Newsletters Nyéléni in English

The international Nyéléni newsletter is the voice of the international movement for Food Sovereignty. Its main goal is to strengthen the grassroots of the movement, by providing accessible material on key issues and creating a space – for individuals and organisations involved in the struggle – to exchange their experiences and share information.

Voices from the field

Newsletter no 30 - Advancing food sovereignty

Voices from the field 1

Globalise the struggle, globalise hope!

Elizabeth Mpofu, General Coordinator, La Via Campesina

There is an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone, but you won’t go far. If you want to go far, go with others.”

I believe that the struggle for Food Sovereignty is captured in the latter part of the proverb. Food Sovereignty is a lasting global solution for how we should relate with nature and people as we feed ourselves. It is a struggle that requires alliances for fully recognizing and realizing peasants’ rights, and achieving social, economic and ecological equity and equality. This can only be done through collectiveness, in alliance across movements, regions, cultures and genders to ensure global solidarity and effect real change.

To build and realise Food Sovereignty, it is imperative to work and engage with others—peasants, indigenous people, fisherfolk, women, men, progressive researchers, consumers, etc.—to rethink ways and means of farming and mobilisation. By sharing ideas and generating knowledge, we are able to shape a society based on justice and solidarity, build healthy, inclusive communities, and improve social integration and cohesion. La Via Campesina recognizes the importance of alliances and we have joined hands with other social movements and organizations to push for Food Sovereignty in many national and international spaces. As a result, Food Sovereignty is included in some policies, enshrined in constitutions by some countries, while in others, debates continue on what to adopt.

Today, Food Sovereignty is a living concept because of continuing alliance work. It is the struggle for local food systems based on agroecology ; access to local markets ; access to and control over productive resources such as land, water, seeds, etc ; recognition of peasant rights ; and resistance to industrial agriculture, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Transnational Corporations (TNCs).

Voices from the field 2

The State of Palestine : Internationally recognized yet stripped of food sovereignty

Jamal Talab, Land Research Center, Palestine

Perhaps the loss of food sovereignty for the people of an occupied state doubles the negative impact of the violation of their fundamental human right to a life of dignity. The State of Palestine, recognized as a member state by the United Nations (UN), still does not have full sovereignty, including over natural resources. The Israeli occupation controls 80% of the underground water and 64% of the total area of Palestine, reserved for the expansion of settlements that are illegal according to UN Resolution number 2334 of December 2017.

Furthermore, the Israeli occupation has constructed an apartheid wall (774km), opened colonists-only roads (1270km), confiscated 50% of Palestinian lands and uprooted over two million fruit trees, 70% of which were aging olive trees. It established over 488 colonies and outposts on Palestinian hills and mountains, pumping untreated sewage water and banned pollutants (pesticides and fertilizers) onto Palestinian agricultural lands, resulting in the contamination of plants and degradation of lands.

The concept of food sovereignty entitles peoples to control their food chains and systems. Yet all concepts are not applicable in Palestine. Also, the occupation has besieged the Gaza strip for over ten years and Israel executes full control over land, air and water. Fishermen are only allowed a quarter of the entitled mileage into the sea, which negatively affects their fishing capacity and income.

The presence of over 742 Israeli military checkpoints across all Palestine fully restricts the movement and transportation of goods. Above all, Israel has imposed hindrances that undermine local markets to shift Palestinians from producers to consumers of Israeli markets that are more organized and modern.
With over 41 days of hunger strike for dignity and freedom, Palestinian prisoners urged the international community to stand by their side for their full rights and sovereignty.

Voices from the field 3

The women’s movement and food sovereignty

Sophie Dowllar, World March of Women

The World March of Women participated in the Nyéléni International Forum on Food Sovereignty in Mali in 2007 as a feminist movement, contributing to the expression of women as political subjects. One of the most important themes in food sovereignty is women’s access to land, water, seeds and territory. Land should be in the hands of those who work it. Ultimately, those who stay in the countryside to till the land for food production are peasant women. Rural women are permanently concerned with rescuing and maintaining biodiversity, and preserving the land, which is reflected in their use of sustainable, agroecological practices. Water should be respected within the framework of food sovereignty. The privatization and commodification of water as a common good is a crime against nature and humanity. For peasant women, protecting and saving seeds is a fundamental role and way of contributing to food sovereignty.

