Another step to strengthen the struggle for Food Sovereignty

CLOC

07/08/2013

Opinión

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Following almost a decade of discussion and construction we have come to the First Continental Assembly of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty of the People of Latin America and the Caribbean. From this assembly we hope to achieve greater coordination of struggles and action to achieve Food Sovereignty as a strategic and necessary line of action to strengthen the process of Latin American integration with a popular character, with peoples' sovereignty and democracies enabled to withstand the onslaughts of transnational corporations and the empire.

The context demands maximum efforts of coordination and unity among popular forces; the crises, above all the food crisis and the environmental crisis, are closely tied to the model of industrial agriculture and of agribusiness.

This model demonstrates the consequences of the offensive of financial capital and of transnational corporations in agriculture that began with the Green Revolution, a pretext to open markets in agriculture for transnational manufacturers of arms, machinery and chemicals. From that moment on, we have seen the unleashing of various mechanisms of destruction of local systems of food production, the displacement of millions of campesinos, the commodification of land, of natural goods and of food. Globalization and the consequent hegemony of financial capital accelerated this process, leading to the employment of technologies such as GM seeds resistant to pesticides. For the first time in the history of humanity we have greater urban than rural population, local fairs and markets replaced by hypermarkets, and commodities subordinating national territories to the transnational corporations, food subject to commodities markets and their prices constantly increasing due to the pressure of speculative funds. The global market of food is in the hands of a small number of corporations that dominate every link in the food chain.

In the world summit on food in 1996, the figure of 800 million hungry people was deemed scandalous. Nevertheless, the business lobby promoted the notion that the problem was a lack of technology, proposing to greatly increase the promotion and development of industrial agriculture with its destructive impact. With respect to the urgency of hunger, this tendency of profits over life claims to achieve Food Security, that is to say, to put an end to hunger through charitable donations of food from the rich countries to the underdeveloped countries.

At that moment, in the same Summit, the voice of the international Via Campesina was heard, in complete disagreement with the "proposals of FAO." Peoples have the right to produce their own food. Campesinos have fed humanity for ten thousand years and even today, with one third of the land, we feed 75% of the world population. It is difficult for justice and democracy to be established among peoples that do not have autonomous food supplies. This is where the proposal for Food Sovereignty arose, as a response to the lies of capital. Food Sovereignty is political proposition, according to which peoples have the right to produce and consume their own food. In order to achieve this, land should be considered as related to the common good, it is a social good and peasant farmers, native peoples, and workers are those who can guarantee this.

The environmental crisis is also directly related to the food and livestock model. Nearly 50% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the agro-industrial food chain, because of the enormous consumption of fossil fuels, pesticides, fertilizers and plastics for packing. Because of this we claim that campesino agriculture contributes to the cooling of the planet. We are at a most interesting juncture in Latin America, with a process of integration, the building of the "great motherland", under principles of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and with a socialist perspective, which is engaged in a relentless dispute with the project of Yankee imperialism, of capitalism in control with its logic of self-interest, where everything has a price.

In this framework we understand that Food Sovereignty is a cornerstone of any project of the people, which explains the fundamental contradiction between campesino agriculture and industrial agriculture and agribusiness.

In this continent, land-grabbing and evictions and assassination of campesino and indigenous leaders are on the increase; millions of acres of forests and jungles are being destroyed, water is contaminated, and whole villages are being poisoned with pesticides. Bees are dying... and as Albert Einstein said, "when the last bee dies, four years later the human species will disappear."

According to FAO there are approximately one billion hungry people in the world today, along with five hundred million obese people; moreover, according to FAO, forty per cent of food in the industrial agricultural system is lost through spoilage.

Food sovereignty is a political, economic, social and cultural proposition, which can only be achieved in the framework of a people's movement.

Thus we hope that the Alliance for Food Sovereignty can allow for greater vitality in the coming together of distinct processes of coordination and struggle; Friends of the Earth, the International Indian Treaty Council, MAELA, COPROFAM are some of the networks that form part of this initiative together with CLOC Via Campesina.

2014 has been declared the world year of family agriculture, and it will be very important to engage in the ideological struggle with respect to ideas and meanings. For some, family agriculture means small scale agribusiness "directed" by members of a family. For us this is not the case, and because of this we insist on the term campesino (peasant farming), which refers to a way of life, that has a historical memory, in which the spirit of the common good is dominant, dignified labour as a fundamental value for the development of peoples, with a strong relationship to local markets and a productive model based on harmony with nature. The earth is our mother, and because of this we peasant farmers live on the earth, we work, we produce healthy and diverse foods, we procreate our children, we celebrate and we die on the land.

Because of this we speak of a clear proposal: campesino agriculture, with an agroecological basis oriented to Food Sovereignty.

Obviously we consider ourselves allied to all those who identify with this model but who speak of family agriculture, such as herders, artisanal fisher-people and native peoples.

In recent times FAO is changing course, in spite of its bureaucracy. It has recognized the fact that to resolve the problem of hunger it is necessary to strengthen family agriculture; it has approved, together with CFS, the Guidelines on land tenure, recommending to governments that they develop policies of access to land for family and campesino agriculture. Nevertheless, the majority of progressive governments continue with agricultural policy based on industrial agriculture, where land is subordinated to the interests of transnational corporations and local oligarchies.

Because of this another objective of this Alliance is to promote changes in agrarian policy to favour public policies based on Food Sovereignty and integral Agrarian Reforms, provision of credit to campesinos, and quality education and health care in rural areas, strengthening local markets, etc., that is to say, to install these policies in the agendas of UNASUR, CELAC and ALBA, in addition to working with urban and workers' organizations.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty is being set up to sow more hope, to sow more struggles, hoping to harvest popular conquests and new challenges.

Diego Montón

Operational Secretariat

Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations - CLOC -Vía Campesina

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/78256