list of pesticides that have been proven to cause severe health and environmental damage. It is already banned in Malaysia and other European countries. Unfortunately, the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority revoked a previous order restricting its use due to intense lobbying by Syngenta. Right now, there is an international effort led by environmental NGOs such as PAN, Berne Declaration, and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation to stop its production, importation, and use, particularly in Third World countries like the Philippines.

“Agrochemical transnationals and big plantations must be made accountable for the country’s worst chemical disasters in far-flung areas such as Kamukhaan. At the same time, the government must resist the influence of these corporations in order to stop the terrible waste of human life and the environment caused by pesticides,” said Dr. Quijano.

In Manila, Nueva Ecija, Laguna, Bicol, Cordillera, and Cagayan Valley, the RESIST alliance (Resistance and Solidarity Against Agrochemical TNCs) also held a a series of forums and photo-exhibit entitled “The Politics of Pesticides: Changing the World’s Agriculture and People’s Resistance” that began December 8. The Magsasaka at Siyentipiko Para sa Pag-Unlad ng Agrikultura (MASIPAG) also held a forum in North Cotabato from December 6-7 about genetically-modified organisms. The forum focused on how GMO crops actually increase pesticide use. Producers of GMOs, such as Monsanto, are the same agro-chemical transnationals who introduced pesticides in agriculture.

December 3, dubbed as World No Pesticides Day, is the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy in India wherein the chemical spill of the pesticides company Union Carbide (now Dow Chemicals) in 1984 caused the instant death of 8,000 people and injured more than 500,000.

The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal reports that today, more than 150,000 people are still reeling from the health effects of the world’s worst chemical disaster two decades ago. These include children born to parents who survived the disaster, who are suffering from cancer, neurological damage, nausea, breathlessness, numb limbs, headaches, body aches, fevers, anxiety attacks, chaotic menstrual cycles, depression and mental illness.

This year, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, has also called this year’s two-decade commemoration as the International Day of Action Against Corporate Crime, in order to pressure Dow Chemicals to face criminal charges filed against them in the Bhopal District Court.

Source: Bulatlat - Journalism for the people

The great milk robbery

2011-12-17T01:00:00.000+10:00

A new report by GRAIN documents the importance of milk to the livelihoods and health of the poor in many countries of the global South. Most dairy markets are supplied by small-scale vendors who collect milk from small farmers and pastoralists. But they are under threat from dairy corporations,

Selling milk in Colombia.

like Nestlé, and other players, like PepsiCo and Cargill, that are trying to take over the dairy sectors in these countries, from the farms to the markets.

"People's milk" involves hundreds of millions of people around the world, from small-scale farmers and pastoralists to local cheesemakers and fresh milk vendors. They supply safe, nutritious and affordable milk to hundreds of millions of poor families.

   •   80% of the dairy markets in developing countries are supplied by these "people's milk" systems, often referred to as the "informal sector"
   •   15% of the global population is involved in dairy production
   •   Small-scale dairy systems in the South create 200 rural jobs per million litres of milk/year compared to 5 rural jobs per million litres of milk/year in the industrial milk production systems of the North
   •   In Pakistan, Kenya and Colombia, fresh people's milk sells for half the price of packaged milk in the supermarket.

Small-scale farmers, pastoralists and vendors are doing an amazing job of supplying the growing markets for dairy in the South. The problem is that corporate interests are after these same markets and they are using heavy tactics to steal them from the poor, while governments are lending a helping hand.

   •   Bilateral trade agreements allow transnational dairy corporations to periodically dump subsidised powdered milk and undercut local producers
   •   Regulations and private standards are biased towards the corporate sector and shut people's milk out of markets.

Financial investors and big dairy corporations are joining forces to set up mega dairy farms throughout the South. Cargill's hedge fund is committing $300 million to factory dairy farms in China and India. The world's biggest dairy cooperative, Fonterra, is building farms in China, India, and Brazil on a scale that it could never get away with in its home country New Zealand. A bank in Vietnam is building a 137,000 cow farm. These are social and ecological disasters that will bring hardship to millions of people.

Several actions and measures are suggested to stop the corporate hijack of dairy markets:
   •   High, comprehensive tariffs to prevent the periodic dumping of imported milk powder and cheap dairy products
   •   A reorientation of dairy production to domestic markets among exporting countries, with programmes such as supply management
   •   Food safety systems suited to the needs of people not corporate bottom-lines
   •   Boycotts of large dairy companies and supermarkets
   •   Divestment campaigns targeted at funds that invest in industrial dairy production in the South
   •   Solidarity within and across borders between dairy producers, small-scale vendors and processors, consumers and dairy industry workers

People's milk is up against some powerful forces. But experience in Colombia and elsewhere shows that it can prevail because so many people depend on it for their livelihoods and the well-being of their families. These are the kind of food systems the world needs to deal with poverty, hunger and climate change and we should all be supporting them.

The full report, The great milk robbery: How corporations are stealing livelihoods and a vital source of nutrition from the poor, is available here: http://www.grain.org/e/4259

Indian Farmers Protest Outside Governments "Unsustainable" Agribusiness Meet

2011-12-16T07:34:00.003+10:00

Dec 2, Bangalore: Farmers from South India organized a parallel platform and protest at Karnataka governments Global Agri-business and food-processing Meet of 2011. This was Karnataka governments attempt to lure foreign corporate investment in the agriculture sector of the state- starting from seeds to retailing and food processing, from dairy to fishing and apiculture.
Farmers movements of south India members of LVC have been opposing the corporate onslaught on India's and global agriculture. These agribusiness companies they say are not interested in feeding people, preserving the ecology and biodiversity or generating livelihoods. Their main aim is to patent nature for themselves, industrialize farming for exports, monopolize nature and make farmers and people dependent on them for food and farming. Their primary concern is the generating profits while the continue to cause climate change and increase hunger. Ironically the Karnataka government called it “sustainable” agribusiness summit, when agribusiness promotes a type of agriculture that is far from sustainable.
Read More at LVC South Asia

Indigenous peasant farmers have their say at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, Dec 2011

2011-12-16T01:00:00.000+10:00

Check out this latest webcast of a press briefing with indigenous peasant farmers talking about how the REDD* will impact upon them.

*REDD: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation
Read more about REDD here.

Jim Goodman, dairy farmer and Via Campesina member rocks

2011-12-15T01:00:00.000+10:00

Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa launched

2011-12-14T01:00:00.000+10:00

A 14-member ''network of African networks'', tagged the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), was launched in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, 4 December, to help promote agro-ecology as a solution to climate change, feeding people, biodiversity, livelihoods and healing the soils.

According to its sponsors, AFSA began amid joyful singing from African women farmers; sobering facts about the multiple threats from climate change and false solutions such as the Bill Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), GMOs, biofuel land grabbing and carbon trading; and inspiring discussions about agroecological solutions for food, farmers and biodiversity.

AFSA immediately released a report emphasising that Food Sovereignty can cool the planet, while feeding the world and regenerating ecosystems.

“There are so many challenges facing our continent,” Anne Maina of the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), one of AFSA’s member networks, was quoted as saying.

“As 14 Pan African networks, representing a huge constituency in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa, we are in agreement that Food Sovereignty must be way forward to ensure resilient food systems and ecosystems in the face of climate change and destructive development,” Maina said.

Also speaking, Million Belay of Melca Mahiber, an Ethiopian member of ABN, said Food Sovereignty is an approach to agriculture that is radical, but it is self-evident too.

''It holds the interests of small-scale food producers, their communities and ecosystems, as critical to strengthening resilient food systems. For too long, food policy has focused on yield at any cost – and undermined the very systems and people on which food production depends.  Food Sovereignty is a powerful concept and framework that is clear about embracing solutions, and challenging the threats,” Belay explained.

Agnes Yawe of Participatory Ecological Land Use  Management (PELUM), a network with members in 10, said AFSA is about using and conserving the resources that are freely available to communities .

''These are appropriate for our economies, and our small scale farmers, who don’t need the expensive chemical inputs that are being pushed on us,” Yawe said.

Meanwhile, AFSA is observing Monday (5Dec) as “Food Sovereignty Day”. As part of the Day, farmers will march through Durban, venue of the ongoing UN Climate Change conference.

Source: Panapress

Women of Corn

2011-12-13T01:00:00.000+10:00

In the countries of the Global South, women are the principal producers of food, those in charge of working the land, safegaurding the seeds, gathering the fruit, obtaining water. Between 60 to 80% of food production in these countries is down to women, and worldwide at a level of 50%. These women are the main producers of the staple crops, such as rice, wheat and maize, which go to feed the most impoverished populations of the South. But despite their key role in agriculture and provision of food, they are, together with children, the most affected by hunger.

For centuries, rural women have been responsible for domestic chores, care of people, feeding of families, and cultivation and marketing of surplus from their gardens, and have borne this load of reproductive, productive and community work in a private and invisible domain. In contrast, the principal economic transactions of agriculture, the trading of livestock and bulk buying and selling of cereals in the market, have been carried out by men... occupying the public rural domain.

This division of roles assigns to women the upkeep of home, of health, of education and of families and gives men the management of land and machinery and most significantly the”know-how”, thus perpetuating the roles allotted as masculine and feminine which for centuries and even today persist in our societies.

Nonetheless, in many regions of the Global South, in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, there exists an evident “feminisation” of paid agricultural work. Between 1994 and 2000, women occupied 83% of new employment created in the sector of non-traditional agricultual export. But this tendency includes a marked division of gender; on the plantations, women perform the unskilled tasks such as collection and packaging, while men carry out the harvesting and planting.

This incorporation of women into the paid workplace entails a double burden for women, who continue to carry out the care of their families whilst working to obtain an income from an employment which for the most part is precarious. They can expect worse working conditions than their male counterparts and lower pay for the same tasks, therefore having to work longer to earn the same.

Another difficulty is access to land. In several countries of the South, laws deny women this right, and in those that legally concede tenure, tradition and custom impede disposition to them. However, this problem not only occurs in the Global South. In Europe, many women farmers do not have their entitlements recognised and despite working on the land like their male peers, farm ownership and payment of social security, etc is usually commanded by men. Consequently, women, on retirement, cannot count on any pension, nor have claim to assistance or to payments, etc

The degradation of farmland in these Southern countries and the increase in migration to the cities has provoked a process of agricultural disintegration. Women are an essential component of this national and international migration, engendering a disruption and abandoment of families, land, and processes of production whilst increasing the family and community burden of the women who remain. In Europe, the United States, Canada... migrant women end up taking the jobs that years back were filled by locals, reproducing a cycle of oppression, burden and ‘invisibilisation’ of care, whilst externalising its social and economic costs to the communities of origin of the migrant women.

The incapacity to resolve the current crisis of caretaking in western countries, the combined result of massive incorporation of women into the labour market, the aging of the population, and the non-existent response from the state to these needs, leads to the massive importation of female labour into domestic work and paid care, from the countries of the Global South.

In opposition to this intensive and unsustainable neoliberal agricultural model which has demonstrated a complete inability to satisfy dietary needs of people and a complete disrespect for Nature, and which is especially adverse to women, arises the alternative paradigm of food sovereignty. This deals with the recuperation of our right to determine the what, the how and the source of what we eat; that the land, the water and the seeds are in the hands of small farmers (male and female); and the fight against the monopoly of agrifoods.

And it is requisite that this food sovereignty is profoundly feminist and internationalist, and that its accomplishment will only be possible from full equality between men and women and free access to the means of food production, distribution and consumption, along with solidarity among peoples, far from the chauvinistic cries of “ours first.”

We must reclaim the role of women farmers in food and agricultural production, and recognise the part played by the “women of corn”, those that work the land. To make visible the invisible. And to promote alliances between rural and urban women, from the North and the South. To globalise a resistance… feminine.

Esther Vivas is a member of the Centre for Studies on Social Movements (CEMS) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is author of the book in Spanish “Stand Up against external debt” and co-coordinator of the books also in Spanish “Supermarkets, No Thanks” and “Where is Fair Trade headed?”. She is also a member of the editorial board of Viento Sur

Source: International Viewpoint

Elizabeth Mpofu: Agroecology is the solution

2011-12-12T01:00:00.000+10:00

Big La Via Campesina mobilization in Durban

“Climate change is not something which is inevitable, it can be managed, it can be stopped”, Zimbabwan peasant Elizabet Mpofu would say this to any official delegate of an industrialized country at the United Nations Climate negotiations (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa.

She would add something else if she had the chance: “Please can you keep your money and I will keep my land?”.

This was the answer of La Via Campesina’s activist to the question of what she would ask an official representative at the COP.

La Via Campesina organized a march in the streets of Durban as part of what they called “International Food Sovereignty Day to Cool Down the Earth”. Nearly 2,000 people participated in the demonstration.

“La Via Campesina has called for mobilizations in Durban and around the world to demand a change of the entire capitalist system. The fight against climate change is a fight against neoliberal capitalism, landlessness, dispossession, hunger, poverty and inequality.”, reads a press release issued to call the march.

During the demonstration people would chant slogans like “agroecology cools down the planet”, “agriculture is not for sale, food sovereignty now!” and “Yes to Cochabamba, No to REDD”, in reference to the Peoples’ Agreement signed in the Bolivian city in April of 2010 at the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

The public protest of La Via Campesina included exposing big transnational corporations like Monsanto, which appropriate seeds through patents and violate peasant rights to use and exchange their own seeds.

Elizabeth Mpofu warned that the new climate patterns are affecting peasant production, many time with totally unexpected and unprecedented events in certain times of the year. She said in October a heat wave affected Zimbabwe causing the temperature to raise up to 40°Celsius, which she had never witnessed in her entire life.

La Via Campesina promotes peasant agriculture and agroecology as sustainable alternatives to cool down the planet. “With our agroecological system we find it very easy to preserve our soils and to produce what we really want”, said Mpofu. Peasants manage to get enough grains for their consumption and for sale despite all the weather events.

Zimbabwan leader admitted that the governments usually fail to implement the peasant proposals, but she said rural workers will keep up their fight. She also criticized the concept of “climate-smart agriculture”, promoted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). She said it is “none sense”. The proposal would include technology and financial packages that especially concern peasants, as it would include new waves of licenses for genetically modified crops and the extension of carbon markets to agriculture.

She shared a reflection with her colleagues of La Via Campesina: “The struggle is ours, no one can come and rescue the Africans, the small scale farmers. We have to unite, we have to struggle until we win”. She admitted it is challenging because they are fighting powerful people, while they are just poor people but she said “we are not going to go back”.

Source: Via Campesina

La Via Campesina Durban Declaration

2011-12-10T01:00:00.000+10:00

Assembly of the Oppressed, 5th December 2011, Durban, South Africa
Articles pictures and videos from Durban on www.viacampesina.org

As the Assembly of the Oppressed we are gathered here to demand the transformation of the entire neo liberal capitalist system. The fight against climate change is a fight against neo liberal capitalism, landlessness, dispossession, hunger, poverty and the re-colonization of the territories of the people’s of Africa and the global South. We are here to declare that direct action is the only weapon of the oppressed people of the world to end all forms of oppression in the world.

We are here in Durban, South Africa where the 17th United Nations Conference of Parties is taking place and are discussing false solutions to the climate crisis. And we can see that the future of Mother Earth and of humanity is in peril as those responsible for nature’s destruction are attempting to escape their responsibility and erase history.

We, La Via Campesina, the global movement of peasants, small-scale and agricultural family farmers, is severely dismayed at the attempts of the developed countries to further escape their historic responsibility to make real emission cuts and push for more false and market based solutions to the climate crisis.

Here in Durban, they are discussing a “new mandate” as an outcome of the COP 17, one which contains market mechanisms and a voluntary pledge system in order to move away from the mandated program of working towards legally binding commitments to cut emissions. Also, developed countries are working hard to escape their historical responsibility and not pay their climate debt by pushing for a green climate fund that involves private capital and the World Bank. Finally, there is a push to include agriculture in the negotiations, treating agriculture as a carbon sink rather than a source of food and livelihood. For La Via Campesina, with this trend of negotiations, it is better to have no deal than a bad deal that condemns humanity and our planet to a future of climate catastrophe.

We are now at the worst moment for agriculture and small farmers and for nature. The impacts of climate change are steadily worsening, leading to harvest failures, destruction of habitats and homes, hunger and famine and loss of lives. The future of humanity and the planet is in critical danger and if these false solutions push through, it will be a catastrophe for nature, future generations and the whole planet.

We therefore demand to all governments in the negotiations:

- For all countries from the global South to stand up for their people and to defend the people and the planet with dignity and conviction. The government of South Africa has already sold out its people in this regard.

- For all the developed countries to live up to their historical responsibility of causing this climate crisis and to pay their climate debt and commit themselves to at least 50% domestic emission reductions based on 1990 levels, without conditions and excluding carbon markets or other offset mechanisms.

- Stop industrial farming that promotes pollution and climate change through high levels of use of petroleum based chemicals

- Governments must support agro-ecology

- For all countries to listen and work for their people and not be under the control of transnational corporations.

- For all countries to stop trying to save capitalism and making the people, including small farmers, pay for their economic and financial crisis.

We as La Via Campesina, demand the implementation of the people’s global agreement on climate agreed on in Cochabamba. And here in Durban and in a thousand Durbans, we strongly reiterate our solutions to the climate crisis.

- Further global warming must be limited to a rise of 1 degree Celsius only.

- Developed countries must make domestic emission reductions of at least 50% based on 1990 levels, without conditions and excluding carbon markets or other offset mechanisms.

- Developed countries must commit to payment of their climate debt and give funding from at least 6% of their GDP. All funds for this climate finance must be public and be free from the control of the World Bank and private corporations.

- All market mechanisms must be stopped, including REDD, REDD++ and the proposed carbon markets for agriculture.

We reiterate that there will be no solution to climate change and the predatory neo-liberal system that causes it, without the liberation of women, and rural women in particular, from age old patriarchy and sexist discrimination. We therefore demand as part of comprehensive action against patriarchy and sexism:
The promotion of women’s land access and rights through targeted redistribution
Laws and policies must be made responsive to the particular needs of women

We as La Via Campesina, demand an end to the commodification of our Mother Earth reject the mechanisms of the carbon market. Furthermore, we reject the proposed inclusion of a work program on agriculture in the negotiations and reject all proposals of market mechanisms surrounding agriculture.

We as La Via Campesina and the people of the world have the real solutions to the climate crisis and we call on all governments to heed them before it is too late. At this assembly of the oppressed we declare to the people of the world that the solutions are in their hands. Through building social movements and mobilizing popular struggles for social change the world’s people will overcome the close alliance between governments and multinational corporations that is strangling the world. In Africa at the moment this alliance is perpetrating one of the biggest land grabs in history, which would mean more chemical-industrial farming, more poverty and exploitation, and more climate change. The only serious counter to this is the land occupations initiated by the landless themselves. From the perspective of food sovereignty, agrarian reform and climate justice, these land occupations deserve the fullest support.

Sustainable peasant’s agriculture and agroecology cool down the planet.

Food Sovereignty is the solution!

Peasant agriculture is not for sale!

Globalize the struggle, Globalize the hope!

Media contacts: email: boa.monjane@viacampesina.org

International Operational Secretariat:

Jln. Mampang Prapatan XIV no 5 Jakarta Selatan 12790, Indonesia

Tel/fax: +62-21-7991890/+62-21-7993426

Email: viacampesina@viacampesina.org

Farmers oppose agri-meet

2011-12-09T01:00:00.000+10:00

A KRRS rally in Mysore, India.

Bangalore: Consider this: A multi-national company will enter into an agreement in the upcoming Global Agri-investors' Meet with the state government to buy/lease over 2,000 hectares in Gangavati for growing paddy. The company eventually uses the world's best practices to grow high-quality basmati rice and later sells them in the foreign market at thrice the rate at which it's available in the local market.

While the government will earn a handsome royalty, farmers will get a lucrative price for their land sold or leased to investors for a period ranging from 20 to 100 years. And local labourers will obviously be happy with jobs coming to their doorstep.

Wait till you read the flipside of such investment. "If we lose our family farmers, we'll lose the diversity in our food supply, and what we eat will be dictated to us by a few large corporations. Family farms are a valuable resource worth preserving. The government should avoid providing land to private investors and encourage local farmers for rapid poverty reduction and food security in the country,'' said Chukki Nanjundaswamy, of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) which plans to hold a parrallel meet to educate farmers about the looming dangers of the Global Agri-business meet.