In order to produce and distribute nutritious food to everyone, women’s movements are already engaged in different forms of community based agriculture that link rural and urban women, and in joint initiatives that build and strengthen alliances among women from different sectors including fisherfolk, migrants, peasants, environmentalists, etc. Despite the contradictions due to existing in a capitalist and patriarchal society, these initiatives create opportunities to learn, organise, develop new forms of conviviality, forge meaningful alliances for sustainable food production and solve problems together. There is also a shared vision that includes seed preservation, food sovereignty and the relationship between peoples and territories.

The affirmation of women’s knowledge and contribution to food production, preparation and distribution is one of the greatest hopes that lies ahead for food sovereignty to thrive. There has to be recognition of their indigenous knowledge and their contribution to the production, preparation and distribution of food. Food sovereignty means the future.

Voices from the field 4

Why we choose food sovereignty

Zainal Arifin Fuad,Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI)

Food Sovereignty as an alternative paradigm to Food Security was first adopted by the government of Indonesia in 2009 following a long struggle by the Indonesian Peasant Union (SPI) to counteract the introduction of the Food Security framework adopted by the FAO in 1996 to overcome hunger.

Food Sovereigntyis concerned not only with shortages of food, but also with agrarian reform, biodiversity, environment, energy, workers rights, consumers, economic institutions, financial institutions, markets, transportation and politics, which are part of food based geo-politics. The implementation of Food Security reproduces poverty, hunger and agrarian conflicts because of the role of corporations in providing and controlling food through the green revolution, land grabbing and free markets.

Therefore, SPI realizes that Food Sovereignty should be supported by all components of civil society (academics, students, NGOs, women, workers and other social movements) and the government. La Via Campesina’s slogan : “Peasants’ Struggle, Peoples’ Victory” is a message that the struggle for Food Sovereignty is for everyone.

Now there are many laws in Indonesia containing Food Sovereignty explicitly as well as implicitly, such as The Law of Land Protection for Sustainable Food Based Agriculture (2009), The Law of Food (2012), The Law of Farmer Protection and Empowerment (2013) and the Development Program of Jokowi (2014-2019). However, the way forward is hard and even paradoxical at the level of implementation. There are many constraints and interventions from many actors, both national and International, who still want to implement Food Security. FAO has already opened a window for Agroecology in 2014 and processes are ongoing in the Human Rights Commission in Geneva on the Declaration of Peasant Rights. Therefore, SPI and La Via Campesina continue their struggles at the grassroots level, as well as for public policy space at national, regional and international levels.

Voices from the field 5

Consumers and food sovereignty

Isa Álvarez, Advocacy officer URGENCI

From the point of view of consumers, food sovereignty is a key right in order to obtain a full and dignified life. It is difficult to consider ourselves as living in dignity if there is limited autonomy of choice about how we feed ourselves.

In today’s times the capitalist system values citizens primarily in two ways : as a workforce to feed the production system or as a niche in the consumer market that continues making that market viable. At the same time through mechanisms of mass publicity it has constructed an imagined world where consumerism is the only entry point for rights, making invisible the human rights which all citizens have for the mere fact of having been born.

It is becoming increasingly urgent that it be the people who are able to decide on their own political policies in all areas but especially in that of food and agriculture. Today the globalized market, in the hands of transnational corporations, inundates is with ultra processed products which make us sick, while associating such products with progress and being a citizen of the 21st century. This leads to the disappearance of not only other forms of foodstuffs which are more suitable to our real needs, but also progressively of small farmers and peasants.

The negative impacts of these edible products (not foodstuffs) on our health are already evident. Curiously, in the face of this evidence some false solutions are instead putting in focus citizen responsibility – especially that of women – perpetuating their unequal role as carers, as if the act of deciding what to eat in today’s world was a free act made in a neutral environment. Instead, we should not forget the role and capacity which public policies have of choosing (or not) our foodstuffs, as well as the need that these policies become the fruit of participatory processes among all citizens and not the result of pressure applied by large transnational corporations which have little or nothing to do with human necessities.

Voices from the field 6

The road towards people’s food sovereignty

Diego Montón, Operative Secretariat – CLOC-Vía Campesina

From our understanding it is impossible to achieve people’s food sovereignty in the framework of the capitalist and patriarchal system. Given that, it is necessary to build a popular program based on solidarity, on social, gender and environmental justice and on food sovereignty.

