Newsletter no 12 – Editorial
Migration and agriculture
Illustration: “With or without papers, workers unite!” Titom
Food is essential to life and it is also an expression of our cultures and our societies. The dominant corporate food system takes away the vital and social value of food and reduces it to a commodity; in order to profit from all stages of its intensive production, processing and distribution and ultimately from food speculation in the financial markets.
This system pushes to separate people who consume food from the ones who produce it. While family food producers continue to feed more than 70% of the world population, the neoliberal system and its trade policies drive peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists and indigenous people out of the their territories and support the development of intensive monoculture farms and factory farms, food processing industries and retailers, based on the labour of food workers.
More and more, these food and farm workers are migrant people obliged to leave their country in order to escape poverty and hunger. More and more, due to racial migration policies and the militarization of borders migrant people risk their lives to cross frontiers undocumented. More and more undocumented migrants are persecuted and criminalized while simultaneously being exploited and even enslaved in the food production system, to which they are indispensable. The struggle against the current global food system is also a struggle to support the rights of migrant people. The struggle for food sovereignty is also a struggle to give people back the freedom to choose whether to stay or leave their communities and territories.