She said the most profound long-term consequence is the expansion of corporate control over food production. It would not only destroy local agriculture but also result in severe food insecurity and increased poverty,'' she added

Endorsing her views, K S Puttannaiah, leader of another faction of the KRRS, said: Karnataka in a bid to lure multinationals in the agricultural sector will convert the state from food producer to food exporter.''

According to them, small farmers are more efficient, usually making good use of their resources and are certainly more efficient than many large farmers. Most importantly, family farmers serve as responsible stewards of the land. They produce more food, they are sustainable, they are environmentally friendly, and they do not displace large numbers of farmers from the land.

Source: Food crises and the global land grab

Uniting Palestinian farmers with International farmers

2011-12-08T01:00:00.000+10:00

Representatives from Via Campesina Brazil met and discussed with UAWC, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and other Palestinian grassroots social movements for a conference in the Hebron district, West Bank in November. The meeting was an effort to include Palestinians in the largest, social popular movement in the world. Source: http://alternativenews.org

Small scale fishing communities fighting for their way of life

2011-12-07T01:00:00.000+10:00

The November issue of Nyéléni focuses on the essential role that small scale fishing communities play in the livelihoods of and providing access to food for millions of people around the world.

Here's the editorial from this November edition. The complete copy of the newsletter can be found here.

EDITORIAL

Developing countries are generally more vulnerable to the effects of climate change
than more developed countries due to their low capacity to adapt to climate change and
variability. Increasing global surface temperatures, rising sea levels, irregular changes
in average annual precipitation and increases in the variability and intensity of extreme
weather events pose a major threat to coastal and island communities, which are heavily dependent on fish resources for their wellbeing – communities in which poverty is
widespread and few alternative livelihoods are available.

Amidst the destruction caused by a lack of responsible governance of the use of land
and natural resources, small-scale fishing communities are fighting to claim back their
fishing grounds as governments and land use planners are seizing the catastrophe as
an opportunity to halt small-scale fishing activities in such areas and allocate the
areas to the development of tourist infrastructures and other uses. Fishing is not
only a source of employment, income and food for small-scale fishery; it is a way of life
based on social and environmental harmony which strengthens communities and
supports adaptation measures particularly for the most vulnerable, especially women.
Small-scale fishing communities can build and strengthen their capacity to adapt if
they are supported, and not forced to leave their waters.

Margaret Nakato
Co- President of the World Forum of Fish Harvesters & Fish Worker

Who is Nyéléni?

In the last years hundreds of organizations and movements have been engaged in
struggles, activities, and various kinds of work to defend and promote the right of people
to Food Sovereignty around the world. Many of these organizations were present in
the Nyéléni Forum 2007 and feel part of a broader Food Sovereignty Movement, that
considers the Nyéléni 2007 declaration as its political platform. The Nyéléni Newsletter wants to be the voice of this international movement.

Organizations involved: Development Fund, ETC, FIAN, Focus on the Global South,
Food First, Friends of the Earth International, GRAIN, Grassroots International, IPC for
food sovereignty, La Via Campesina, Marcha Mundial de las Mujeres, Oxfam Solidarity, Real World Radio, Roppa, The World Forum Of Fish Harvesters & Fish Workers, Veterinarios Sin Fronteras.

Now is the time for Food Sovereignty

MST Receives 2011 Food Sovereignty Prize

2011-12-06T01:00:00.000+10:00

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) received the 2011 Food Sovereignty Prize. Inaugurated in 2009, the Food Sovereignty Prize, awarded by the Community Food Security Coalition at its 15th annual conference, held this year in Oakland California. The prize recognizes leaders in the global movement for food sovereignty. The movement works to ensure the right of all people to control their own food and agriculture systems in the face of a food crisis that has driven over a billion people into hunger worldwide. The MST has been recognized as the 2011 Food Sovereignty Prize winner for addressing the extreme disparities in land access in Brazil by organizing over 350,000 landless rural families to resettle and farm formerly idle land.

This prize is a refreshing alternative to the World Food Prize created by ‘the father of the Green Revolution,’ the late Norman Borlaug,” says Christina Schiavoni of Why Hunger’s Global Movements Program. “The Food Sovereignty Prize challenges the notion that we can produce our way out of the current food crisis through technological packages or by focusing solely on food access. With a billion hungry people in the world—the majority of whom are food producers and landless workers—we need a drastically different approach to ending hunger, one that is based on equitable distribution of resources, sustainability, and dignity for those who produce our food. The honorees exemplify this.”

This year the prize, awarded by a committee of nationally recognized food system leaders (information on the nomination and selection process can be found at www.foodsecurity.org) had the theme “From Panthers to Pitchforks.” The keynote speaker was David Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. Hilliard stated that while the Panthers were known for their militancy, it was actually their community service programs that struck terror into the heart of the US government and put the Panthers on the government target list. Hilliard spoke about the Panther’s connection to food – their early support for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers and free breakfast program for children. Hilliard recounted how Huey Newton had told him that politics begin with a hungry stomach. Hilliard described how the Panthers also distributed food to the community. “We have always been involved with food because food is a very basic necessity and it is the stuff revolutions are made of.”

Click on photo for a link to Hilliard's remarks

Elias Araujo and Janaina Stronzake accepted the award on behalf of the MST. Araujo thanked the Community Food Security Coalition and all those supporters of the MST. In describing the MST’s accomplishments, he acknowledged the role of all those who had struggled before them, including the Black Panthers. Stronzake urged the crowd to “Globalize Hope, Globalize Struggle!”

Elias Araujo and Janaina Stronzake Accept the Prize

In making the award to the MST, the Community Food Security Coalition issued the following statement:

The Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil has been a leader in social action for agrarian reform and food sovereignty for over 25 years. MST organizes landless workers to reclaim idle land, obtain legal title, and use the land productively. Through these efforts, more than 350,000 families have been settled on over 17 million hectares of land, with an additional 90,000 families organized in encampments and awaiting titles. These actions have called both domestic and international attention to unequal land distribution and to the need for agrarian reform, food sovereignty and gender equity. Additionally, the MST has established over 1000 schools serving over 150,000 students, and through its cooperatives has created 900,000 new jobs in the area of agriculture alone. In areas of MST settlements, social health indicators from infant mortality rates to school attendance tend to be exponentially better than in other parts of rural Brazil. Through international learning exchanges and service brigades, such as e.g., the MST inspires and shows solidarity with communities working towards food sovereignty across the globe.

By Jeff Frank with acknowledgement to US Food Sovereignty Alliance

All photographs by Rick Gerharter at Rick Gerharter Photography.

Source: Friends of the MST

In Kenya, famine's lessons

2011-12-05T01:00:00.000+10:00

From 'The Axis of Logic' a well written article on the lessons learned from the current famine in Kenya.

Editorial comment: "The right to food is a human right. It protects the right of all human beings to live in dignity, free from hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. The right to food is not about charity, but about ensuring that all people have the capacity to feed themselves in dignity.

The right to food is protected under international human rights and humanitarian law and the correlative state obligations are equally well-established under international law. The right to food is recognized in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), as well as a plethora of other instruments. Noteworthy is also the recognition of the right to food in numerous national constitutions." (Right to food)

"Multinational companies play an increasingly large role in the world, and have been responsible for numerous human rights abuses. Although the legal and moral environment surrounding the actions of governments is reasonably well developed, that surrounding multinational companies is both controversial and ill-defined. Multinational companies' primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not to those affected by their actions. Such companies may be larger than the economies of some of the states within which they operate, and can wield significant economic and political power. No international treaties exist to specifically cover the behavior of companies with regard to human rights, and national legislation is very variable.

Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights on the right to food stated in a report in 2003: "The growing power of transnational corporations and their extension of power through privatization, deregulation and the rolling back of the State also mean that it is now time to develop binding legal norms that hold corporations to human rights standards and circumscribe potential abuses of their position of power." (Human rights - Wikipedia)

SON

La Corne de l’Est de l’Afrique frappée par la famine, (The Horn of Africa hit by famine) juillet 2011. Getty Images /AFP/Oli Scarff (Photo borrowed from Secours Populaire)

THIS past summer I came across a camel that had lost its hump. After a long journey in search of pasture, the beast was swaying beside a brackish well, its ribs and hip bones showing. The hump hung flaccid off its back like a deflated balloon.

I was in northern Kenya, which is suffering through the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 60 years. The toll of deprivation is everywhere. In the village of Kursin, emaciated livestock are collapsing in the middle of town; the local headmaster, Ismael Ali, told me they've "had a problem with dead carcasses around the school." Attendance dropped sharply since the beginning of the year, as many families left the parched region with their flocks, some even crossing into war-torn Somalia in search of food.

American attention to the hunger crisis has focused on the dire conditions of Somalis, but they account for just about a third of the 13 million people affected. According to the United Nations, hunger afflicts 4.5 million people in Ethiopia and 3.75 million people in Kenya, which has about half of Ethiopia's population. An estimated half a million Kenyan children and pregnant or breast-feeding women suffer acute malnutrition.

The drought has been mounting for a year, but it wasn't until the crisis peaked over the summer that the news media and most international donors took notice. It's a familiar cycle: first come the news media pictures of emaciated infants, followed by conferences on how to do better next time, visits from top-level government officials and large financial commitments from international organizations and even donors like China and the Ikea Foundation. The United States Agency for International Development and the Ad Council have even begun a celebrity public service campaign with the actors Uma Thurman and Josh Hartnett.

This is good news; the assistance is badly needed. Yet the mismatch in timing raises a question that bedevils aid agencies. Unlike earthquakes or hurricanes, droughts and food price increases take time to develop, and the resulting hunger crises are forecast well in advance. From water harvesting to livestock support to cash assistance, there are a plethora of steps that could have significantly ameliorated the current crisis. Why weren't they taken?

This year's drought followed two failed rainy seasons, leaving farmers and herders fragile. When coupled with skyrocketing food and fuel prices, catastrophe loomed. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, financed by U.S.A.I.D., anticipated it as early as August 2010, and by January the American ambassador to Kenya had declared a disaster and called for urgent assistance.

Although the United States began stockpiling emergency food in the region, that wasn't enough. On June 7, the warning network announced, "This is the most severe food security emergency in the world today, and the current humanitarian response is inadequate to prevent further deterioration." At that time, there were 7 million people in jeopardy. Now, the number is 13 million.

A common misconception is that hunger crises are about a lack of food. Yet there is food in Kenya and Ethiopia, and even in many parts of Somalia. The real issue is poverty. The people affected are poor to begin with; when things turned bad, they had no recourse. In April the World Bank reported that 44 million people worldwide were pushed over the edge by skyrocketing food prices.

Such a perspective is largely missing in our food-aid program. It's like a health insurance system that waits until someone has a full-blown illness before he or she can get treatment. By the end of June, with the crisis in full swing, the United States had committed a total of about $64 million to Kenya, much of it in the form of food supplies (this doesn't include relief for the Somali refugees). But food aid loses at least half of its value, according to the Government Accountability Office, because we ship actual food instead of sending cash for local purchase, like most countries. And only $5 million was allocated to agriculture, nutrition, water and sanitation - about $1.33 per hungry person - things that would have helped people during lean times.

Blame politics. Medium- and long-term planning is often the first thing to be cut from an aid budget. After the food price crisis of 2008, when hunger riots erupted around the globe, President Obama got the Group of 8 to promise $22 billion for agricultural development and food security. But many of those commitments have not been met. Meanwhile, this summer Congressional Republicans voted to cut the foreign food aid budget by a third, and more cuts are planned.

And, of course, there is the matter of optics: donors want to see dead babies before they provide significant assistance, one frustrated aid worker told me.

Blame also lies with the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments. In the northern district of Wajir, for instance, by July the central government provided only about half the food assistance that local governments requested, while Ethiopia, according to the BBC, misused aid for political purposes. It is an old story: sending emergency aid is clumsy, and often fraught with problems. As I was leaving a village that depended entirely on delivered water, I passed the water truck the villagers were waiting for, broken down by the side of the road.

Aid officials say they realize that prevention is better than reaction. "We know how to do this," Rajiv Shah, the head of U.S.A.I.D., told me during a trip he made in July to Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp. "It is one-tenth the cost to provide effective agricultural support and help communities gain food security than it is to provide food aid at a time of famine."

Our shortsighted response also highlights a misunderstanding about foreign assistance and prevention. "We are not investing in relatively obvious solutions," said Christopher Barrett, an expert on food aid at Cornell University. Those mundane but vital interventions include shoring up the water supply and helping to bolster markets and transportation so that economies continue during lean times. The best assistance, people in Wajir told me, would be a decent road to the south, which would cheapen imports and give them a market for their animals.

DRIVING through Wajir's sandy, arid landscape, we turned the corner to an amazing sight: a green oasis - a farm, a greenhouse, a well, a water pump, a windmill. Running around were the first happy, healthy-looking children I had seen. This is the Kutulo Farm, a women's cooperative in Wagberi, where they grow kale, cabbage and peppers. They received money for the well from the European Union, but otherwise have done everything on their own. They would like to expand, said Adey Issack, one of the founders, but have no access to credit.

Programs like the Kutulo Farm are significantly cheaper to start and maintain than sending mounds of food aid at the last minute, in large part because they leverage the skills and knowledge of local residents to do the work. The current crisis is a painful demonstration of how well such an approach works: those few communities that received small, well-designed assistance are weathering the drought relatively well.

While recent rain has eased the pressure, much of it will be lost because of a lack of water-collection facilities. And experts warn that so many in Kenya are weakened and destitute that the cycle is expected to start up again in May. In other words, droughts cannot be stopped. But the economics that link drought and famine can be upended, so that next time, the people of Wajir, and dozens of countries around the world, might be able to avoid untold, and unnecessary, suffering.

Samuel Loewenberg is a Nieman Foundation global health reporting fellow at Harvard. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting provided a travel grant for the reporting of this essay.

Free Markets and the Food Crisis in Central America

2011-12-02T01:00:00.000+10:00

Here's a great article written by Carlos G. Aguilar Sanchez. He talks about the way in which Central America provides a good example of how trade liberalisation can be the source of inequality and international exclusion - and provides proposals for Central American integration to move forward towards food sovereignty, and guaranteeing access to food for the people.

“Free markets can still feed the world.” - Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank

“Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, as well as a few governments, are making the argument for more investment in agriculture, for increasing food aid for poor food-importing countries and for liberalizing markets so these countries can increase incomes through exports. Many argue that we need more intensive models of production, which for proponents means more industrial inputs- including GMOs and fossil fuels!” La Via Campesina, 2008

Poverty and Agriculture in the Central American Transition
During the 1990s, Central America underwent a series of socioeconomic transformations that affects specific sectors, including small and mid-sized agricultural producers and middle-class consumers. New regional patterns of trade and accumulation have redefined the role of local markets and have led to an increase in food imports to meet the nutritional and food needs of Central Americans. According to the FAO, the region is home to two countries that suffer from severe poverty and malnutrition—Nicaragua and Honduras—and the region as a whole has been become heavily dependent on imports and “aid” through free trade agreements, mostly with the United States and the European Union.

During that same period, the tertiary sector of the economy (services, off-shore manufacturing and business) displaced agriculture at the center of the economy, causing widespread migration from the countryside to the cities, contributing to slums around the area’s metropolises and an influx of informal day workers who had formerly made their livings in farming.[2]

According to the State of the Region Report-2008, in 2005 agriculture contributed less to the regional GDP than remittances. The service industry, meanwhile, accounted for about 67% of regional GDP. Along the same lines, agricultural land use decreased by 7.4% between 2005 and 2008.

In only 15 years—from the early 1990s to 2005—land planted in rice, beans, corn, sorghum (staple foods for the poor) fell by half, substituted by exportable goods.[3]The recession of 2008-2009 wiped out some of the supposed economic advances in combating poverty in that period.

The most recent figures from the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) show that the region continued to have “very high” levels of income inequality as measured by the GINI coefficient. A study by the UN’s Fund for Children and Adolescents carried out in 2008-2009 shows that 78.5% of Nicaraguan and Guatemalan children and adolescents live in poverty and in El Salvador the number rises to 86%. Since poverty affects women more severely, significant disparities show up when gender variables are introduced.

Even though many point out some achievements in cash transfer programs and public investment, official poverty statistics have been going up and hunger has emerged as an urgent problem in certain critical areas of the region.[4] The so-called “Dry Corridor” of Central America (Eastern Guatemala, Northern Nicaragua, and South Central Honduras) has been one of the most hard hit by adverse weather, but it’s mainly the insufficiency and/or absence of national and regional policies related to crop loss (principally corn, sorghum, and beans) that is causing the suffering there. In 2009, the Guatemalan government had to declare a state of national disaster because it found more than four thousand at-risk communities, representing some 400,000 thousand families going hungry and malnourished.

A recent State of the Region Report- 2011 highlights, “In 2008 poverty was affected by the rise in international prices of basic goods […] For example, in El Salvador the per capita cost of the basic food basket went from $38.40 monthly in 2007, to $44.8 in 2008 in urban areas, and from $25.10 to $29.10 in rural areas. It was the same situation in all of the other countries of the isthmus as well.”[5]

New information confirms the scope of this region-wide calamity; for example, in 2009 the Center for Latin American Social Ecology (CLAES, by its Spanish initials) incorporated a variable on food security in their country risk-assessment measurements. Its application demonstrated how the food crisis of 2008 placed most of the Central American countries in critical condition or in socio-environmental default. Defaulting countries included Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama.[6]

Economic restructuring in the region has spurred the import of basic grains and led to a change in production in most of the countries. It has also caused a fragmentation of national territory that deepens the divisions between the centers of political and economic power and the periphery— rural areas, indigenous peoples, people of African descent (most of whom are located on the Caribbean coastline). This breakdown makes real regional integration impossible.

Food availability, especially of basic grains, is strongly controlled by import chains, posing a special challenge to attaining food sovereignty and the right to food.[7] The Guatemalan case illustrates clearly the relationship between the food crisis and neoliberal policies promoted by the free market. According to the Institute of Agricultural and Rural Studies, “Commercial liberalisation, with its maximum expression in the Central American and Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), has been problematic by de-incentivising the domestic production of the same goods that are entering the country at highly subsidised prices and flooding local markets. So when prices in those products rise, there has already been a reduction in the capacity to produce them internally—especially in the crops that are the most heavily imported. As such, the applied model has generated dependency that worsens the crisis.”[8]

At the same time, according to the Association of Guatemalan Palm Growers palm oil monocultures are growing about 3,238 thousand acres per year in that country alone. This rate makes Guatemala the world’s foremost producer in palm oil by area[9] and affects agricultural production in places like San Marcos, Retalhuleu, Suchitepéquez, Escuintla, Quiché, Izabal and the south of Petén.[10] While Central American nations suffer from the food crisis, the cultivation of crops for biofuels is being expanded in numerous countries, promoting the systematic territorial displacement of local indigenous and farming communities.

Export-based agriculture is currently concentrated in extensive monocultures for foreign markets (e.g. pineapple, bananas and biofuel-producing crops like cane sugar and palm oil). This leads to a rise in the use of fertilizers and pesticides that has in turn produced the release of tons of contaminating and greenhouse gases[11]documented over the period between 2003-2005.[12]

Central America serves as a good example of how trade liberalization can be the source of inequality and international exclusion, destroying the potential for regional integration based on the specific needs of the countries in the region.

The link between trade liberalization and food availability is becoming a critical factor that, far from improving living conditions, threatens to deepen and entrench the structural causes of hunger, violence and malnutrition in the region.

Prelude to the crisis: free trade and food prices

Central America continues to suffer from historical conditions of malnutrition and poverty that are getting worse as a result of its form of insertion into the globalized economy, and especially its trade and financial liberalization policies. Free trade, which is commonly claimed to be a fundamental component of development for impoverished countries, seems to be operating in the current framework as a source of inequality and inequity at a regional and international level.