Advancing towards food sovereignty on the continent with the largest level of land concentration means defending the social function of land, while also defending peasant seeds and resisting any and all initiative to privatize them. Therefore the struggle for integrated agrarian reform and the construction of local systems of seed production are key central commitments of the CLOC.

At the same time, we need to transform the models of production imposed by transnational corporations and dominant classes at a national level. Agroecological production is fundamental in retaining the autonomy, the realisation of the right to food and the environmental sustainability of peasants and small farmers. In this area education and training play a fundamental role and for this reason the CLOC has created IALAS and agroecology schools in various countries.

To reinforce the work of peasants and small farmers while generating opportunities for rural youth, it is vital that the state plays an active role through public policies which :
• Ensure the equal access of women to resources and policies ;
• Ensure a dignified life in the countryside, guaranteeing a minimum income, health cover, educational access and other rights ;
• Develop local and small-scale agroindustries which add value to primary products which can subsequently be marketed in local and urban markets ;
• Guarantee infrastructure for local markets ;
• Subsidise logistical support in transporting products from farms to markets and fairs ;
• Define different standards so that peasant products can be sold directly into local markets, through urban and rural planning avoid the mass concentration of the population in cities ;
• Fortify peasant and small farmer organisations ;
• Promote integration between popular organisations from the countryside and the cities which permit them to debate and consolidate food sovereignty as a right of all citizens.

To advance down this road we need : strong democratic states as well as UN resolutions which control and penalize transnational corporations and their states of origin when those states or TNCs violate human rights or attempt to monopolize the market for foodstuffs.

For these objectives all the popular rural movements of the continent are working together.

Voices from the field 7

Advancing food sovereignty in Nepal

Balram Banskota, All Nepal Peasants Federation

Food sovereignty has become the banner of All Nepal Peasants’ Federation (ANPFa), the largest peasant organization in Nepal. Nepal’s peasant movement joined hands with its national and international counterparts to bring the discussion of food sovereignty into the mainstream as a new development model for agrarian and rural development, opposing the neo-liberal paradigm of development and advancing towards socialism. It was during the Peoples’ movement-II [The 2006 Democracy Movement is a name given to the political agitations against the direct and undemocratic rule of King Gyanendra of Nepal. The movement is also referred to as Jana Andolan-II (“People’s Movement-II”)] when the message of the peasant movement and concept of food sovereignty reached down to the local level. People had food sovereignty in one hand and the political agenda of a federal democratic republic in the other. That is why it was possible to incorporate food sovereignty as a fundamental right of the people. The new constitution of Nepal (2015) has ensured that people have the right to food sovereignty as guided by the law (article 36 under food related rights, sub-article 3). Though these historic achievements are worthy of mention, legislative acts to implement these rights have still to be drafted.

The political instability in Nepal as a direct impact of regional hegemony and global capitalism still continues. Thus the present government, backed by neo-liberal forces and with technical support from FAO, is drafting the food security and right to food bill against the mandate of the constitution. We understand the conspiracy of anti-people forces against food sovereignty and other progressive rights of people that ensure Nepal’s advancement towards socialism. We are well prepared for the massive political awareness and demonstration needed to support food sovereignty. ANPFa is also leading the process of drafting the food sovereignty bill necessary to implement peoples’ constitutional rights. We hope that we will soon implement food sovereignty in Nepal despite those challenges.

Voices from the field 8

Food sovereignty expresses the richness of our struggle

Nettie Wiebe, National Farmers’ Union (Canada)

The term “food sovereignty” has become so familiar and widely used (as well as mis-used) that it’s hard to remember a time before it was part of our lexicon.

We are not entirely sure who first coined the term “food sovereignty,” but there is no doubt about how and where it became a signature concept in La Via Campesina (LVC) and beyond. It is a defining theme of our struggles, our analysis and our movement.

The founding meeting of LVC in Mons, Belgium in 1993, took place in a context where the neo-liberal agenda was rapidly gaining legitimacy and power through regional and global trade agreements, particularly the GATT/WTO. By April, 1996, when the first major, delegated conference was held in Tlaxcala, Mexico, the hundreds of peasant, indigenous and rural organization representatives who participated were unanimous in their opposition to these policies and powers that threatened peasants, small-scale farmers and rural and indigenous communities everywhere.

It was not difficult to name what we were fighting against – the destruction of communities, environments, cultures, livelihoods and local markets by corporate agribusiness and the governments that colluded with this destruction.