As underlined in the State of the Region Report-2008, “[…] the accessibility of food hadn’t been a problem in Central America. However, through the effects of international economic integration, the agricultural sector has been neglected, especially in the areas of domestic food production […] and dependency on imported food increased, most of all in basic grains; […] the situation has been further complicated by the recent spike in these prices (international food prices), among other reasons, due to the increased use of food products to generate biofuels.”[13]

In its 2008 report entitled The State of Food Insecurity in the World, the FAO pointed out that among the many causes driving the elevation of food prices was the growth in food crops used for agrofuels (the FAO calls them “biofuels”) and trade policies that favor “[…] practices of re-supplying or pre-supplying large importers for speculative purposes…”[14] A similar situation began to develop again in 2010, when grain prices increased up to 50%, pushing more than 70 million people worldwide into extreme poverty.

According to the FAO report, socioeconomic factors (this includes changes in imports and exports) represent 27% of the cause of the food crisis since 2000, as opposed to only 2% in the 1980’s.[15] The links between globalization and food availability have grown in recent decades so that international trade agreements cannot be separated from the issue of the right to food in low-income countries.

Just to give an idea of what this means, when prices of basic grains began to rise in 2010, countries with a food deficit were forced to spend 20% of their budgets on importing food than in 2009 — $164 billion USD.[16]

In regards to Central America, the 2008 State of the Region Report, based on indicators from ECLAC, calculated that an increase of 15% in the price of food could mean 2.5 million more people in extreme poverty, particularly in Guatemala and Honduras. A model of rising imports (wheat, rice and corn went up to about 30% in available food between 1990-2003) with tripled prices for wheat and doubled prices for corn and rice (2008-2009), leads to profits for the companies that import the goods, but growing malnutrition, especially among the region’s rural and indigenous poor.

Trade and investment rules negotiated within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and bilateral trade and investment agreements assure a base for the exportation of specific local stock agricultural products and a wide range of facilities for the massive imports of food products controlled by large global marketing and distribution chains.

GRAIN eloquently sums up this international problems:

“These policy prescriptions were reinforced in the 1990s with the establishment of the World Trade Organization and more recently through the avalanche of bilateral trade, free trade, and investment agreements. Together with a package of other measures, they have implacably dismantled tariffs and other means of protection that developing countries had in order to protect their local agricultural production, and forced open their markets and land to global agribusiness, to speculators and subsidized exports coming from rich countries. Today, approximately 70% of so-called developing countries are net importers of food.”[17]

Trade agreements have caused a reduction in the diversity of crops grown in the area as growers concentrate their yields around exportable goods.[18] So although the total availability of goods rises, it isn’t destined for local consumption, or it is based on imported goods, which means that price hikes primarily affect the poor and extremely poor. We quit producing food for the local market and what we do produce is sent abroad through trade agreements. The diversification of production has been done at the expense of starving the local population to satisfy demand for tropical products in “developed countries.”

In the past couple of years, this trend has led to an exponential increase in the production of tropical goods while growth of staple grains for the local market has experienced a dramatic decline. Costa Rica, the country with the highest percentage of exports in the region, is a case in point. From 1990 to 2005, the land area devoted to rice, beans, corn, and sorghum declined by 52%, while land devoted to crops for foreign markets (mainly the United States and the European Union)–such as fruits, legumes, vegetables, and oils–doubled.[19]

The result is an apparent paradox provoked by the insertion of regional economies into the world market: a greater availability of food—based on the imports of grain, meat, and milk— that heightens international dependency and weakens food sovereignty. The more trade and investment that flow in the region, the more imports are needed to satisfy food demands.

When we analyze the composition of regional markets and companies, we find that the majority are small or medium-sized and operate on a local or regional level. This creates a two-pronged economy: One prong is linked to foreign markets through trade agreements (agribusiness for export), and the other is rural-indigenous, family subsistence-level agriculture, which is currently threatened by structural conditions of violence and poverty.

On the basis of this dual and unequal structure, the countries in the region have failed to comply with a single criterion of adequate nutrition (with a few limited exceptions). The direct availability of food through natural resources and access to arable land is severely limited or poorly distributed, the systems for distribution and marketing are oriented toward satisfying the demand of foreign markets, and physical and economic access to food is impossible in the face of a growing pattern of unemployment and poverty concentrated in rural areas and among African descendents, indigenous groups and peasant communities.

Food supply, where possible, is acquired through greater dependence on imports and is severely threatened by all of the above conditions.[20] Guaranteeing the Human Right to Adequate Food as a principle formally incorporated into the body of Human Rights, is impeded by trade agreements that limit the capacity of autonomous economics, politics and production for small farmer in Central America.

Proposals for Central American Regional Integration to Confront Poverty and Guarantee Access to Food for the People
Central American countries urgently need to open up debate and begin to develop new proposals for integration that break with the current model of open regionalism promoted by ECLAC in accordance with the globalization tenets of attracting foreign investment and aggressive trade liberalization.

The starting point for alternative integration proposals should consider that no country in the region can face the multiple challenges inherent in escaping poverty and misery alone. What’s needed is a coordinated regional strategy with supranational policies (joint sovereignty)[21] based on new principles of institutional and political organization.[22] We urgently need a concrete mechanism for maintaining reserves of the foods that make up the mainstay of the Central American diet, regionally administered with the goal of controlling price volatility and imports of grains and cereals in the area.

Proposals:

1. Develop a coordinated regional plan with supranational policies on the basis of new organizational and political principles

2. Establish a mechanism for regionally administered food reserves

3. Strengthen state investment in agriculture

4. Strengthen the democratic participation of diverse sectors of the population in the definition, creation, and implementation of public policies addressing hunger

5. Advance agrarian reform to guarantee that food production returns to the hands of small farmers

6. Establish policies that provide credit and technology transfer for production of basic foods and support agroecology production and marketing.

7. Develop agricultural policies that take into account environmental impact on ecosystems and biomes and seek alternatives

These policies would require Central American governments to strengthen agricultural investment and political control in defining national and regional strategies, based on broader and more informed democratic participation by diverse sectors of society in defining, producing, and implementing public policy aimed at eliminating hunger and poverty. They require deep democracy, which at present doesn’t exist in the region and can’t exist under the current institutional conditions of violence and displacement.

The right to food plays a major role in this perspective, since the process of integration must deal with the immediate urgency to confront increasing malnutrition and hunger, and not just the demands of foreign markets. There is a documented link between poverty and limited access to land, which proves the need to move forward with agrarian reform so small farmers can feed their families and their nations.

The starting point should be that every Central American has adequate access to food, and for this to happen, the structure of production and commerce must change. National and regional production should, first and foremost, attend to the needs of local markets. We must produce to cover the food and nutritional needs of Central America. But it’s not only about guaranteeing food, which could be achieved in the short term through imports. It’s about creating and strengthening the production chain of local and regional markets.

Figures from 2009 show that approximately 45.6% of intraregional trade comes from agriculture.[23] Redeveloping the role of the Central American common market and the responsibilities of regional producers requires the urgent task of defining a strategy that slows massive food imports. Thus businesses in the region have an important role in this strategy and should be more proactive in developing policies to enhance their capacity to interact with other productive sectors in the region.

In Central America most trade is carried out by small and medium-sized producers, marketers, and distributors. Without a shared, common policy that strengthens these sectors, it is impossible to think about better access to food. The current structure needs to be complemented and supported by policies that provide credit to those producing staple goods and foodstuffs. Policies also need to provide new technologies and promote agro-ecological production and commercialization.

Agricultural Policy and the Environment

Central America is a very small but growing region. If we continue using a model of production and marketing of the same products in each of the countries, we run the risk of worsening hunger and malnutrition and irreparably damaging the area’s delicate ecosystems and overall environment.

The entire region shows critical levels of social and environmental vulnerability, especially in Nicaragua and Honduras. The State of the Region- 2011 signaled, “Among the major areas of impact of climate change, are pressures on food security, the availability water (including its potential energy use), alteration and loss of biodiversity in its ecosystems (with an emphasis on forests and marine-coastal resources), all this alongside an increased propensity toward natural disasters, harm to human health and livelihoods (particularly in indigenous and rural communities).[24]

This means that the strategy must prioritize and reorganize the basis of agriculture policy that coordinates with estimates of ecological impact and alternatives to protect ecosystems and biomes. This also means that joint management needs to extend beyond political boundaries, especially in relation to transnational water basins that are currently threatened by mineral extraction projects, and a new form of geopolitics based on bioregions. In general, what predominates today is the fragmentation of habitats and a concentration of economic and productive activities along the coasts.

It’s no coincidence that from the mid-1980s to the middle of the last decade the region lost 35% of its wetlands, causing serious impacts on local flora and fauna. The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, a shared area threatened by a series of initiatives to link up physical and informatic infrastructure, is an area of high biodiversity, especially in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala and Bosawas Biosphere on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua.[25]

Large consortiums for tourism and mineral extractions, along with increased agricultural activity for the production of monocultures, are causing pressure on ecosystems that destroys not only forests but also any possibility of food sovereignty. The region urgently needs to reorient its physical and infrastructure capacity to incorporate the goals of the right to food, the protection and rehabilitation of fundamental ecosystems, coordinated policies of complementary and competitive production, and more control by the people in defining and implementing public policy on territory and common goods.[26]

A new structuring of land use will mean that some areas should be totally protected, while others can be selectively used for certain activities. Some areas present better conditions for growing basic foods, while others are better used for farming exportable products. What we can’t continue to allow is a trade regime that concentrates profits while shunting the environmental costs onto local populations and continuing to make crucial political decisions within small, anti-democratic elites of businessmen and women.

Central America needs a new form of alternative integration based on a new institutional architecture–one with broad participation from social movements and strict application of the right to food and food sovereignty. The current conditions of the crisis and the accumulated effects of liberalization should urgently point to the need to restore the strategic leading role that rural farmers have had in the region’s historical development. The present threat to our indigenous-African descendent-peasant populations signals that it is time to think about and build a Central America without hunger and poverty. It’s time for a present with promise for all generations of Central Americans.

Carlos G. Aguilar Sanchez is a member of the regional coordination of Grito de los Excluidos Mesoamérica (Cry of the Excluded Mesoamerica

Source: Upside Down World

A global alliance emerges in West Africa

2011-12-01T01:00:00.001+10:00

Photo by Salena Tramel

By Salena Tramel

Selingué, Mali—Early morning on day one of the first peasant-organized international conference to stop land grabbing held in Nyéléni, Mali, delegates from more than 30 countries took their seats for the opening ceremony. Many fumbled with the bulky and crackling radios that would provide simultaneous translation, while a small group of women from across Africa gathered in the center of the open-air conference hall, their feet sinking into the sand. In a long-standing tradition of the Via Campesina, the global peasant movement, the women kicked off the events with a mistica—a ceremony intended to depict socio-political struggles and incite debate.

That debate, and the three-day forum at Nyéléni, had been a long time in the making. Outraged by their governments’ increasing willingness to sell or lease prime farmland to foreign investors on the cheap, social movements and grassroots organizations around the world issued a chain of pleas. Notable among those are the Kolongo Appeal, written in the wake of Mali’s most contentious land grab to date, and the Dakar Appeal, following the World Social Forum earlier this year.

“The land has belonged to our communities for generations,” said Ibrahima Coulibaly, president of the National Confederation of Peasant Organizations (a Via Campesina member) in Mali during one of the plenary sessions. He added, “We are here to find solutions, to fight together against the national and multinational agendas that seek to displace us. That all starts with telling our stories and organizing to mobilize farmers.”

“We are so impressed with the African movements,” said Rafael Alegría, a founding Via Campesina member from Honduras. “They have helped us articulate a truly global voice.” Land grabbing, a global phenomenon, has resulted in multinational corporations, financial speculators, sovereign wealth funds, and richer countries sweeping up between 40-50 million acres of land from 2006-09 alone. Africa, has been especially hit.

A man in traditional white Senegalese kaftan dress sitting next to me clutched a string of wooden prayer beads. “I’m Diery Gaye,” he offered, his voice quiet but strong. “What do you know about African movements?” he asked. I told him that I was eager to learn more. He let go of his beads, leaned over, and took my notebook—drawing an intricate map of organizing from the local to the Pan-African level.

Diery, who is a representative from the Senegalese rural development network, the National Council for Rural Dialogue and Cooperation (CNCR), explained that land grabbing is a relatively new phenomenon in his country, describing it as out-of-control decisions from above that must be fought from below. Diery is a small producer in Niayes, a coastal region that is Senegal’s breadbasket—thus all the more susceptible to being swept up by foreign investors. “It comforts us to be here in Mali, to know that there are others fighting this same kind of colonization and expulsion,” he said, “The peasant cause unites us.”

Maria Luiza Agusta Clodé, a young woman from Guinea-Bissau shared similar sentiments. In her country, the State often expropriates land from peasants, offering no compensation to its residents. “Throughout these few days, we have exchanged our experiences as farmers,” she said. “I have learned that land grabbing is slightly different in every country—but the consequences are always the same. Without land, we cannot live.”

Delegates strategized late into the nights, resolving to make land rights a reality. On the final day, both exhausted and energized, they read the fruition of their work—the Final Declaration to Stop Land Grabbing.

“I’m so excited,” exclaimed Lalla Aïcha Sy, a small farmer from Mauritania. “This is a milestone for all of us,” she explained. The declaration calls for all organizations committed to its principles and actions to join the new Global Alliance against Land Grabbing, launched in Nyéléni.

At dusk on the last day, a Malian woman took my hand and led me outside for the closing mistica. This time, a small group of peasant leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean led the ceremony. And this time, some of the heaviness lifted when they enacted the powerful potential of the hard work done in a small West African village.

Grassroots International partially funded the Via Campesina/CNOP’s organizing of this conference. Grassroots consultant Salena Tramel attended the conference and wrote this blog.

Source: Food Crisis and the Global Land Grab

Venezuela, revolution and food sovereignty

2011-12-01T01:00:00.000+10:00

by Lisa Macdonald, AVSN

If current trends continue, global food crises will become more frequent and more severe. Today's food systems already leave hundreds of millions of people in hunger and are rapidly depleting the soil fertility on which long-term food security depends. Add to this mix the convergence of climate change and peak oil and it's clear we need major changes to the way food is produced and distributed.

The Venezuelan people are in the midst of an exciting experiment to create a socially just and sustainable food system. From fishing villages to cacao plantations to urban gardens, this growing social movement is showing what's possible when people, not corporations, take control of food.

Since the discovery of oil in Venezuela in the 20th century, multinational corporations’ single-minded exploitation of this “black gold” turned Venezuela into a single-industry economy. Food production and feeding the population was neglected in favour of the huge profits to be made from oil exports, and the mass migration of rural populations to urban centres to find a better standard of living resulted in Venezuela, by the 1990s, having to import more than 80% of its food.

With the election in 1998 of President Hugo Chávez and the development of the Bolivarian revolution, however, this began to change. In the last decade, a large number of initiatives have been taken to promote Venezuela's rural development and guarantee food sovereignty.

Among these are:

Food sovereignty is now guaranteed in the Constitution: “Food sovereignty is the inalienable right of a nation to define and develop priorities and foods appropriate to its specific conditions, in local and national production, conserving agricultural and cultural diversity and self-sufficiency and guaranteeing food supply to all the population”.
The new Law of the Land and Agrarian Development, Law of Food Sovereignty and Security, and Law of Integrated Agricultural Health are based on the principles that farmers should control their land and product, the country should produce its own food, and toxic agricultural chemicals should be phased out.
The nationalisation of large private landholdings, many of which had lain idle for decades, and the redistribution of that land to local communities for agricultural development is one of the most important achievements. Victorian farmer Alan Broughton, who participated in a food sovereignty study tour to Venezuela in July 2010, writes in an article available at http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/45308: “Control over production is in the hands of the farmer cooperatives on the newly distributed lands.
Assistance is provided by the government for cooperative management and to establish processing plants so the farmers are no longer victim to the powers of the processors and distributors to set prices... The communities that have gained control of the land have different methods of land ownership and organisation.
Some communities chose to own individual plots and work together for machinery and knowledge sharing and marketing. Others form cooperatives to hold title of the land in common and work the land together. Other land remains as state farms with day to day decision making determined by the farm workers.”
Rural producers are today supported by the Agricultural Bank of Venezuela (BAV), which promotes the social and economic development of the country. They receive agricultural funding at low interest rates and guidance to guarantee the success of their productive projects. BAV's main goal is to dignify the work of farmers. By 2010, nearly 600,000 small and medium producers had registered in this program.
In urban areas, “Venezuela is emulating the remarkable achievements of Cuba where more than half of the fruit and vegetable needs of the urban population are produced within the cities”, Broughton explains. “As in Cuba, the city food gardens are all organic, providing non-toxic, safe, fresh food to communities. The benefits of urban agriculture are seen as contributing to food security and sovereignty, improving the urban environment, supplementing the income of families, communities and schools, and fostering learning and recreational activities. The gardens are set up on unused land, at schools and, using raised beds, on concrete and balconies. Community centres have established these gardens wherever possible.”
One of the most radical government initiatives is its work to eliminate chemical fertilisers and pesticides, which were used in massive quantities in Venezuela in past decades. To help achieve this, agroecology colleges have been set up, with the assistance of advisors from Cuba, which is now almost fully organic. Biological control and biofertiliser labs are also being set up across the country to produce beneficial insects and fungi, and soil inoculants.
Seed banks and seed treatment plants have been established to provide the range of agricultural genetics suited to the various regions, says Broughton. The aim is to completely bypass the international corporations that supply seed around the world, and preserve the genetic diversity that has been built up in Venezuela for thousands of years. GM seeds are not allowed.
The establishment of the Paulo Freire Latin American School of Agroecology to provide free education for future advisors and teachers from around Latin America is important not only for Venezuela but also the whole continent. The aim is to reclaim agriculture from the neo-liberal model, especially for indigenous and Afro farmers. The stated philosophy of the school is social transformation in defence of Mother Earth. Permaculture is integrated into the education process.

During the 12 years of the Bolivarian revolution, the food producing area has increased from 4,049,866 acres in 1998 to 6,014,404 acres today, and agricultural production has increased by 44%. The Venezuelan economy is still dominated by oil exports, but the social investment policies implemented by the Bolivarian government have used the oil wealth to gradually replace food imports with domestic production and Venezuela has now achieved food sovereignty in the production of rice and white corn.

Growing change

In his 2011 documentary, Growing Change: A Journey into Venezuela's Food Revolution, filmmaker and solidarity activist Simon Cunich investigates the 2008 global food crisis and visits Venezuela to speak to farmers, fisherfolk, cocoa producers and urban gardeners about the new food system that is being constructed by communities and the revolutionary government.

Growing Change is an inspirational story full of lively characters, thought-provoking insights, stunning scenery and ideas to transform the food system. It is a film that everyone interested in a sustainable future should watch, discuss and encourage others to watch. Why not organise a screening in your local community centre, U3A group, school, university, or at home with your neighbours?

For more information or to get a copy of the film visit: http://www.growingchange.com.au For details of public screenings of the film around Australia, visit http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org.

Young farmer connects others to the land as she learns about rice production

2011-11-30T01:00:00.000+10:00

This is the third video in a series of three that give an insight into the real life experiences of a young woman farmer living in Japan.

Ayumi Kinezuka has a great passion to involve others in the farming experience. In this third video, Ayumi talks about how she is learning to produce rice, and in doing so, invites other people to join her in her journey, from the planting to the harvesting. This story is more than just about producing rice, it is an impressive story about success through sharing and connecting.

Source: Food Sovereignty Japan

Why I became a farmer!

2011-11-29T01:00:00.000+10:00

This is the second video in a series of three that gives insights into the real life experiences of a young woman farmer in Japan.

In this second video, Ayumi Kinezuka shares with us the reasons behind her decision to return to her father's organic tea farm and become a farmer. From her studies in psychology and sociology to her decision to take what she has learnt and ... go back to the farm - Ayumi's story is truly inspirational.

Source: Food Sovereignty Japan

Young tea farmer talks about her family's organic farm

2011-11-28T01:00:00.000+10:00

This is the first video of a series of three that give an insight into the real life experiences of a young woman farmer in Japan.

Ayumi Kinezuka is an amazing young woman, who has been farming on her father's tea farm for the past 8 years. In this first video, Ayumi talks about the importance of her family's connection to customers, the difficulties her father had 35 years ago in transitioning the farm from chemicals to organics, and the advantages of being organic and of connecting with other farmers to market their products.

Source: Food Sovereignty Japan

Final Declaration: Stop Land-Grabbing Now!

2011-11-25T01:00:00.000+10:00

Nyeleni, November 19, 2011

We, women and men peasants, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and their allies, who gathered together in Nyeleni from 17-19 November 2011, are determined to defend food sovereignty, the commons and the rights of small scale food providers to natural resources. We supported the Kolongo Appeal from peasant organizations in Mali, who have taken the lead in organising local resistance to the take-over of peasants' lands in Africa. We came to Nyeleni in response to the Dakar Appeal, which calls for a global alliance against land-grabbing.

In the past three days, peasants, pastoralists and indigenous peoples have come together from across the world for the first time to share with each other their experiences and struggles against land-grabbing. In Mali, the Government has committed to give away 800 thousand hectares of land to business investors. These are lands of communities that have belonged to them for generations, even centuries, while the Malian State has only existed since the 1960-s. This situation is mirrored in many other countries where customary rights are not recognised. Taking away the lands of communities is a violation of both their customary and historical rights.

Secure access to and control over land and natural resources are inextricably linked to the enjoyment of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several regional and international human rights conventions, such as the rights to an adequate standard of living, housing, food, health, culture, property and participation. We note with grave concern that states are not meeting their obligations in this regard and putting the interests of business interests above the rights of peoples.

Land-grabbing is a global phenomenon led by local, national and transnational elites and investors, and governments with the aim of controlling the world's most precious resources. The global financial, food and climate crises have triggered a rush among investors and wealthy governments to acquire and capture land and natural resources, since these are the only “safe havens” left that guarantee secure financial returns. Pension and other investment funds have become powerful actors in land-grabbing, while wars continue to be waged to seize control over natural wealth. The World Bank and regional development banks are facilitating land grabs by promoting corporate-friendly policies and laws, facilitating capital and guarantees for corporate investors, and fostering an extractive, destructive economic development model. The World Bank, IFAD, FAO and UNCTAD have proposed seven principles that legitimise farmland grabbing by corporate and state investors. Led by some of the world's largest transnational corporations, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) aims to transform smallhold agriculture into industrial agriculture and integrate smallhold farmers to global value chains, greatly increasing their vulnerability to land-loss.

Land-grabbing goes beyond traditional North-South imperialist structures; transnational corporations can be based in the United States, Europe, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea, among others. It is also a crisis in both rural and urban areas. Land is being grabbed in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe for industrial agriculture, mining, infrastructure projects, dams, tourism, conservation parks, industry, urban expansion and military purposes. Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities are being expelled from their territories by armed forces, increasing their vulnerability and in some cases even leading to slavery. Market based, false solutions to climate change are creating more ways to alienate local communities from their lands and natural resources.

Despite the fact that women produce most of the world's food, and are responsible for family and community well being, existing patriarchal structures continue to dispossess women from the lands that they cultivate and their rights to resources. Since most peasant women do not have secure, legally recognised land rights, they are particularly vulnerable to evictions.

The fight against land-grabbing is a fight against capitalism, neoliberalism and a destructive economic model. Through testimonies from our sisters and brothers in Burkina Faso, Columbia, Guatemala, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand and Uganda, we learned how land-grabbing threatens small scale, family based farming, nature, the environment and food sovereignty. Land grabbing displaces and dislocates communities, destroys local economies and the social-cultural fabric, and jeopardizes the identities of communities, be they farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, workers, dalits or indigenous peoples. Those who stand up for their rights are beaten, jailed and killed. There is no way to mitigate the impacts of this economic model and the power structures that promote it. Our lands are not for sale or lease.

But we are not defeated. Through organisation, mobilisation and community cohesiveness, we have been able to stop land-grabbing in many places. Furthermore, our societies are recognising that small-scale, family based agriculture and food production is the most socially, economically and environmentally sustainable model of using resources.

Recalling the Dakar Appeal, we reiterate our commitment to resist land-grabbing by all means possible, to support all those who fight land-grabs, and to put pressure on national governments and international institutions to fulfill their obligations to defend and uphold the rights of peoples. Specifically, we commit to:

Organise rural and urban communities against land-grabs in every form.
Strengthen the capacities of our communities and movements to reclaim and defend our rights, lands and resources.
Win and secure the rights of women in our communities to land and natural resources.
Create public awareness about how land grabbing is creating crises for all society.
Build alliances across different sectors, constituencies, regions, and mobilise our societies to stop land-grabbing
Strengthen our movements to achieve and promote food sovereignty and genuine agrarian reform
In order to meet the above commitments, we will develop the following actions:
Report back to our communities the deliberations and commitments of this Conference.
Institutionalise April 17 as the day of global mobilisation against land-grabbing; also identify additional appropriate dates that can be used for such mobilisations to defend land and the commons.
Develop our political arguments to expose and discredit the economic model that spurs land-grabbing, and the various actors and initiatives that promote and legitimise it.
Build our own databases about land-grabbing by documenting cases, and gathering the needed information and evidence about processes, actors, impacts, etc.
Ensure that communities have the information they need about laws, rights, companies, contracts, etc., so that they can resist more effectively the business investors and governments who try to take their lands and natural resources.
Set up early warning systems to alert communities to risks and threats.
Establish a Peoples' Observatory on land-grabbing to facilitate and centralise data gathering, communications, planning actions, advocacy, research and analysis, etc.
Strengthen our communities through political and technical training, and restore our pride in being food producers and providers.
Secure land and resource rights for women by conscientising our communities and movements, targeted re-distribution of land for women, and other actions make laws and policies responsive to the particular needs of women.
Build strong organisational networks and alliances at various levels--local, regional and international--building on the Dakar Appeal and with small-scale food producers/providers at the centre of these alliances.
Build alliances with members of pension schemes in order to prevent pension fund managers from investing in projects that result in land grabbing.
Make our leaders abide by the rules set by our communities and compel them to be accountable to us, and our communities and organisations.
Develop our own systems of legal aid and liaise with legal and human rights experts.
Condemn all forms of violence and criminalisation of our struggles and our mobilizations in defense of our rights.
Work for the immediate release of all those jailed as a result of their struggles for their lands and territories, and urgently develop campaigns of solidarity with all those facing conflicts.
Build strategic alliances with press and media, so that they report accurately our messages and realities; counter the prejudices spread by the mainstream media about the land struggles in Zimbabwe.
Develop and use local media to organise members of our and other communities, and share with them information about land-grabbing.
Take our messages and demands to parliaments, governments and international institutions.
Identify and target local, national and international spaces for actions, mobilizations and building broad-based societal resistance to land-grabbing.
Plan actions that target corporations, (including financial corporations), the World Bank and other multilateral development banks that benefit from, drive and promote land and natural resource grabs.
Expand and strengthen our actions to achieve and promote food sovereignty and agrarian reform.
Support peoples' enclosures of their resources through land occupations, occupations of the offices of corporate investors, protests and other actions to reclaim their commons.
Demand that our governments fulfill their human rights obligations, immediately stop land and natural resource transfers to business investors, cancel contracts already made, and protect rural and urban communities from ongoing and future land-grabs.

We call all organizations committed to these principles and actions to join our Global Alliance against Land-Grabbing, which we solemnly launch today here in Nyeleni.

Globalise the struggle! Globalise hope!

Via Campesina

GM Crops: Vietnam's food sovereignty under threat

2011-11-24T09:32:00.000+10:00

Vietnamese experts are increasingly concerned about genetically-modified (GM) plants that have undergone trials and are about to be cultivated widely.

Le Huy Ham, director of the Agricultural Genetics Institute, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development is considering approving mass cultivation of seven GM maize varieties.

“If it [the approval] is done early, Vietnam will plant GM maize on local farms in 2012,” he said.

This is in line with a government plan announced last year to cover between 30 percent and half of the country’s agriculture land with the controversial gene-altered crops by 2020.

Since then, many local scientists have said the “modern varieties” could be a good choice to ensure food security as Vietnam is among the countries that would be hardest hit by climate change, which is expected to inundate large areas of farmland.

But increasing numbers of people, including experts, are worried about the implications of GM crops as the time for mass cultivation of GM maize draws near.

Nguyen Thi Binh, former Vice President of Vietnam, said she has participated in several international seminars where scientists have expressed concerns over the harmful consequences and risks that GM plants pose to environment, human health and the economy.

“The pollen of GM plants can affect surrounding farms and reduce the effect of certain pesticides and force pests to improve their resistance,” she told Thanh Nien.

“On economic side, we would have to buy seeds from producers, US firms specifically, for every crop. GM corn doesn’t geminate and we have to totally rely on seed producers.”

Vo Tong Xuan, a well known Vietnamese agriculturist, said GM maize may benefit the animal feed industry with mass cultivation, but conceded the nation would have to rely on foreign producers to supply seeds and their own herbicides for every crop.

Known for his contributions to Vietnam’s emergence as a major rice exporter from being a net importer food as late as in the 1980s, Xuan said he strongly opposed cultivation of GM rice in Vietnam.

“It will not be more profitable,” he said, adding that Vietnam needs new rice varieties that can grow in dry and poor lands, and this can’t be found among GM rice varieties.

At a seminar on biotechnology held last month in Hanoi, many experts were worried by the prospects of mass cultivation of GM maize.

An international agriculturist who wanted to remain anonymous said Vietnam should never adopt GM plants because of harmful consequences to food sovereignty and sustainability.

“The local varieties of rice and other crops that have been proven to adapt to varying levels of conditions in Vietnam for many years will be replaced by these so called ‘modern varieties’ which are not sustainable.

“In the long run, the companies will be in control of the food security and sovereignty of Vietnamese production because Vietnam will be heavily dependent on these seeds,” he told Thanh Nien Weekly.

He said the corporations will exert their patent rights for these varieties, which would undermine the nation’s food sovereignty and food security.

“Vietnam’s food security status enjoys a good level of equity but once the companies gain control of this vital aspect of the society, which is staple food, Vietnam runs the risk of inequity and manipulation by corporate greed and narrow interests,” he said.

Source: thanhniennews via Vietnam Travel News

Movements Unite in Mali, Confronting Powerful Interests : “We are decolonizing Africa here”

2011-11-24T01:30:00.000+10:00

The National Confederation of Peasant Organization’s (CNOP) agroecological training center stands at the crossroads of the West African countryside. Surrounded with rich Malian farmland and dotted with white thatched-roof huts, the Niger River snakes into the horizon on one side, and a dusty road connects the property to the sleepy town of Sélingué. Today, well into the first International Peasant’s Conference, the center was buzzing with activity as peasants from across Africa and around the world worked together to envision communities where land is more than a commodity.

"This is the kind of awareness-raising that has the potential to change policy,” said Ibrahima Coulibaly, CNOP’s president and a Via Campesina leader. “As local and national movements, we need to fight together against the global structures that threaten our communities,” he added.

Over the course of the day, peasants outlined the enormity of their struggle against those international structures—ranging from misguided pension funds to the innermost workings of financial institutions like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Following the financial crisis, pension and other investment funds have increasingly put their money toward natural resources and food—commodifying historical rights to land and water.

“It’s the international institutions that deny us access to the common good, and threaten our ability to plant diverse crops that feed world,” offered Rafael Alegria, a Honduran Via Campesina leader. “And the only way that we can work against them and avoid becoming refugees on our lands is as a united movement.”

Via Campesina has already seen victories of the sort. In the mid 90s, representatives of their base organizations demonstrated at World Food Summit. Later, they were allowed inside once-closed doors where they observed decision-making processes, while still mounting pressure from the outside. After years of counter summits, Via Campesina has been given a voice that allows them to be a part of framing the debate and defining a global agenda.

“We hope that by the powerful participation of social movements, we will bring the food sovereignty agenda to the UN,” said Sofia Monsalve, a human rights expert with Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN). Via Campesina—credited with coining the term “food sovereignty”—has been determined to rethink the global notion of food security from its very origin.

But peasant movements concur that in the absence of control over their lands, real food sovereignty is impossible.

The cash-strapped Malian government, for example, has already allocated at least 750,000 hectares to multinational corporations for large-scale agricultural projects—much of which is reserved for export. And more than 40% of those deals involve crops like Jatropha for agrofuels, feeding foreign machines instead of local people. Investors are offered attractive fiscal incentives and in some cases, first access to water from the Niger River. Entire communities are displaced while water resources and food supplies become increasingly vulnerable.

Delegates from dozens of countries shared similar statistics, and personal stories, from their own countries—where their indigenous lands have become magnets for foreign investors. By first shedding light on these David vs. Goliath struggles, their forum provides a space to come up with unified solutions to put an end to the new form of colonization that is land grabbing.

“We are decolonizing Africa here,” said Elizabeth Mpofu, a peasant woman from Zimbabwe. “Our job is to come up with democratic declarations at the grassroots level. It’s up to us to make sure that they reach our governments, and that they can be shared with all stakeholders—including at the international level.” She recognized the enormity of that task, but at the same time felt empowered by her counterparts from five continents.

At CNOP’s open-air training center in Nyéléni, Ibrahim Coulibaly stood in the coarse sand, bright green Via Campesina flags hanging behind him. “Let’s start,” he said, opening yet another session, “We have a lot of hard work to do.” But for a brief moment, he paused, looking out over the diverse crowd of peasant leaders. Then he raised his voice and smiled. “There is so much energy here,” he beamed, “What an atmosphere.”

Via Campesina News

Asian farmers visit and learn from Karnataka’s farmers about natural farming

2011-11-23T09:23:00.001+10:00

Fifty farmers of La Via Campesina movements from Asia visited some of Karnataka's most outstanding natural farms from Nov 2 to 6 2011. This event was organized by LVC and KRRS as part of their efforts to carry out farmer to farmer exchanges of knowledge of agro-ecology practices to "feed the world and cool the planet" as well as for farmers movements to share their best knowledge experiences with each other in solidarity.

The international delegation included twenty farmers and social movement activists from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Timor Leste, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, South Korea and Mexico. There were also many south Indian farmers present in the delegation.

During the four days journey, the group explored coconut, arecanut and banana farms, as well as vegetable plots, a sericulture field, a paddy seed bank and a jaggery production site. Some farmers were practicing natural farming for more than 15 years, while others had just started. Also a variety of natural farming methods were explored - from Fukuoaka's method to Palekar's zero budget natural farming. All farms were situated around the Mysore area, in South Karnataka. They were all successful examples showing that natural farming can and ought to be actively promoted as one of the many sustainable and accessible alternatives to conventional and organic farming. Furthermore, farmers organizations should play a strong role in creating platforms for exchanging practices and knowledge which is one of the best ways of spreading sustainable farming practices.

Natural farming is not a new concept, but a philosophy and practice that can be associated to the earliest stages of agriculture. Indigenous and forest people still treasure the wisdom of the unity of man with nature, but we have lost it in the course of civilization. Industrial organic farming is one attempt to free ourselves from chemicals, but, it is still labour intensive and promotes the addition of foreign organic fertilizers and compost to enhance soil fertility. The main idea of natural farming is that farming should be left to nature itself; it should be simple and low-cost.

The origin of ‘modern’ natural farming is generally associated with the Japanese Masanobu Fukuoka who started his experiments in 1938. Since then, different methods of natural farming have been developed in India. In Karnataka, Subhash Palekar’s Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is the most popular method, with hundreds of followers claiming success. The central idea of ZBNF is to end dependence on purchased inputs and monetary investments thereby also ending debt and the cycle of suicides from indebtedness.

Palekar was invited by LVC to Sri Lanka in 2010 for LVC's Asia level agroecology meeting of farmer trainers. Here, Palekar introduced ZBNF to many Asian farmer trainers involved with agro-ecology practices. Farmers groups in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are now adding elements of ZBNF in ways that are appropriate to their local conditions and finding that it can be adapted and altered to suit their needs.

To close this exchange program, a one-day international seminar on agroecology was held in Mysore on November 6th. In her opening speech, Chukki Nanjundaswamy of KRRS, situated natural farming as a mean of struggle and resistance: “Natural farming is not just about technologies, but it’s also about resisting capitalism”. In the first panel, Peter Rosset of LVC stressed the importance of supporting sustainable and peasant based agricultural practices used all over the world, even though it may have a variety of different names such as agroecology, organic farming, natural farming, biodynamic farming and permaculture. The important thing to remember he said is that these all have similar principles which we in LVC choose to call agroecology. Other panelists included Subhash Palekar, Kailashmurthy, Afsar Jafri and Swami Anand. 200 people, including farmers, students, scientists and the media attended the seminar.

Source: La Via Campesina South Asia

World Fishers Day - 21 November

2011-11-23T09:12:00.000+10:00

Fishermen living along the 1050 kilometre long Pakistan coastline between Sindh and Balochistan celebrated the World Fisheries Day falling on November 21.

On this occasion, fishermen mostly did not go to the sea for a catch and joined the community activists to express solidarity with the world fisher people. They decorated their fishing vessels and jetties with colourful flags, facilitated the community children and visitors to have a short boat trip along the beachside.

For this year, the World Forum of Fisher People (WFFP) had decided to keep the theme ‘Food sovereignty for the fishing community.’

It is the socio-cultural event that the fishermen around the world celebrate enthusiastically. The fishing communities worldwide celebrate this day through rallies, workshops, public meetings, cultural programmes, dramas, exhibition, music show, and demonstrations to highlight the importance of maintaining the world’s fisheries.

The Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), being the major community representative organisation, had designed different colourful events on the occasion, including performing theatre, specifically focusing on the issues the community people are facing.

The PFF celebrated the event in Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur and Gwadar. The major event was organised at Motani jetty, Ibrahim Hyderi of Karachi where hundreds of coastal community people participated. The community artisans exhibited their items, including the ornaments and small toy boats to fascinate the visitors.

PFF chairperson Mohammed Ali Shah said that they were struggling to have control of the local communities on seafood and water supplies resources. He said that the instead of polluting the environment and water resources, the government of different countries should ensure producing food, energy and clean water.

He added that the fishing community have a justification to get their livelihood, using unsustainable methodology to catch a larger amount of fish, which definitely will cause loss for the future generations.

Shah quoting a recent United Nations study reported that more than two-thirds of the world’s fisheries have been over fished or are fully harvested and more than one-third are in a state of decline.

Source: The News - International

Fighting TPP with 'reverence' for farming and 'expulsion' of consumer culture

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000+10:00

Under a cloudy sky, Akira Sudo is seen amidst his rice paddies in Tome, Miyagi Prefecture, on Aug. 3. (Mainichi)

A great article by Takao Yamada, Expert Senior Writer - Mainichi Daily News

I can't seem to make sense of the ongoing debate on Japan's possible participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade zone (TPP). I think it's the pro-TPP attitude of "let's open Japan up to the world" that rubs me the wrong way. I never noticed us being under a policy of "sakoku" -- or isolation -- like the one that had been implemented by the Tokugawa shogunate for some 200 years until U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his black ships in 1853. It has been unnatural the way the TPP issue has been framed for the public and the way the debates have been carried out, all in an effort to convince the public of the righteousness of TPP participation.

That the Japanese government feels that it has to go along with the U.S. pursuit of open markets because it is indebted to the U.S. for national security reasons is understandable. However, neither the Noda administration nor the media have any fundamental ideas on how to strike the right balance between liberalization and regulation, and on the direction in which the country should be taken. At the root is a sense that we are merely drifting about.

Farmer and poet Kanji Hoshi, 76, who has been engaged in organic farming for 38 years in the Yamagata Prefecture town of Takahata, is adamantly opposed to Japan's TPP participation. While it is standard for the media to showcase arguments for and against TPP, here, I'll only talk about Hoshi because there's no sense of drifting in his argument.

Hoshi started farming in 1954, at the age of 19. Not long afterward came the 1961 enactment of the Agricultural Basic Law, whose objective was to increase productivity and income. Agriculture grew more and more mechanized, and along with the heavy use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and herbicides, led to greater harvests. At the same time, however, food safety began to crumble and the problem of environmental pollution grew serious.

In 1973, the Organic Agriculture Association was established in Takahata, with Hoshi at its helm. In "Fukugo osen" (Complex contamination), a true-to-life novel that was serialized in a newspaper between 1974 and 1975 and caused a great sensation, author Sawako Ariyoshi included an anecdote about biting into one of Hoshi's chemical-free apples.

It goes without saying that organic, chemical-free farming is hard. Hoshi was ridiculed for "trying to go back to the Edo period," but he continued to explore new methods and repeatedly made mistakes. It was through his activism against the spraying of pesticides from helicopters that he found like-minded comrades. Eventually, in an act of revenge, Hoshi harvested sparking, tortoiseshell-like brown rice, for which he was awarded the gold medal in a nationwide contest.

Through long-term efforts, loaches, fireflies, river snails and meadowhawk dragonflies returned to the land. Organic agriculture was now well established in Takahata. Hoshi is part of a network comprising over 100 consumer groups and rice sellers, and has had opportunities to exchange ideas with university instructors and students pursuing environment, life and agriculture.

Hoshi is the author of an essay called "Sonno joi no shiso: han TPP no chiiki ron" (The philosophy of revere agriculture, expel the barbarians: anti-TPP localism), published in May 2011 in the book, "Takahata-gaku" (Takahataology). In it, he writes: "I would like the philosophy of revering agriculture and expelling the barbarians to be the stronghold against the black ships of TPP," Hoshi writes. "We need to give primary importance to agriculture for its production of food for life, and to justly appreciate its function of protecting the environment. If we destroy our beautiful homeland, we will not be able to face our descendents. 'Expel the barbarians' refers to the elimination of our disposable consumer civilization. We need to possess a set of values necessary to live simply and spiritually rich in a mature society, and let us attempt self realization."

Holding placards reading, "Protect Japanese land and food," farmers from tsunami-hit Miyagi Prefecture shout slogans against the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade zone (TPP) on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

In this essay, Hoshi categorically states that TPP participation will devastate Japanese agriculture. Our dinner tables will be filled with imported products whose manufacturers and processors we don't know, sacrificing food safety, and rural landscapes will be destroyed, Hoshi says, and warns that local communities themselves will collapse.

Pro-TPP advocates say that domestic agriculture must be revived in a way that it will be able to withstand market liberalization. And by "revival," what they mean is boost "profitable agriculture" aimed for since the Agricultural Basic Law was implemented to a "more profitable agriculture." They argue that agriculture must also contribute to economic growth. Hoshi, however, sees the value in agriculture that protects something that is different from economic growth.

Both domestically and internationally, financial, economic and social shockwaves are expected to become increasingly intense and contradictions are bound to balloon. We may well reach a time when no amount of money can buy us food. Does the light of the 21st century side with economic growth and money-making? Or does it side with Hoshi's hands-on practice and knowledge? This is the question that needs to be asked.

Occupy the food system: Building a vision of transformation

2011-11-21T07:43:00.000+10:00

Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck have written the following article in conjunction with the release of their new book: Food Movements Unite!

A dynamic global food movement is rising up around the world. Food justice activists are taking back their food systems through urban gardening, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, and locally owned processing and retail operations. Food sovereignty advocates organize for land reform, the end of destructive global-trade agreements and support for family farmers, women, and peasants. Protests against—and viable alternatives to—the expansion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), agrofuels, land grabs, and the oligopolistic control of our food are growing everywhere every day, denouncing and replacing the dysfunctional corporate food regime with visions of hope, equity, and sustainability.

The social and political convergence of the “practitioners” and “advocates” in these food movements is well underway, as evidenced by the growing trend in food policy councils; the coalitions for food sovereignty spreading across the US, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe; and the practical and political solutions to the food crisis that appear increasingly in academic literature and the popular media.

The global food movement springs from strong commitments to food justice, food democracy, and food sovereignty on the part of thousands of farmers’ unions, consumer groups, nonprofits, and faithbased and community organizations across the urban-rural and North-South divides of our planet.

This remarkable “movement of movements” is widespread, highly diverse, refreshingly creative and— much like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests—busy forging a broad-based vision for transformation.

Many publications point to the hopeful initiatives in growing, processing, distributing, and
consuming. And many analyses are now identifying the structural barriers to a fair and sustainable political processes. Supporting farmers’ political leadership is echoed by Groundswell, a new rural development collective working in Haiti, Ecuador, Burkina Faso,
and Ghana. Groundswell calls for a shift from project and donor-driven strategies to farmer and movement driven approaches.

Farmers, Sustainability and Food Sovereignty

Family and peasant farmers—who produce over half of the world’s food—have embraced food
sovereignty as a political platform to roll back the corporate assault of our food and farming systems. Leaders like Paul Nicholson and João Pedro Stédile of Via Campesina call for alliances of transformative action and new structural policies for our food systems. George Naylor of
the National Family Farm Coalition links today’s calls for food sovereignty to the historic U.S. farm struggles asserting that, “Without clarity on parity, all you get is charity.”

Read the full article here

Farmers mobilise to find solutions against land grabbing

2011-11-20T06:04:00.000+10:00

More than 250 participants, mainly representatives of farmers’ organisations, from thirty different countries gathered in Nyéléni Village, a centre for agro-ecology training built in a rural area near Sélingué, in Mali, to participate into the first International farmers’ conference to stop land grabbing. The Nyéléni village is a symbolic place, where the first international conference on Food Sovereignty was held in 2007. For three days, from the 17 to the 20 of November, participants are exchanging their experiences and creating alliances to stop the global land grab.

Land grabbing is happening everywhere, making the daily struggle of rural communities worldwide for survival even more difficult. Rights of family farmers, as well as pastoralists, artisanal fishers and indigenous communities, are violated constantly and their territories are being increasingly militarised. Small scale food production is replaced by large monoculture plantations for export and local farmers are left without land, without jobs, without food. This is why peasant organisations decided to mobilise together against this problem and create a space for exchanging experiences and finding common solutions.

At the opening ceremony Ibrahima Coulibaly, president of the CNOP (National Confederation of Peasant Organisations) of Mali, said: “The land belongs to local communities and it has been like that for generations. Now, governments are pushing farmers off their lands. This is not acceptable. It is a denial of historic rights, rights that exist since hundreds of years, while many states exist only since the 1960s. This shows how politicians are not connected to the people. The situation is very serious, and that is why we are here. We have the possibility in these three days to sit together, find a common understanding and find the solutions.”

Since the global food and financial crises broke out in 2008, governments and private firms have been increasingly acquiring large areas of fertile land in foreign countries all around the world. More then 60 countries have been targeted by hundreds of private corporations and dozens of governments. This international “land rush” affects as least 30 million hectares in Africa alone.

During the initial debates, participants shared their experiences and presented a multifaceted image of land-grabbing. On the one hand, they agreed that land grabbing is not a completely new phenomenon, as most countries have suffered it through colonisation and in some places colonial legal systems persist until now. On the other hand, they noted that land grabbing can have different shapes and forms as well. There is state-led land grabbing and there are land grabs by transnational corporations. There are land grabs to produce food for export, to produce agrofuels, land grabs for mining or other large infrastructural projects, periurban land grabs and so on. But even at the local level, leaders and community chiefs grab land. There are also mechanisms within families and communities that result in land grabbing, such as men denying women access to land, the widespread discrimination against young and women farmers, and land grabs by local elites.

In Africa, 80% of the population are small-scale family farmers and even though their means of production may be rudimentary, as many of them do not own even a plough, they are still able to feed the majority of the people. As land grabs push small farmers and pastoralists off their lands, they directly undermine food sovereignty.

“When we lose the land we lose our culture, communities and knowledge. The land for us is everything,” said a farmer from Senegal. Other farmers shared testimonies of local struggles and expropriation of communities across Africa and worldwide. “Farmers are being criminalised. Many of us are thrown into jail, only because we are trying to save our land and our way of life,” added a farmer from Indonesia. “More than fifty compañeros and compañeras have died in the last year while defending their land. Today, our territories are completely militarised,” said a farmer from Honduras, talking about the struggle of local communities in Bajo Aguán.

Here in Mali, around 800,000 hectares of land have been leased or are under negotiation for lease. One farmer from Kolongo, in the Ségou region, where two investors have grabbed peoples’ land, Malibya and Tomota, explained his experience: “We have been living in our villages for hundreds of years, yet nobody came and told us about these projects. Then one day, this machine came and started to dig. They gave us a paper which we could not read. So we had to show it to somebody who could tell us what it said. The paper said that we had to leave our land and our farms. Then they started to build a canal. They dug up a cemetery, they robbed us of our harvest and ruined our land. We organised a forum in Kolongo one year ago and we are still struggling for our rights, but we are really suffering.”

A woman farmer from the Office du Niger, where many different foreign investors have been grabbing lands, stood up and said: “We are really glad to be here today. In our villages, we are in real difficulty. The projects took away our lands, so we cannot produce food anymore. Due to the struggle, some of us are in jail and I myself had a miscarriage after I was beaten. We even had to send our children away, as there is no food. Now, we have no happiness but we are fighting for our future and for the coming generations. We came to this conference as we hope to struggle together.”

Every day, farmer and pastoralist communities are being expelled from their land. At the same time everywhere, resistance and new solutions are being developed to stop this massive land grabbing. In Senegal, since the recent conflict in Fanaye, which led to several deaths, farmers organisations, social movements, NGOs and human rights groups have set up a monitoring and alert committe to warn all civil society actors, journalists and decision makers whenever new land grabbing cases arise on the ground.

Participants agreed that this struggle to stop land grabbing is also a struggle to stop the ongoing commodification of seeds, water and knowledge and to support small-scale family farmers. Paul Nicholson, one of the leaders of La Via Campesina said: “Some people say that land grabbing is modernizing agriculture, and that it is the only solution to alleviating hunger. This is not true, what we need is food sovereignty. We must fight for our agroecological model, and we need policies that support family farmers everywhere. It is urgent to implement an agrarian reform all over the world.”

Via Campesina News

La Via Campesina and Australian FS Alliance - Statement against TPPA

2011-11-19T16:27:00.000+10:00

Statement: Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement - Food Sovereignty Networks
La Via Campesina and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance jointly make this statement at the conclusion of the APEC meeting in Hawaii regarding the further negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).

This statement is to express our alarm about the implementation and pursuit of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) across the Asia-Pacific Region, in particular the TPPA. In the wake of the collapse of the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organisation, national governments are seeking to promote the free trade agenda through FTAs. There is a growing web of FTAs between countries and/or regions, across the world. Australia is currently party to 6 FTAs with ASEAN, New Zealand, Chile, United States, Singapore and Thailand, as well as in the process of negotiating a further 9 FTAs; the TPPA, PACER-Plus; China, Japan, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia and the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The region and the world are still experiencing food, energy, financial and environmental crises. Many of these crises have been exacerbated by the removal of policy space for Government to respond as a result of signing free trade agreements.

These agreements directly threaten national food sovereignty and security. Currently, Japan's farmers produce 40% of the country’s food needs, but, according to the Japanese minister of agriculture, this food self-sufficiency rate (calorie base) will drop to 13% if Japan signs the TPPA. The much greater import dependency of Japan will have a major impact on food sovereignty and security amongst other rice-producing nations. According to research conducted by Japan's Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives, the vastly increased level of rice imports by Japan following the signing of the TPPA will swell the ranks of the hungry across Asia by a further 270 million people, bringing the total number to 1.2 billion. This is a recipe for social chaos and political instability.

It is widely acknowledged that Bilateral and Regional Free Trade Agreements do not adequately address barriers to agricultural trade, with carve outs a regular feature. The Australia-US FTA made no impact on the very large US Farm subsidies, and gained very little additional market access for Australian farmers. The market access that was obtained is phased in over more than a decade, if at all. Sugar, for example, remains excluded from the agreement, in order to protect US sugar producers. Meanwhile , US farmers gained significant market access to Australia with tariffs removed on 99% of agricultural trade immediately.

These outcomes reflect the reality that Australia’s ability to obtain greater agricultural market access through the negotiation of bilateral and regional FTAs has been greatly reduced, since Australia has unilaterally reduced and removed quotas and tariffs, to the clear disadvantage of Australian producers.

The Australia-US FTA has directly led to farmers leaving the land. In the pork industry, for example, 70% of farmers have left the land following the entry into force of this FTA on 1 January, 2005. It has also exposed Australian farmers to disease not previously present in Australia, such as BSE and Hog Wasting Disease.

Just as Australia does not face a level playing field when competing against the US and their corporations, developing countries face that same unlevel playing field when compared to Australia. For example what developing country can follow Australia’s lead and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing, research and development for their farmers?

The neo-liberal free trade agenda in agriculture is premised on the ideological concepts of “comparative advantage” and “specialisation”. This agenda leads to consolidation of agriculture under large, predominately US based, corporations, and to monoculture farming. A salutary example is Mexico, which went from being food secure prior to signing the North America Free Trade Agreement in 1993, to being food insecure and exposed to rapidly rising world food prices by 1996. Subsequently Mexico experienced riots linked to sharp increases of the price of corn during the food price crisis in 2008.

The social, environmental and ecological costs of increasing international agricultural trade through free trade agreements have not been addressed in the neo-liberal framework of free trade. These costs are not simply the increased use of heavy fossil fuels for transportation and the associated increase in pollution, but also include the increased use of chemical inputs, the social and environmental risks associated with genetically modified material, and the reduction in biodiversity caused by mono-cropping. Social dislocation, rapidly increased urbanization, and the resulting loss of community, are just three of the many social impacts which are not factored into the neo-liberal agenda on free trade.

The TPPA, if signed, will further liberalise goods, industry, services and investment in the greater Pacific Rim. The TPPA is mainly an initiative by the United States, as well respected economist Joseph Stiglitz states, "The bottom line is that there is no US commitment to free trade. It is really a commitment to getting other countries to give access to American producers to their markets, and the US reciprocates when it is convenient."

The TPPA threatens peoples’ access to essential public services like healthcare, education, electricity and water. On the other side, access to food, jobs and productive natural resources for the people in the region will also be diminished because of exploitation by corporations. The US openly states that the TPPA is all about the US and ‘American jobs’.

Further liberalisation under the TPPA will violate the sovereignty of nations, communities and peoples. In particular, the provisions regarding the investor-state dispute settlement procedure severely curtails the right of national governments to regulate corporate activities in the interests of the general well-being of peoples on health, social and environmental grounds.

Previous FTAs have threatened peoples’ food sovereignty, especially as regards the right of local producers to receive a fair, locally determined price for their products; and in terms of these producers’ having secure access to their local markets. FTAs will continue to undermine our national sovereignty (especially of developing and poor nations), as these agreements are primarily intended to further entrench the existing dominant position of transnational corporations (TNCs).

At a time when the IMF and World Bank are calling for some (albeit inadequate) re-regulation of the international financial system, the US, through the mechanism of the TPPA, is pushing for further deregulation of finance. We need to re-regulate the international financial sector, and make it democratically accountable to peoples and national parliaments.

Workers’ rights are also in danger. FTAs and the TPPA will create flexible labor markets, and this will diminish existing levels of workers’ protections. Very low wages, temporary and casualised employment, outsourcing practices, and the lack of insurance and other protections are very real risks that many workers in our region will be exposed to, as a result of further trade liberalisation.

Meanwhile, there are many local, national and regional trade alternatives. We do not oppose trade, but we want trade that is based in justice and fair rules: trade that ensures no exploitation amongst peoples and nations. Such trade must respect human rights, uphold food sovereignty and ensures peoples’ access to essential public services.

To support food security and sovereignty we call for:
Genuine agrarian reform for food sovereignty
Implementation of the agro ecological revolution as the solution to climate change and peak oil
Restructuring of the entire food system to prioritise the needs of people and ecosystems
Full and equal participation of women in the new food system and in society as a whole
An end to transnational control of our genetic resources
Seed sovereignty, where locally developed seeds can adapt and mitigate climate change
An end to the use of genetically modified material and the patenting of life
The right to know - the what, where and why of our food.

La Via Campesina

Via Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers. We are an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent of any political, economic, or other type of affiliation. Born in 1993, La Via Campesina now gathers about 150 organisations in 70 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

International Operational Secretariat:

Jln. Mampang Prapatan XIV no 5 Jakarta Selatan 12790, Indonesia

Tel/fax: +62-21-7991890/+62-21-7993426

Email: viacampesina@viacampesina.org

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance advocates for a fair, sustainable and resilient food system for all Australians. We seek to reorient the food system in Australia and internationally so that the vitally important role played by the hundreds of thousands of actors in the non-corporate, non-agro-export sectors of the food system are recognised, valued and supported. This includes small and medium-sized farmers, market gardeners, small food business people who specialise in supporting Australian agriculture, the growing number of community-based social enterprises supplying the type of food their members want at an affordable price, the families and individuals who vote with their dollars to support our nation’s farmers and regional food economies and that fast-growing number of Australians who support food grown, processed and distributed sustainably and justly.

Web: http://australian.foodsovereigntyalliance.org/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AFSAfoodsovereignty

Email: info@foodsovereigntyalliance.org

Tel: 0061 0414 497 819

Indonesian Farmers say: ASEAN must uphold food sovereignty

2011-11-18T05:00:00.000+10:00

The issues of food security and sovereignty have for many years been a rallying call of many grassroots organizations, peasant groups in particular.

It is their call to governments to adopt and implement agricultural and food policies that promote community-based sustainable production as opposed to industry-led, high-input and export oriented production.

In the 19th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Nusa Dua, Bali, from November 17-19, 2011, ASEAN member countries are expected to come up with proposals or recommendations to enhance or protect their food sovereignty and security.

Indonesian Farmers Association (SPI) Chairman Henry Saragih said here on Monday that ASEAN countries should at their summit encourage each other to achieve food security and sovereignty.

"ASEAN must encourage all of its member countries to uphold their food sovereignty and security," Henry Saragih said. According to him, ASEAN had to develop a viable regional food security and food sovereignty program that encourages reliable sufficient food reserves to ensure food security and protect their peoples` health and wellbeing from the impact of a food crisis.

Henry said that every ASEAN country should have a mechanism to ensure food sovereignty and the availability of a variety of farm equipment to produce sufficient food for its own citizens. Besides, he added, countries in Southeast Asia should strengthen their economic or trade defenses against attacks by international market speculators.

According to Henry, ASEAN still lacked an effective mechanism to fight or neutralize speculators who often manipulate the food market and thereby trigger food price hikes in its markets.

"ASEAN is still not able to withstand international food speculators," said Henry, a recipient of an Institute for Global Justice award in 2006.

He said that as ASEAN chairman in 2011, Indonesia was expected to be able to build food sovereignty in Southeast Asia and encourage the creation of provisions for each ASEAN country to produce adequate food for all of its citizens.

Referring to the food sovereignty issue, a senior economist with the Institute for Economic and Financial Development, Bustanul Arifin, said the low level of national food sovereignty in Indonesia was not the fault of scientists but weaknesses in the implementation of policies to ensure the effective production of food in the field.

"If Indonesia is still considered as not sovereign in the food sector, is not the fault of the scientists who have contributed a lot to this country," Bustanul said.

He pointed out that Indonesia was still importing rice, wheat, and soybean because of increasing need of national food that could not be meet with the domestic production.

But again the Indonesian Farmers Association chairman said the country should end its dependence on food imported from other ASEAN countries if it wanted to fully achieve food security and sovereignty.

Food Sovereignty is the people`s and communities` fundamental right to determine their food and agricultural policies that affect their lives and livelihood.

It is the right to access and control their means of production to ensure that their food sovereignty is protected. It is the right to safe, culturally appropriate foods and sustainable food production.

"Indonesia has so far been dependent on rice imports from Thailand, but this dependence is proving dangerous because around 1 million hectares of agricultural lands in Thailand are now inundated," Henry Saragih said.

Therefore, he said, Indonesia should put an end to its reliance on the international market to meet its food needs. Henry warned that compared to other countries in Southeast Asia, many parts of Indonesia still lacked food insecurity because they still relied of food supplies from Java island.

According to Henry, Indonesia should abandon its tendency to let different parts of the country specialize in the production of certain food commodities such as designating Sumatra as a producer of palm oil, Gorontalo as a producer of corn, South Sulawesi as a producer of rice.

Source: Antara News

Can organic farming feed the world?

2011-11-17T06:43:00.001+10:00

Alan Broughton has just returned from South Korea, where he attended the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) Conference. Approximately 800 people from 76 countries took part and 737 papers were presented. Here is an extract from his full report:

Several speakers took up the question - Can organic farming feed the world?

Sarojeni Rengan from Pesticide Action Network of Asia-Pacific told the conference that there was no other way because pesticides are so dangerous. An estimated 350,000 people per year are killed by pesticides, mostly in Third World countries, as a result of illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of information, lack of options, lack of training and lack of labels in local languages. Pesticides also produce chronic effects on people, causing cancer, reproductive problems, birth defects, developmental and behavioural problems, immune system impacts, endocrine disruption and neurological impacts. Some chemicals cause more effect at lower dosages than higher dosages – this is especially the case of the endocrine disruptors, which mimic hormones in the body. More than 127 pesticides are endocrine disruptors. Chemical companies put great effort into preventing chemical control, and regulatory bodies rely mainly on the information that they supply. Only 6 corporations – Bayer, Syngenta, Dow, Dupont, BASF and Monsanto - control 75% of the world pesticide market. These are also seed companies and promote genetic modification. They determine government policy, said Sarojeni.

Vladimir Martichenkov from Russia outlined other problems of chemical agriculture and its emphasis on yields not quality. He said the IQ of children was falling because of poor food. Since chemical farming commenced in China there has been a 100 fold increase in cancer. Male infertility is 30% in the US, 10% in Norway, yet there has been no decline in Africa where chemical farming is just starting. Two billion hectares of land has been destroyed in the world by agriculture; 50 million hectares per year is lost. The cost of food continually rises while the return to farmers continually falls. He advocated Vertically Integrated Farming that combines production with processing and marketing, integrates cropping and livestock raising, and recycles all wastes.

Hans Rudolf Herren spoke about the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science, Technology and Development, a United Nations agency) report called Agriculture at the Crossroads, which said that the world has to go organic to survive. The Green Revolution did not address hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, nutrition, human health, social equity, sustainable development or the environment. It produced starch but not vitamins. The world produces more food that is needed – in Western countries 30% of food purchases are wasted by consumers and too much goes into meat production. Herren said that farmers must be respected for their work, animals have to be returned to farms out of factories and biodiversity increased. Research should be funded by governments, not private companies. The IAASTD report is available from www.agassessment.org.

There was some discussion about the Bill Gates project Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Some people thought there were worthwhile aspects that could be supported, but Gertrude Kenyangi Kabusimbi of Uganda denounced it as another avenue for the penetration of agro-industrial corporations into Africa. Monsanto, Syngenta and YARA (a fertiliser company) are partners in AGRA. She said AGRA was motivated by profit, to sell fertilisers, pesticides and GM seeds, which will worsen food security for small holders as the Green Revolution in Asia did in the 1970s and 1980s. The answer was organic farming, not chemical farming, she said.

John Reganold from Washington State University talked about the large number of studies that have compared organic and non-organic agriculture. While organic farms in developed countries have lower yields on average in normal seasons than non-organic, yields are higher in droughts; in developing countries organic farms have significantly higher production. Other benefits are better nutrition, an absence of pesticide residues, higher incomes, higher carbon sequestration, less soil degradation, more biodiversity, less pollution and better energy efficiency. He concluded that organic farming can feed the world.

Moses Muwanga of Uganda believed that organic farming was the most appropriate farming system to solve the problems of small farmers in Africa. While much of African agriculture uses no chemicals, great improvements can be made by improved design and recycling. Uganda has 200,000 certified organic farmers, yet the organic movement in that country is only 10 years old.

Vic Tagupa has been involved in an organic conversion program in Mindanao Island in the Philippines, using non-hybrid rice and a system of polyculture. He reported that household income had increased by 25% and farmers had greater food security. The program started in 1993 and now covers 10,000 hectares. Similar stories were presented by other speakers in various parts of the world, all of which increased small farmers’ incomes and contributed to a better environment: organic cotton in Burkina Faso, coffee with bananas and pineapples in the Philippines, food crop agroforestry and organic potatoes in Peru, eco-agroforestry in Nicaragua, grains and soybeans and vegetables in the organic village of Ogawa in Japan.

Francis Blake from the UK Soil Association spoke on the topic of peak phosphorus, which will occur in about 2030, as a major incentive for the uptake of organic farming. Long before 2030 phosphorus as a fertiliser may be unaffordable; the price is very volatile, increasing by 400% in 2008, then dropping again to previous levels. China has the greatest reserves of rock phosphate, 35% of the world’s total, followed by the USA with 17% and Western Sahara (now a colony of Morocco) with 15%. Phosphate processing produces large amounts of fluoride which is disposed of in water supplies. The alternatives to mined phosphate are: preventing nutrient loss from farms, recycling waste, supporting mycorrhiza for phosphorus release, reducing lot-fed meat consumption and using sewage as fertiliser. He said modern sewage treatment technology has greatly reduced heavy metal contamination of sewage and organic standards should be changed to allow its use.

Gary Zimmer, who did a speaking tour of Australia straight after the conference, was also critical of organic standards, saying that certification has nothing to do with food quality and that you can get certified by doing nothing. In his opinion the standards should contain two questions: What are you doing to get your soils healthy and mineralised? and What are you doing to get your livestock healthy?

Political issues

Gunnar Rundgren, a former IFOAM leader, expressed the opinion that organic farming must exit from the competitive market economy, as the world environment cannot cope with continued economic growth. Organic farming should be part of the change to a regenerative economy; if not then organic farming is part of “green washing”, the pretence that environmental sustainability can be achieved in a growth economy. “Organic standards will not change the system and save the planet”, he said. Third World countries have difficulty feeding themselves because they cannot compete with industrialised agriculture which is based on cheap oil and trade policies that disadvantage them. We need to challenge the market economy, he said.

Andrea Ferrante of Italy was strongly in support of Gunnar’s opinions. He said organic farmers need to remain outside the commodity food distribution system and to make use of new distribution models for organic food. Options included direct selling, organised group selling in bio-districts, Community Supported Agriculture, cooperatives, and public procurement (for example for school canteens, hospitals, prisons). One million school meals a day in Italy are organic. Organic farmers should get away from supermarkets, he concluded.

Pat Mooney of Canada also attacked corporate control. He talked about the concept of the Green Economy which is now being promoted by some corporations, including chemical and oil companies, in answer to critics. He said people must take control of the Green Economy and not let it be directed by corporations; it must be governed by food sovereignty principles. He warned of the danger of Terminator gene technology being reactivated – there is currently an international moratorium on its use that Brazil is the leader in trying to overturn. The Terminator gene prevents seeds from germinating, so that farmers cannot save seeds. Once it is released into the environment it has the potential to spread to non-target plants, which would be devastating. Pat Mooney says we have successfully fought it in the past and will need to do so again.

Wen Tiejun of China spoke about the worldwide problem of industrialisation causing impoverishment of the countryside, as the capital required for industrial expansion is extracted from farmers, and labour is transferred to the cities. The faster the industrialisation, as is occurring in China now, the faster the rural impoverishment. At the same time chemical increase in agriculture has greatly increased. Now there is a move in China with some government support to develop programs to empower farmers to organise themselves and take control over their livelihoods, reducing poverty and reducing chemical use, ecologising agriculture.

Alan Broughton is a farmer and researcher who works at the Australian Landscape Trust's 2000 acre property, Strathfieldsaye in East Gippsland, Australia.

Impunity for Venezuela's big landowners

2011-11-15T11:07:00.001+10:00

Venezuela's Land Law was enacted to reduce dependence on food imports, however, wealthy landowners believe they will lose profits if it is implemented - so they are threatening and killing those who attempt to implement the law [EPA]

For close to a decade, Venezuela has been the focus and the target of mainstream news coverage, as the scene of a heated political struggle over control of the country's destiny.

But the parade of pundits eager to criticise the country's elected president and simplify the country's political conflict as a rule ignore the deep socio-economic inequality that propelled President Chavez to power.

The Bolivarian revolution has made significant strides in improving the conditions for the country's popular classes and promoting an alternative regional bloc, while at the same time pioneering a unique form of participatory democracy.

Still, the Bolivarian revolution is struggling both from its own contradictions and against a long history of deeply entrenched social inequality, intensified by capitalist globalisation.

This is nowhere more clear than in the rural countryside of Venezuela, where vast tracts of land remain in the hands of a tiny grouping of extremely wealthy families.

Tierras Libres, a documentary released this year, tells a story that has been virtually blacked out by the international press - the murders of hundreds of Venezuelan peasants by hired gunmen and right wing paramilitaries. The peasants have been murdered for attempting to implement the Chavez government's land reform policy. The crimes strongly implicate wealthy landowners who vehemently oppose land reform.

In one scene from the documentary, we see a middle-aged woman, Doneila, whose husband, Hermes Escalona, was murdered in 2003 by gunmen as he was beginning to work some fallow land on a huge plantation.

Speaking directly to President Chavez on his weekly Alo Presidente television programme, she looks hopeful as Chavez promises to "heat up" efforts to bring her husband's killers to justice.

No justice for the poor

In fact, as the documentary shows, Chavez ordered his personal lawyer to come to her aid. However, the film next provides an update on Doneila's story years after her appearance with Chavez on national TV.

Agro-ecology and Food Sovereignty Day 5 December

2011-11-11T22:23:00.000+10:00

CALL TO MASS ACTION AND MOBILIZATION

5th December 2011, Durban, South Africa

We call on all farmers’ movements and organizations, rural workers, landless people and all the food sovereignty movement to join us for an international day of mass action on the 5th of December 2011, during the COP 17 civil society mobilization in Durban, South Africa.

Humanity is confronted with a food, economic and ecological crisis that is rooted in the neoliberal capitalist system of production, distribution and consumption. These multiple crises highlight the limits of neoliberal capitalist production. Today transnational corporations and governments are presenting false solutions to climate change, hijacking the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP17) also referred to as the Conference of Polluters, to be held in Durban South Africa.

These corporate elites, western governments and the neo liberal capitalist system that is responsible for generating the crisis are presenting us with false solutions. The countries of the South and Africa in particular will be hard hit by climate change. Scientists indicate that the African continent is expected to be drier and would become warmer more quickly than other regions of the planet, despite the fact that Africa has contributed the least to global warming. This will hugely impact on agriculture, which is an important livelihood source across Africa. There will be yield losses of the major staple foods of the continent like maize, sorghum, millet, cassava etc. due to temperature rises.

Industrial agriculture and production is responsible for global warming, hunger, land dispossession, massive displacements of farmers, rural workers and indigenous communities across the continent.

In South Africa the host country after 17 years of democracy, millions of farm workers and dwellers have been evicted from commercial farms, only 5% of agricultural land has been transferred to black people, millions in rural and urban areas suffer from food and nutritional insecurity. Today this country is the most unequal society in the world. Particularly women in South Africa have felt the impact of these unequal relations and exclusion more severely.

The solutions put forward by these corporations and governments are already leading towards a re-colonization of Africa and the countries of the global south with massive land grabs and the imposition of a new green revolution.

Instead of finding real solutions to climate and ecological crisis faced by humanity, the Durban COP17 meeting is a platform for corporations through their governments to accelerate the complete commodification of nature. These criminal schemes presented as solutions include amongst other things the promotion of Genetically Modified Seeds, Agro-fuels, carbon trading, climate smart agriculture, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

Why an Agro-ecology and Food Sovereignty Day?

As farmers, farm workers, landless women and men we should mobilize through direct action against these false solutions to expose its criminal intent and catastrophic consequences for the continent and the global south. At the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Right of Mother Earth (April 2010) held in Bolivia resulted in the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba real solutions to climate change were offered which was totally ignored by governments. Food Sovereignty and agro-ecology are the real solutions of farmers and workers to climate change.

We call on all farmers, workers and the landless and all social movements to join us in Durban and everywhere in the world on the 5th of December 2011 to demand a change of the entire capitalist system. The fight against climate change is a fight against neoliberal capitalism, landlessness, dispossession, hunger, poverty and inequality. The crisis of the planet requires that we take direct action. During the agro-ecology and food sovereignty day we will have public protest marches to the conference of the polluters, actions against multinational corporations like Monsanto undermining our seed sovereignty, which will cuminate in a massive Assembly of the Oppressed to discuss ways of ending this unjust system. This will be a day of continued actions where farmers and workers from the entire African continent with social movements from the whole world will demand:

Genuine agrarian reform for food sovereignty
Agro ecological revolution as the solution to climate change
Restructuring of the entire food system
Full and equal participation of women in the new food system and in the society as a whole
Building of a food system based on human needs
End to multinational control of our genetic resources
Seed sovereignty where seed can adapt and mitigate climate change

We call on all the movements of farmers and workers to mobilize and have local direct action in every locality in the world on the Agro-ecological and Food Sovereignty Day.

Reclaim Climate Justice!

Our Planet is not for sale!

No to the Conference of Polluters!

Defend Mother Earth!

Africa is not for sale!

No to the re-colonization of Africa!

This call is convened and supported by:

LA VIA CAMPESINA
AGRARIAN REFORM FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY CAMPAIGN, SOUTH AFRICA
SURPLUS PEOPLE PROJECT (SPP), SOUTH AFRICA
TRUST FOR COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND EDUCATION (TCOE), SOUTH AFRICA
WOMEN ON FARM PROJECT (SOUTH AFRICA)
EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA SMALL SCALE FARMERS’ FORUM (ESAFF)
ESAFF ZIMBABWE
ESAFF UGANDA
ROPPA (Network of Farmers and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa)

If you want to join us in Durban for December 5th, organize an activity in your community/locality/country and share it with us on that day, sign and support the call, or any other inquiry about that specific action, please write to: lvcatcop17@gmail.com

Farmers protest against seed patents

2011-11-10T15:59:00.000+10:00

While UPOV celebrates its 50 years, farmers protest against an institution in the service of the seed industry

Between noon and 2 p.m. on October 20, more than one hundred sustainable family farmers, members of various associations and committed citizens met across from the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), to protest on the occasion of the fiftieth birthday of the institution. Their watchword was “For the immediate recognition of the right of farmers to resow and freely exchange their seeds, and to protect them from biopiracy and contamination from patented genes. No to the stranglehold of seed multinationals, the New Plant Variety Certificate of 1991 and any form of patent on plants, parts of plants, their genes, or production methods.”

A tree was planted in front of the institution to symbolize the fact that farmers now have observer status there. They showed their determination through the symbolic performance of the “hoe kata”. Then packets of “illegal” seeds were distributed and their contents were sowed in the vicinity to illustrate the nature of the farmers’ struggle. Those who accept such seeds are currently considered receivers of stolen goods. Pierre Vanek and Philippe Sauvin (of the solidaritéS party) and Anne Mahrer (of the Vert party), candidates for the Swiss federal elections, are among those who accepted the packets.

“With regard to seeds, the situation has long been intolerable for sustainable family farmers, and may yet get worse. In fact the issue raised here affects everyone, as the question of access and of the free reproduction and exchange of seeds by farmers is the only way to prevent multinationals from appropriating and privatizing the entire food chain, and therefore life itself, through the bias of seeds and UPOV,” says Pierre-André Tombez, of the agricultural union Suisse Uniterre.

The right of farmers to resow and exchange their farm seeds is essential to the adaptation of crops to climate change, and to the local adaptation which alone enables a reduction in the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It guarantees the safety of the seed stock and therefore food security.

“Men and women farmers have always kept part of their harvest to resow and exchange among themselves. Whether UPOV wants it or not, they will carry on doing so. What is at stake is the future of agriculture, of sustainable family farming and of coming generations. The right to save, sow and exchange seeds is the foundation for Food Sovereignty,” adds Josie Riffaud, of ECVC’s coordinating committee.

Press release – European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) and Uniterre - Geneva

CONTACTS

Uniterre: Valentina Hemmeler +41796721407
ECVC: Guy Kastler +33603945721

Food Is Not a Business, But a Human Right

2011-11-09T01:00:00.000+10:00

An interview with JANAINA STRONZAKE, activist and coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil by Tressia Boukhors

Source: IPS

Rural women and small-scale producers play a key role in providing food security and food sovereignty, but many large multinational corporations threaten that progress by undermining populations' independence when it comes to food.

Janaina Stronzake, a member of the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, helps support food security and sovereignty by coordinating organisations of small- and medium-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America and Europe.

The United Nations (U.N.) highlighted the importance of rural women and small-scale producers during the International Day of Rural Women and World Food Day, held on consecutive days in mid-October and focused on agricultural improvements in developing countries.

Asked about creating a more responsible global food system, Stronzake said that there have to be "relationships between the grassroots movement of the political north and south, because food is not a business but a human right".

IPS Correspondent Tressia Boukhors talked with her about the role of small-scale producers and rural women in achieving food security and sovereignty, especially in Brazil.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Regarding the situation of food access in Brazil, what does taking a "food sovereignty" approach mean?

A: In Brazil, we have a public policy that guarantees food security to the population so people have reasonable access to food. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there is food sovereignty.

At the same time that we have such programs as Zero Hunger, multinational corporations are appropriating land, cultural knowledge and Brazilian biodiversity.

One of the ways companies do that, for example, is through trans-genetic seeds. These types of biotech packages developed by companies like Monsanto, Cargill or Bunge promote dependence on the part of the population.

So even if the population has access to food, it is not going to be healthy food – it is not local production and does not promote local empowerment of population. On the contrary, it makes the population dependent on multinational corporations.

Q: Fair trade promotes sustainability and better trading conditions for producers in developing countries. Is it a solution to support more responsible food commerce?
A: We, as members of Via Campesina, are against treating food as a commodity.

Fair trade is one of the components that can help cure the world's hunger. Nevertheless, some data from 2009 pointed to a large concentration of commerce in cacao, coffee and tea, so seeing fair trade without seeing food sovereignty in these countries can also bring a problem of monocultures and the concentration of leadership of one or a few NGOs that rule over these fair trades.

Relationships between people in this fight to end hunger cannot be based purely on commerce.

Q: What is the role of women regarding food sovereignty?
A: Within this idea of food sovereignty, we, as women, have a very strategic role. Historically, women are responsible for the improvements in agriculture and, today, women are directly responsible for feeding their family and communities.

We need to make sure that women continue to have access to food sovereignty and natural resources like water, seeds and plants. Women need to have access to land; they need the process of popular agrarian reform.

However, for women to self-organise, they need to study in order to access education and information. NGOs and institutions need to support them.

Q: Do technologies help create a better future for food access?
A: It depends on what technology we are talking about. If this is the multinational corporation's technologies, like trans-genetic, nanotechnology or biotechnologies we develop in laboratories, it's not going to work – it creates problems.

There are many studies in Brazil and Latin America about the impact of this technology on people and the environment.

For example, there is a region in Brazil where glyphosate (a synthetic compound) was found in 100 percent of the harvest, and all the women that were breast-feeding were contaminated by this poison.

So when we talk about technologies, it needs to be a truly sustainable technology. We need to look to local technologies, developed by the communities themselves, that are appropriate for that region and that are under the control of those communities.

These are sovereign technologies and not technologies that cause dependence.

So if we are talking about technologies to improve production, they have to exist with an inner strategy of food sovereignty. Otherwise, technologies without food sovereignty do not solve our problem.

Ibrahim Coulibaly, Family Farmer - The volatility of agricultural prices

2011-11-08T15:14:00.000+10:00

Around 40 years ago, when I was young, we did not speak of volatility. I still remember how our government gave our parents ploughs, plough oxen, and fertilizer on credit. At the time, there was a public service, the OPAM, that bought food products from farming families at prices that were known beforehand.

Around 30 years ago, I was in secondary school and we were told that it was better to produce for external markets. We began hearing the phrase “deterioration of the terms of exchange” in the discourse of our male politicians. This was a true lament at the time, but it found no echo anywhere. What did it refer to? The prices of export agricultural products were collapsing on the international market. The governments of the time had made the fatal error of encouraging family farmers to produce more export products. When things went wrong, these farmers alone paid the heavy price.

The collapse of our economies and the growth of the public debt in the 1980’s led the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to subject our countries to structural adjustment.

We were told that the state was inefficient and that we needed to make more room for the private sector. At the same time, our states were forced to go even deeper into debt to restore macro-economic balances. We were told to cut all support to sustainable family farming, which was termed unsuccessful. Then the World Bank and its allies launched a true demolition campaign against this type of agriculture.

We were told to produce even more cash crops for export, such as cotton, coffee and peanuts, at very low prices that were set abroad. With these slogans we were told to buy rice from Asia, or flour and dried milk from Europe, all of which are now so volatile. The descent into hell had begun for farming families and for our over-indebted states that were incapable of paying.

Then we were told to become competitive according to the criteria of international financial institutions, and also that our states were no longer authorized to protect us. Our customs tariffs were dismantled and our markets, liberalized. Food products from elsewhere were unloaded onto our markets, making us even more vulnerable to price volatility. Eating habits changed in our cities; the food produced by farming families no longer sold. In West Africa this phenomenon was aggravated by the advent of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and its Common External Tariff, known as the lowest customs tariff in the world.

And yet none of these “solutions” imposed on us pulled us out of poverty. On the contrary, we became even more vulnerable. This is the context in which family farming is asked to be successful.

Today, we are subjected to new challenges that are falling from the skies. Climate change, financial speculation, unpredictable international markets, new policies by developed countries that grab our land to produce fuels. We no longer hear anything about all of these issues, even though they lie at the heart of the volatility that is currently being discussed.

Instead of addressing the causes of our poverty and of the volatility, we have seen complete catalogues of projects and programmes financed in the name of the rural sector. Billions of dollars are mobilized every year but the reality is that more than half of the farming families in most of our countries cannot find 1,000 dollars to pay for a plough, a couple of oxen, a cart or a donkey (see the study by the FAO on agricultural mechanization in Mali).

The high panel of experts should be commissioned to study the efficiency of what is mobilized in the name of the poor. When several hundreds of millions of dollars are mobilized, how much makes it to the fields of the poor and of the women, who are so often mentioned? You would be surprised by the results of such a study. Or maybe not. Considering how long they have been mobilizing all these millions in our name, we clearly should have all been rich by now.

In spite of all of this, and without any aid, any protection whatsoever, and with all the powerful of the world against it, sustainable family farming has not disappeared.

Unfortunately we had to suffer the current crisis for our governments to become once again aware of the necessity for food security based on food production at the national level. However, sustainable solutions are not yet in sight.

To solve the problem of price volatility, we the sustainable family farmers, with the support of other actors in civil society, believe that it is necessary:

← To give priority to our local markets and regional integration, rather than let our prices be dictated by remote and unpredictable international markets. This is the only solution that will enable us, family farmers, to feed ourselves, our communities and our cities.

← To halt all forms of competition between farmers and production modes with a very large disparity in productivity (the hoe against the tractor plus the subsidy is a tall order). One does not have the right to tell us that we will eat when we have become competitive.

← To stop the policies which are destabilizing our systems of sustainable family farming. In times of overproduction we suffer from dumping, in times of shortage we suffer from restrictions on the export of food we have been told to no longer produce.

← Our governments must aspire to policies that will pull us out of poverty and destitution, protect our systems of sustainable family farming from volatile markets, and support us so that we can invest to feed our populations.

← We know what needs doing. Instruments exist to stabilize prices: appropriate customs tariffs, strategic stocks at different levels, the management of offer and demand, and regulations against speculators. In the name of whom is the World Trade Organization forbidding us from doing this?

← Sustainable family farmers, women and vulnerable groups in rural areas must be granted real access to the funds mobilized in their name so they can buy agricultural equipment, fertilizers and seeds, and create value with their products so they can finally begin to live with dignity from their work.

To finish, I want to encourage each of you when we sit in front our plates of food this lunchtime, to meditate and recall that human beings are dying of hunger and malnutrition at this very moment because costly meetings are organized around their fate but without the actions that could save them being carried out. We can no longer wait.

Source: Via Campesina

Australian Farmer's Sustainability Story: Input Free Pasture Improvement

2011-11-07T14:57:00.000+10:00

Alan Broughton is a farmer and researcher who is doing some amazing work at the Australian Landscape Trust's 2000 acre property, Strathfieldsaye in East Gippsland, Australia. A key aspect of his research work in sustainable grazing management involves soil and pasture improvement through a logically obvious and incredibly simple strategy of 'stock rotation'. In this short video, Alan tells us a little about his wonderful work in a unique and beautiful farming environment!

Source: www.australia.foodsovereignty.com.au

The 3Rs A Small Co-op With A Big Food Sovereignty Vision

2011-11-05T10:28:00.000+10:00

The 3 Rs cooperative is an amazing model of just what social, food production, economic, agroecological, and political outcomes are possible on a small campesino cooperative. There are 8 families in this cooperative, and they have 87 hectares of land.

In this video, Fray Silvera talks about how the cooperative started with 100% government support and now they are 80% self managed. Their aim is to be fully self funded and then to help others. They wish to be an example for others to follow by raising consciousness that as campesinos, they can do it themselves. This story, as told by Fray, is inspirational.

Special thanks to our talented translator Federico Fuentes

Special thanks also to Venezuela campesina, fantastic song writer & singer Olga Carvajal

Source: www.venezuela.foodsovereignty.com.au

International Peasant Conference : Stop the land grab

2011-11-04T10:11:00.000+10:00

The farmers of the National Coordination of Farming Organizations (CNOP) in Mali and the international farmers’ movement Via Campesina are inviting the international press to attend and report on the first international farmers’ conference whose objective is to strengthen the fight against the land grabs which are rife in Africa and other parts of the world.

Although many conferences, articles, TV broadcasts have spoken of the topic, until now the farmers voice has been little heard. It's about time to strengthen alliances and elaborate strategies with other actors to be efficient on the land and in the authorities.

The conference will be held in Sélingué from 17 to 19 November 2011, and will bring together almost 200 farmers affected by land grabs as well as numerous other participants, including researchers, political figures, and NGOs resisting the unprecedented land-grab offensive by large businesses and hedge funds, among others, that compromises the ability of people to feed themselves.

Affected populations from all over the world will have the opportunity to make their voices heard, and strategies will be developed to end the seizure of farmland at the expense of the rural family farming that feeds 80% of the African population.

The conference will conclude on 20 November with a visit by a delegation to the Office du Niger’s land in Kolongo, a year after the first farmers’ meeting about this matter. There, journalists will be able to speak to farmers engaged in the resistance, local authorities, and experts on land issues.

Draft programme:
17 November :
- Food crisis and increase in land grabs
- Seizures of international land and institutions: focus on the World Bank’s voluntary guidelines and its Responsible Agricultural Investment
- Current situation and testimonies from Asia, America, Europe and Africa

18 November :
- International financial institutions’ role in land and water grabs and in agricultural investments in Africa
- AGRA’s role and the second green revolution in relation to land grabs
- Presentation of the case of Zimbabwe, starting from land reform and agro-ecology
- Which resistances? (at a local, national and international level, within various institutions, etc.)

19 November :
- Panel of political and social figures: points of view of the parties involved
- Action plan with the parties involved
- Closing remarks

20 November (with a small delegation):
- Visit to Kolongo, to the lands of the Office du Niger, which have been subject to various conventions on land grabs since 2004 (Malybia, TOMOTA, Modibo Keita, etc.) and where the first farmers’ forumwas held in November 2010.

Contacts : CNOP/VIA CAMPESINA Kalabancoura rue 200 porte 727 BP E 2169 Bamako/Mali
Chantal Jacovetti: chantal.jacovetti@wanadoo.fr Phone : 00223.76.81.87.93/64.86.89.26
Lamine Coulibaly: laminezie@gmail.com Phone: Tel: +223 76 17 09 79/ 66 83 63 14

An Amazing Farming Concept: The Socialist Communal City Simon Bolivar

2011-11-03T10:19:00.000+10:00

Venezuela’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” has been applied in large-scale in the Simon Bolivar Socialist Communal Campesino City. Located near the town of Guasdualito, in the state of Apure, the communal city encompass over 8000 farming families, divided into 8 communal complexes, over an area of 115 000 hectares.

Watch the video below to see footage that shows the amazing extent of the Communal City, and listen to spokesperson, Antonio Martez, as he talks passionately about what the people within the community are wishing to achieve together to improve their lives.

Special thanks to our talented translator Federico Fuentes

Special thanks also to Venezuela campesina, fantastic song writer & singer Olga Carvajal

Source: www.venezuela.foodsovereignty.com.au

Food Sovereignty Report Launched

2011-10-26T11:56:00.002+10:00

Food Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Food System

This report prepared by War on Want contrasts the UK government’s preferred approach of ‘food security’, based on free markets supplemented by aid, with the positive alternative of food sovereignty, which returns control over the food system to farmers.

It shows how the government has driven a free trade agenda at the international level, while pressing countries to remove social protections that would reduce suffering.

Far from relieving hunger among the world’s poorest, the Department for International Development (DFID) funds development of new crop technologies that deepen farmers’ reliance on those companies’ seed and agrochemicals at ever greater prices, leading to hunger on an unprecedented scale.

Download the report here.

Indian pastoralist calls on world governments to recognise farmer rights

2011-10-19T15:54:00.000+10:00

Watch this video showing Lalji Desai Marag, chair of the Alliance of Nomadic and Pastoralist Peoples of India talking about recognising and respecting land rights and the identity of farmers, and read more below, about what is happening in Rome where this interview was filmed.

Peasant, indigenous, pastoralists and fisherfolk representatives held a demonstration outside the FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy, to send a clear message to the governments: land grabbing must be stopped in order to tackle the food crisis and the persistent increase in prices.

The demonstration and press conference took place on the second day of the FAO’s inter-governmental talks around the Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land Tenure and the use of other natural resources.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report that “Food prices today remain high, and are expected to remain volatile”. This also implies that farmers, consumers and the poorest nations are most vulnerable to food insecurity and poverty, according to the report on the state of food insecurity in the world.

In response to this situation, and as a result of the increasing expansion of land grabbing and big investment processes in agriculture, the social movements’ representatives who are taking part in the talks were clear: “land grabbing and the global food market must be stopped”.

They highlighted the importance of the Guidelines that will come out after a two-year consultation process with social movements – who act in the Committee on World Food Security as one voice- and of the beginning of a process that will set out new global rules, with special emphasis on the communities’ right to land tenure.

Lalji Desai Marag, chair of the Alliance of Nomadic and Pastoralist Peoples of India said in a press conference “we witness how many rich people acquire more and more land and they keep it unproductive. They only acquire it to speculate, because they know it is a great business”, this makes land prices soar.

“We need to stop this and in order to do that we need to secure land tenure rights for peasant families and pastoralists. In India these rights do not exist, 40% of the farmers do not own their lands.

Meanwhile, the Dakar Appeal against land grabs that came out of the World Social Forum earlier this year, was submitted on Tuesday afternoon and it has been ratified by hundreds of social networks and organizations, especially peasant groups around the world.

Source: RadioMundo

Farmers at the Committee on Food Security: "No to the corporate food system!"

2011-10-18T14:17:00.001+10:00

A delegation of women and men farmers from around the world representing the international movement La Via Campesina will attend the 37th Session of the Committee for World Food Security (CFS) in Rome from October 17 to 22. Small-scale farmers will defend a food and agricultural system free from the corporate grip.

"We will not feed people by allowing big business to continue to grab land and resources from local communities," says Henry Saragih, General Coordinator of the 200 million-strong farmers organisation La Via Campesina.

While the economic crisis is pushing more people into hunger and poverty, transnational companies are acquiring vast expanses of agricultural land to establish industrial export-oriented plantations, while local food producers are expelled and deprived of their means of subsistence. Kalissa Regier, a young farmer from Canada says: "La Via Campesina urges the CFS to reject the World Bank principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) and demands strong Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in order to guarantee people's access to land and life resources".

The issue of investments in agriculture will also be at the core of negotiations in Rome. "The CFS has to guarantee that small-scale farmers remain the main investors in the agricultural sector and that they receive support to develop local food production," says Andrea Ferrante, an Italian farmer leader. The corporate sector is trying to control agriculture and food production by investing massively in commercial and industrial agriculture. To feed the world, priority should be given to local and sustainable food production and not to export commodity crops.

The CFS meeting will also address the issue of price volatility that has become endemic since the 2007-2008 food crisis. Price stability is vital to guarantee stable food production. It is urgent to develop local markets, to protect domestic markets against cheap imported products and to build public reserves. Food sovereignty should underlie all public policies to face the current economic and food crises.

Meetings with the press:

Wednesday 19 October, 1 pm-1.30 pm: Press conference and symbolic action by la Via Campesina "Small farmers for a corporate free agriculture" -
In the Food Sovereignty tent in front of the FAO building (Angelo Salita di San Gregorio)
Thursday 20 October (afternoon) : Action against landgrabbing (more information will follow)

Contacts for the media (To interview Via Campesina farmers in Rome)

Annelies Schorpion: mobile phone +393319209210 (or +32474847280), email:<a.schorpion@eurovia.org>

Great New Music Vid from Playing for Change: La Tierra del Olvido

2011-10-14T07:55:00.003+10:00

Check out this fantastic new music vid from Playing for Change!!!

La Tierra del Olvido features over 75 musicians across the country of Colombia. PFC says... "Throughout our journey we have learned that music is the greatest tool for healing broken countries, cultures and hearts. With this video we set out to unite and inspire the people of Colombia so they can move forward from years of conflict and create a positive future. Listen to the music, see the smiling faces, and remember that we are going to make it as a human race!!"

Indian farmers reject land acquisition for urbanization

2011-10-14T01:00:00.001+10:00

Since farm land grabs by corporations has become a growing phenomenon, Indian farmers too are facing alienation from their lands and are now in a tussle with the Indian state to question this trend. The Indian government claims that urbanization and the disappearance of rural India is “inevitable” in its foreword to the new land bill governing land acquisitions by the government- usually done in the garb of public purposes but then handed over to private for profit players.

The Indian farmers however have questioned the logic behind this ‘urbanization is inevitable’ mantra that is used to discredit rural India and have refused to disappear. Recently they met the Rural Development minister Jairam Ramesh regarding the unjust land bill introduced by the government without any public debates or consultations with those that have been struggling against land grabs all across the nation.

The minister finally agreed to appear in a national public debate provided the farmers themselves organized it. The South Indian Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements has thus agreed to organize this debate and invite various social movements from across the country to participate and publicly reject the current trends of blind urbanization at the cost of climate change, livelihood losses as well as food insecurity and rampant hunger.

Below is the position of the south Indian farmers [also endorsed by the north Indian farmers at Jairam Ramesh’s office].

South Indian Farmers response to the draft LA &RR Bill - 31st August, 2011.

The Draft National Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation & Resettlement bill, 2011 (LA&RR bill) released by the ministry of rural development on July29th, 2011 in the public domain for discussion does not address genuine “public purpose” - such as rural development, agriculture, eco restoration, land for landless, rights of forest dwellers and tribals etc. Instead it is completely biased towards facilitating industrialization. This bill is a result of a political compulsion - the compulsion to ensure that there is a coercive law to satisfy the forces [mainly industry] intending to grab land and resources. And that too at a time when those who want to acquire the land, whether government or the private sector has accumulated capital as never before, sufficient to bid and ‘buy’ land at the going rate in the market.

The farming community has no urgency to pass this bill; this is the urgency solely of the government and the industries to advance urbanization and private takeover of our resources. We do not accept the idea that our way of life has no place in the future of India. Industrialization and urbanization is not the right direction – there are already serious environmental, climatic, livelihood and food crises at stake. These crises will only worsen with the vision enshrined in this bill. We demand people’s sovereignty over resources. Why are we not giving land to the landless and completing the land reform process before acquiring land for the industries? We disagree with the fundamental principles laid down in this bill below and list out the reasons why as well as our main demand.

We reject the draft Land acquisition bill in the present form because:

1. We oppose the fundamental spirit behind the bill. The definition of Public Purpose is absolutely unacceptable to us: The sole purpose of this draft bill is to accelerate industries and urbanization at the cost of all rural communities and our way of life. This bill does not cater to the needs for agriculture or eco-restoration or for land to the landless and small/marginal farmers. We oppose that the state should use its eminent domain in order to spread industries at the cost of rural livelihoods thus increasing the threat of food insecurity and the climate crisis. The role of farming community in ensuring the food sovereignty of India is absolutely more vital to the future of this country than unrestricted industrialization. We therefore reject this definition and demand that a genuine national consultation and deliberation with the farming and rural communities’ takes place at the local level to really define public purpose which should be determined along with farmers and the rural community before any development project. We are willing to give our lands for genuinely public purposes.

2. Change of farm land use to industrial private purposes is unacceptable: Land is not a commodity to be purchased and sold. Land is about our identity, our roots and out community. Furthermore we oppose that farm land be turned into uses like hotels, residences for rich people. We also reject the distinction between irrigated and un irrigated lands. This bill promotes acquisition of all lands except multi-cropped irrigated agricultural land, which is often owned by the rich farmers. All agricultural land should be kept for farming purposes only. There should be strong monitoring of land use even when purchased in the open market to ensure that the food sovereignty of India is not put in danger. We condemn the commodification of land by the govt to facilitate industrialization – agriculture cannot wait and industrialization needs to wait!

3. Minimum displacement is not the driving force behind this bill: In fact there is no mention of “no forced displacement” or “prior informed consent”. Furthermore 80% consent mentioned is only for PPP projects and not for government projects and there is no guarantee that the government will not use its eminent domain to acquire land for industry. No procedures have been laid out for obtaining the consent of 80% and who will decide that the consent has been obtained? Under the current draft bill the company itself can ascertain 80% consent and the chances are high that they can use forgery and other malpractices to prove consent. We demand a clear laid out procedure in the act itself and that 80% consent must apply to all acquisitions including only for government projects to minimize the trauma of displacement.

4. No mechanism to protect land losers from unfair negotiations or malpractices of private players to buy land: There is a great power asymmetry between the land buyers and those whose lands are sought. The bill makes no effort to address this. There is no guarantee that private players will not use underhand methods, muscle power, forging etc to grab peoples lands. It does not prevent and protect the people from being forcibly dispossessed of their land through ‘sale’ of land to land mafias of all kinds.

5. No guarantee that compensation, R & R will happen before the land is taken: The bill promises a ‘liberal’ and speedy compensation, relief and rehabilitation prior to the acquisition but at the same time permits delayed payment of compensation; The collector has enormous powers to decide when R & R is completed and also take over land before compensation is paid. The land losers are at the mercy of the collector who incidentally is also the person to be approached for making any complaints! Instead to strengthening the farmer’s position the bill is putting them at the mercy of the bureaucracy who have historically proved to be serving the interests of the industries and against the people.

6. We reject the lip service to tribals, forest dwellers and gram sabhas in decision making: Forest dwellers have the primary right under Forest Rights Act to make decisions on forests and this bill does not address that for conducting any project, permission and consent needs to be first acquired from forest dwellers and tribals. How can forest dwellers rights over forest and natural resources be exchanged with an R and R package? Also the Gram Sabhas will receive a “token” consultation, under the current bill, they will not have any meaningful participation or the power to stop a project or give their prior informed consent; This bill also denies any decision making right on ‘relief and rehabilitation’ to the people, the gram/ward sabhas

7. Inadequate rehabilitation package: Why is R and R only applied to 100 acres and above? Even if a single acre is acquired for any government project, then R and R should apply. Furthermore, the bill denies compensation and R & R to those affected by the acquisition of common property or public land and denies infrastructural amenities in the resettlement area where the number of resettled families is less than one hundred families. It exempts private companies from the provisions of rehabilitation and resettlement when the ‘land acquisition’ is for less than one hundred acres;

8. Social impact assessment is a farce: Under the current bill the SIA seems like a window dressing. The main issues as to how the SIA will impact the final decision on the project are not answered. It seems like the SIA is only meant to improve the project rather than rejecting it if opposed by the people. Furthermore the SIA will only be reviewed by an independent expert body but will be conducted by the “appropriate government” when it should be both conducted and reviewed by independent bodies. There is no provision for participation of the affected people or Gram Sabhas in the SIA. It offers social impact assessment to be carried out, but does not insist that the decision to acquire land has to be based on its recommendations;

9. Unfair disciplinary mechanisms: the bill provides for only disciplinary proceedings for offenses by the officials while providing for imprisonment and penalty to those people obstructing land acquisition.

OUR DEMAND

· We demand the introduction of a new Bill instead of the bill the “The Draft National Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation & Resettlement bill, 2011” published by the ministry of Rural development on 29th July,2011 to repeal the draconian “The Land Acquisition Act 1894”. The ministry should completely revamp the bill and should come out with a new bill taking in to the consideration of the farmer’s movements and people’s movements.

· We demand the government of India to formulate a committee comprising the representatives of the farmer’s movements to finalise the new bill for the land requirement for the government and Rehabilitation & Resettlement.

· We demand that a genuine guideline of public purpose is created after nationwide debates at the taluka level. Only when genuine public purpose is determined by the new guidelines and after prior informed consent of those whose lands are needed in each case land can be given to the state after a liberal offer of compensation along with a relief and rehabilitation far above the operative market prices.

· Project affected persons and or gram sabhas should have the right to stop a project if they find violations, or if the social impact assessments so recommend.

· We demand that the government makes a timeline to build a consensus among the farming and rural communities of India, we need debates at the taluka level. The new bill should be translated in all regional languages so that we may be able to have discussions and debate at the grassroots level.

· We demand the government of India to release a White Paper on the extent of land acquired for industrial purposes and extent of land ‘really' utilised for the purpose specified in the past six decades

· Finally, before the new law comes into place all acquisition processes under the draconian 1894 Land Acquisition Act should be suspended.

Endorsed by

Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangh( KRRS) (Karanataka).

Thamizhaga Vivasayigal Sangam( Tamil Nadu),

Uzhavar Ulaippalar Katchi(Tamil Nadu),

Uzhavar Periyakkam(Tamil Nadu),

Katchi Sarpartra Thamizhaga Vivasayigal Sangam(Tamil Nadu),

Kongunadu Vivasayigal Sangam( Tamil Nadu),

Kerala Coconut Farmers Association (KCFA)( Kerala)

Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha(Kerala),

Source: La Via Campesina Asia

Farmers' Networks Urge Government Action Against Land Grabbing

2011-10-13T11:48:00.000+10:00

Civil society organisations and global farmers' networks are gathered in Rome this week to ask governments to stop the "disastrous practice of land grabbing", ahead of next week's Committee on World Food Security.

From Oct. 11 to 14, the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is running intergovernmental negotiations on land governance.

After six years of negotiations involving governments, international organisations and civil society groups, this session is expected to adopt voluntary guidelines on responsible governance of land and other natural resources. These guidelines would protect and strengthen access to land, fisheries and forests for indigenous peoples and small- scale producers, especially women.

According to farmers' organisations, the guidelines currently under negotiation could become an instrument "to keep financial speculation out of peoples' lands, water and forests and to overcome a system of governance that facilitates the takeover of peoples' natural resources by corporate investors and other powerful actors".

Delegates from the global farmers' network la Via Campesina, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty and the Italian Committee for Food Sovereignty are taking part in the negotiations.

The issue seems most crucial now that the global food and financial crises have made maintaining livelihoods impossible for farmers, their communities and small-scale producers unless their land is preserved.

A rampant practice

A recent report by Oxfam identified 227 million hectares of land, an area the size of northwest Europe, as having been reportedly sold or licensed – largely in Africa and mostly to international investors – through thousands of secret deals since 2001.

Earlier this year the World Bank identified 56 million hectares of "grabbed" land, again predominantly in Africa.

The issue implicates Europe and the U.S equally.

According to a recent report on land grabbing, released earlier this month by Friends of the Earth, more than 60 percent of land consumed in Europe is imported, while U.S. demand for imported land increased by 100 million hectares between 1997 and 2004.

The report stated, "Europe uses the equivalent of 1.5 times its own area in land. Germany and the UK are among the top land import dependent countries, each importing more than 80 million hectares a year. Average land consumption in the EU is 1.3 hectares per capita, while countries such as China and India use less than 0.4 hectares per capita. The U.S. consumes more than three hectares per capita, four times as much as India."

In many cases, land is being used to grow crops for biofuel markets.

Widespread, long-lasting impacts

"We want to make sure that governments understand our position on the disastrous (impacts) of land grabbing on international investments in agriculture," Kalissa Regier, youth vice president of Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU) and member of La Via Campesina, told IPS.

"The situation is particularly disastrous for young farmers. Every time farmland is (taken) from the rural community, it can never be regained by families or the younger generation who once had a chance to be part of their land, part of their families' heritage."

Areas where farmers have secure land tenure and access to arable land have decreased incidence of food insecurity, she added. But once land is lost "through land grabbing, corporate investments in agriculture or government investments in farmland", it cannot be regained, she said.

Regier, an organic grain producer in Canada, said the impacts of this issue would last for hundreds of years and stressed that land grabbing is not limited to the global South, but that people around her were experiencing it as well.

Land grabbing is "manifesting itself differently depending on the social and economic structures" in different regions, she said. " In Africa, Asia and South America, you see the disastrous impacts of poverty, hunger and displacement of communities," while North America has seen many of its youth shift from rural areas into cities alongside huge amounts of foreign investment in farmland.

Concerns over implementing guidelines

Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, recently urged the adoption of common guidelines on land governance.

He stressed that "governments should be wary of speculation and concentration of ownership when land rights are transferred to private investors to develop farmland". He added, "Harmful investments to the detriment of local populations – or land grabbing – can only be warded off if we first secure the underlying rights of farmers, herders and fisherfolk."

On Tuesday, farmers' delegates in Rome submitted the Dakar Appeal, a document prepared during the 2011 World Social Forum in Senegal, to the president of the U.N. Committee on Food Security (CFS).

The appeal, which calls on governments to put an end to land grabbing and urges the CFS to reject the World Bank principles for responsible agricultural investment, is endorsed by over 700 organisations worldwide.

Farmers are also extremely concerned about the implementation of guidelines.

"We are participating (in high-level discussions) here… but finally we want this paper to be reflected in the life of the woman who depends on fish from the lake, whose children go to sleep hungry because the fish in the lake have been taken by a big company from another country," Rehema Bavuma, a Ugandan delegate from the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers, told IPS.

Bavuma lives on the bank of Lake Victoria, Uganda.

"Traditionally, women and men near the lake have depended (exclusively) on fish. The men fished and the women cooked or smoked the fish, for eating or selling to their neighbours."

However, Bavuma said, this is not happening anymore. "They still live near the lake but they are not allowed to fish because the government has given rights to big companies to take fish from the lake and sell it, but local people cannot afford to buy it, as it is very expensive."

"These people have no food, no jobs, no water and no income. If our governments negotiate (guidelines) on behalf of their peoples, we want to see (those rules) adopted and implemented." She added that land grabbing affects water supplies and other resources as well.

Farmers' networks are expecting governments to take a strong position in the negotiations on land tenure by openly opposing land grabs and ensuring communities' rights and human rights are protected.

"We expect governments negotiating land tenure to approve strict guidelines that can rescue farmers from the hands of private speculators and safeguard small producers' and local communities' access to and control over natural resources, including land, water and forests," said Mamadou Ba, of the Conseil National de Concertation et de Coopération des Ruraux, Senegal.

Source: IPS News

October: a month of international mobilisation!

2011-10-12T15:22:00.000+10:00

Global days of action mark the month of October, when social movements around the world take to the streets to protest against a system based on the oppression of peoples, and particularly of women and the environment.

This journey of struggle against capitalism, was agreed upon at the Social Assembly Movements during the 2011 World Social Forum held in Dakar, Senegal (read the Assembly declaration below).

The choice of October 12th was a symbolic one. This is the date that marks the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas (in 1492) and one of the dates marking the beginning of the “Modern Age”, of the rise of capitalist “civilization”. In the Americas, it is the day of indigenous resistance, in defense of the rights of nature, on which the cry of the excluded – across the continent – has been celebrated since the 1990s. Besides that, this day is right in the middle of a whole series of key action dates for social movements around the world (for women, trade unions, farmers, indigenous peoples, against debt, etc.), running from October 7th to 17th, including:

7th October: World Day for Decent Work

8th – 16th October: Week of Action against Debt and International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

12th October: Day of action against capitalism / Global day in defense of Mother Earth / Cry of the Excluded (Latin America)

15th October: International Day of Rural Women / Anniversary of Thomas Sankara’s murder, symbol of the African anticolonial struggle / International actions for real democracy now!

16th October: World Food Sovereignty Day

17th October: International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

On this journey, the different movements are invited to link their existing actions, relating to their own situations and priorities in national level, to a common framework, in order to make this international anti-establishment struggle more concrete and visible.

Let's take advantage of these moments to organize and join in the actions, combining debate and action! We know that many organizations are already planning to take part in or organizing activities and demonstrations within the month of October.

Please send your calls to action, news and images to this email: asamblea.assembly@gmail.com so they can be made visible at the blog:

https://sites.google.com/site/anticapitalistjourney

In solidarity and struggle !

CADTM Internacional

CADTM Network Africa

Cebrapaz

COMPA - Convergencia de movimientos de los pueblos de América

CUT – Central Única de Trabajadores / Brasil

GGJ – Grassroots Global Justice

HSA – Hemispheric Social Alliance

Jubilee South/Americas

Via Campesina

WMW - World March of Women

Source: La Via Campesina

Via Campesina calls for organisations to sign the Dakar Appeal against Land Grabbing

2011-09-27T01:00:00.001+10:00

During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2011, social movements, organizations of small food producers and other CSOs released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 650 organizations have already endorsed it. If your organization has not signed on yet and would also like to support this appeal, please do so before 7 October 2011.

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) based in Rome at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is currently negotiating Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests. These Guidelines are supposed to protect and strengthen the access to land, fisheries and forests of small food producers. Unfortunately some powerful governments, with the support of International Financial Institutions, are reluctant to adopt strong Guidelines. They prefer a system of governance that facilitates the take-over of people's natural resources by corporate investors and other powerful actors.

Peasants affected by land grabbing will hand over the Dakar Appeal, together with the names of organizations endorsing it, to governments during the negotiations on the Guidelines in Rome from 10-14 October.

This mobilization will also contribute to pressure governments to definitively reject the World Bank-driven Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI).

Land grabbing has to be stopped, it cannot be made "responsible"!

Please read and sign the petition here: http://www.dakarappeal.org

La Via Campesina

Via Campesina is an international movement of peasants, small- and medium-sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers. We are an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent of any political, economic, or other type of affiliation. Born in 1993, La Via Campesina now gathers about 150 organisations in 70 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

International Operational Secretariat:

Jln. Mampang Prapatan XIV no 5 Jakarta Selatan 12790, Indonesia

Tel/fax: +62-21-7991890/+62-21-7993426

Email: viacampesina@viacampesina.org

Haitian Farmers Fighting Monsanto and Chemical-intensive agriculture

2011-09-26T05:35:00.000+10:00

An exclusive interview with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, executive director of Haiti's Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP), on fighting Monsanto and chemical-intensive agriculture. The interview was conducted August 26, 2011 by Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides, and Marie-Jose Etheart, Beyond Pesticides supporter, collaborator and Kreyol translator.

At the time the seeds were being distributed in 2010, Mr. Jean-Baptiste said Monsanto’s donation is an effort to shift farmer dependence to more expensive hybrid varieties from traditional seeds and will harm the island-nation’s agriculture. He called the donation a new earthquake. Haitian farmers and small growers traditionally save seed from season to season or buy the seed they desire from traditional seed markets, and, as he points out, have been doing this for 200 years.

Monsanto says that it donated “more than $4 million worth of conventional corn and vegetable seeds to be made over the next 12 months [through 2010] in support of reconstruction efforts.” According to Monsanto, the donated seeds include corn, cabbage, carrot, eggplant, melon, onion, tomato, spinach and watermelon. The hybrid corn seeds are treated with the fungicide Maxim XL, which is comprised of fludioxonil and mefenoxam. Other vegetable seeds were treated with thiram, a neurological, reproductive and thyroid toxicant, mutagen and skin sensitizer. The USAID WINNER program was responsible for distributing the seeds through farmer association stores where they were then sold to farmers at a significantly reduced price. Mr. Jean-Baptiste said that the Ministry of Agriculture has been unwilling to share any information with him on specifics of the seed.

In the interview, Mr. Jean-Baptiste voiced concern that the efforts of Monsanto and USAID were undermining traditional, organic peasant agriculture, while advancing a form of industrial agriculture that relies on seeds that require synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. He identified farmers who had used the Monsanto seeds without the synthetic fertilizer that was provided. The yields and quality of the corn were diminished, according to the farmers interviewed.

Mr. Jean-Baptiste expresses a strong belief that peasant organic agriculture is the only form of agriculture that can feed Haiti and the world and fight global climate change. He points to university studies in Europe and the U.S. and the position of the United Nations as additional support for his position.

MPP was founded in 1973 and is Haiti’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to work toward social justice and improving the quality of life in the country. Among the organization’s goals are to improve the environment and soil so that Haiti can regain its food sovereignty and contribute to an efficient management of natural resources such as water, forests, and seeds. For more information or to donate to help the farmers of Haiti, go to mpphaiti.org.

Source: www.beyondpersticides.org

Australian Farmer's Sustainability Story: Input Free Pasture Improvement

2011-09-16T08:56:00.005+10:00

Alan Broughton is a family farmer and researcher who is doing some amazing work at the Australian Landscape Trust's 2000 acre property, Strathfieldsaye in East Gippsland, Australia. A key aspect of his research work in sustainable grazing management involves soil and pasture improvement through a logically obvious and incredibly simple strategy of 'stock rotation'. In this short video, Alan tells us a little about his wonderful work in a unique and beautiful farming environment!

Alan would love to hear your comments and thinking on his research:

Please email him at : soiltest@alt.org.au

For more family farmer's stories on Video check out www.foodsovereignty.com.au

Great New Music Video: Higher Ground - Playing For Change

2011-09-09T09:16:00.002+10:00

Another wonderful song and video music clip from the incredible and ever growing team from Playing For Change.

“Higher Ground” is a song that speaks of the perseverance it takes to reach the higher consciousness. Let’s all keep trying together, one heart and one song at a time, until we all reach the Higher Ground.

Venezuelan Campesinos Share their Struggle for Food Sovereignty

2011-09-06T12:27:00.003+10:00

Check out this great new video of Venezuelan Campesinos sharing their Food Sovereignty realities and aspirations.

PROLESA is a small dairy cooperative in the Venezuelan state of Tachira. It is located in a river delta about 50 kms from San Cristobal. The community is made up of about 250 farming families and 25 of those families are involved in the PROLESA Dairy Cooperative. While some crops are grown, the main focus of the cooperative is to purchase milk from the local community for the production and distribution of cheese and yogurt. In this short video, cooperative members share the amazing stories of their struggles to achieve food sovereignty, their insights for success and their visions for the future.

Special thanks to our talented translator Federico Fuentes
Special thanks also to Venezuela campesina, fantastic song writer & singer Olga Carvajal

Read More about PROLESA one of
Reciprocity's Core Partnership Projects in Venezuela

Haitian peasants inspire great new very scary GMO Film Project!!

2011-08-22T13:33:00.004+10:00

Check out this great new and very scary GMO film project by Compeller Pictures inspired by the actions of Haitian peasant farmers against Monsanto.

GMO Film Project Sizzler from Compeller Pictures on Vimeo.

Today in the United States, by the simple act of feeding ourselves, we unwittingly participate in the largest experiment ever conducted on human beings. Massive agro-chemical companies like Monsanto (Agent Orange) and Dow (Napalm) are feeding us genetically-modified food, GMO’s, that have never been fully tested and aren't labeled. This small handful of corporations are tightening their grip on the world’s food supply—buying, modifying, and patenting seeds to ensure total control over everything we eat.

The GMO Film Project (Untitled) tells the story of a father’s discovery of GMO’s through the symbolic act of poor Haitian farmers burning seeds in defiance of Monsanto’s gift of 475 tons of hybrid corn and vegetable seeds to Haiti shortly after the devastating earthquake. After a journey to Haiti to learn why hungry farmers would burn seeds, the real awakening of what has happened to our food, what we are feeding our families, and what is at stake for the global food supply unfolds in a trip across the United States in search of answers.

Are we at a tipping point? Is it time to take back our food? The encroaching darkness of unknown health and environmental risks, seed take over, chemical toxins, and food monopoly meets with the light of a growing resistance of organic farmers, concerned citizens, and a burgeoning movement to take back what we have lost.

We still have time to heal the planet, feed the world, and live sustainably. But we have to start now.

A film by Compeller Pictures
gmofilm.com

Directed by Jeremy Seifert
Produced by Joshua Kunau
Co-Producer, Elizabeth Kucinich
Associate Producer, Timothy Vatterott
Cinematographer, Rod Hassler

Farmer to Farmer Talking Tour - Venezuela

2011-08-19T15:27:00.000+10:00

There are 5 places only available on this unique farmer-to-farmer talking tour that has been specifically designed for Australian farmers interested in food sovereignty and natural farming practices.

The tour provides an incredible opportunity for Australian farmers to share their ideas and thinking about sustainable agriculture. Australian farmers will also learn about the amazing journey of Venezuelan farmers, now recognised as leading the world in achieving food sovereignty.

Top 10 Terrific Tour experiences farmers will have!

Meeting small scale farmers who are supported by the government to farm chemical free;
Working with farming communities who recognise the possibilities of a farmer-led better world;
Eating, sleeping and living with the Venezuelan farmers on their farms and in their communities;
Getting Venezuelan dirt on your hands as you work side by side with Venezuelan farmers in their fields, on their rivers and with their animals;
Having your ideas and thinking valued and treasured by Venezuelan farmers and their communities;
Being with a small group of like-minded farmers keen to share and learn together;
Seeing how government policy and farmer solidarity translates into real action to create an alternative food system without the influence from multi nationals and agribusinesses;
Appreciating the sharing qualities of the Venezuelan farmers who put the needs of others before their own;
Daily reflection and sharing facilitated by one of Australia’s leading agroecologists /soil scientists, Alan Broughton;
Building authentic, global, farmer relationships and solidarity.

Number of places: 5 ONLY
Duration of tour: 17 days
Date of tour: 9 April to 25 April (in country)
Cost: $ 2,200
Price includes:

All in country transportation, beginning and ending in Caracas
All accommodation – small hotel and farm stay (based on shared double room)
3 meals a day
Tour leaders and 3 bi-lingual translators
Preparatory reading materials
Facilitated information and review sessions
All programme activities

Not included in price:
International air flights
Travel and medical insurance
Departure taxes and excess baggage
Personal spending money
Alcoholic drinks

For bookings and more information contact:
Dianne James
Reciprocity
Email: diannejames@reciprocity.com.au

There are 4 projects that will be the major focus of this Talking Tour. For more information go to: Food Sovereignty Venezuela

Con La Soja al Cuello 2

2011-08-16T20:17:00.002+10:00

Con la Soja al Cuello 2 (La ofensiva por la tierra 2011) from Radio Mundo Real on Vimeo.

De La Haciendo Punto En Otro Blog

Por la primera edición de este documental (2009) producido por REDES - Amigos de la Tierra Uruguay y la productora Interludio transcurrían varios casos de conflictos ambientales producidos por el avasallante crecimiento del agronegocio sojero, el que se suma al forestal ocupando entre ambos cerca de dos millones de hectáreas, una octava parte del total del territorio uruguayo.

Con la Soja al Cuello 2 es una actualización de esta problemática que combina su ampliación cuantitativa con otras consecuencias cualitativamente diferenciadas: tal es el caso de la “ofensiva por la tierra” o la dinámica del mercado de tierras y la consiguiente pérdida de soberanía que ha motivado la agricultura empresaria, más allá de los tímidos intentos oficiales por acotarlo.

Otro plano del análisis lo constituye una visión comparativa entre el aporte tributario de estas actividades al Estado uruguayo en relación a sus crecientes utilidades, lo cual a través de leyes de promoción y acuerdos de inversión con terceros países se ha revelado como prácticamente inexistente.

En ese sentido, Con la Soja al Cuello 2 recoge testimonios, sí, pero también el resultado de las investigaciones que sobre esta problemática han llevado adelante académicos y organizaciones de productores y ambientalistas.

Entre otros entrevistados para este documental figuran: el sociólogo Diego Piñeiro (UdelaR), el doctor Humberto Tomassino (UdelaR), el economista Jorge Notaro (Facultad de Ciencias Ecoonómicas, UdelaR), Jacinto de la Cuerda (Pit-Cnt), el ingeniero agrónomo Gustavo Pardo (Comisión Nacional de Fomento Rural).