But it was harder to name the alternatives succinctly. I recall long, profound, sometimes contentious, discussions going late into the nights as we struggled to find a term that would capture what we were fighting for. The conventional term of “food security” was inadequate. This was about more than producing more food or distributing it more efficiently. We were grappling with fundamental questions of power and democracy : Who controls food producing resources such as land, water, seeds and genetics and for what purposes ? Who gets to decide what is grown, how and where it is grown and for whom ? We needed to have language that expressed the political dimensions of our struggle.

Food Sovereignty is such a term. It provokes the necessary discourse about power, freedom, democracy, equality, justice, sustainability and culture. Food is taken out of the realm of being primarily a market commodity and re-embedded in the social, ecological, cultural and local contexts as a source of nutrition, livelihood, meaning and relationships.

A few months later, at the World Food Summit in Rome, LVC publicly presented some of the basic principles of food sovereignty. And in the decades since then, it has become a powerful, transformative, widely used concept that frames a multitude of diverse struggles to protect life, cultivate hope and reap justice.

Voices from the field 9

Food sovereignty in small-scale fisheries

World Forum of Fisher Peoples
“We, the El Molo people, co-exist with nature. Our livelihoods and traditions are connected with nature and the lake [Turkana] where we fish. In El Molo, we have a saying : ‘conserve, protect and sustain the lake so it can serve your family and your community.’ It is the source of your life ; it is a two-way relationship. There is no commercial aspect, it’s about surviving.” Christiana Louwa, El Molo Forum, Northern Kenya

The importance of Food Sovereignty has long been recognized by the leadership of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) : Food Sovereignty is a political agenda of small-scale food producers in the defense of our rivers, lakes, oceans and land. It is at the centre of our struggle against the neoliberal food system dominated by multinational corporations who, in the context of fisheries, seek to privatize and consolidate fishing rights in the hands of the few.

Food Sovereignty gives us a new language to describe what already makes up the heart and soul of the defense of our territories, our heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food. It provides a framework for sharing indigenous, traditional and new knowledge and wisdom, and to cultivate the study and debate about Food Sovereignty among youth, women and men in all of WFFP’s constituencies. Our vision builds on the ‘six pillars’ for Food Sovereignty :

1. Focuses on Food for People :
Inland and marine small-scale fishers are at the centre of fisheries and related policies, and ensure that food production is not harming future generations.
2. Values Food Providers :
The human rights of all small-scale fisher peoples involved in the entire value chain of small-scale fisheries, including youth, women, men and Indigenous fishers, must be respected and protected.
3. Localizes Food Systems :
Fishing communities decide independently on their own food system. They are at the center of decision making in terms of processing of fish products (salting, drying, smoking, fresh products, freezing, canning, etc.).
4. Puts Control Locally :
Fishing communities must have control over the land and water territories in both inland and marine fisheries. Access to fishing grounds – including lakes, rivers, salt marches, mangrove forests, coral reefs, and coastal waters – is a fundamental right of fishing communities.
5. Builds Knowledge and Skills :
Small-scale fishers have built their traditional, customary and/or Indigenous knowledge and skills over many generations (passed on from parents to children).
6. Works with Nature :
Small-scale fishing communities have a long history of working with and respecting nature. The inter-connectedness between fisher peoples and nature is deeply rooted in traditions and customary practices, especially for Indigenous Peoples, and expressed through our commitment to agroecology.

It is on the basis of Food Sovereignty that we will be able to take our struggle into the next decade. With emphasis on youth, women and Indigenous Peoples, we will strengthen solidarity between fisher movements and other social movements from all over the world.

Voices from the field 10

Food sovereignty and AFSA

Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) [2] understands food sovereignty as the ultimate struggle to protect Africa from the assault of the industrial food system.

Never before has there been a more coordinated and better-funded attempt to transform Africa’s peasant based agriculture into a commercial enterprise. Agricultural and food policies are geared to corporate interests. Through agreements and shady dealings, our governments are handing over the responsibility of feeding Africa to corporations. The kind of food production envisioned by corporations is strongly biased towards the industrialization of agriculture, relying on hybrid seeds, GMOs, and increased use of fertilizer and pesticides – as well as on mechanized, large-scale farming. Rather than being supported, food producers are being eliminated from their food production system. Rather than incorporating the available knowledge and experience of food producers, they are giving the impression that the majority of food producers are no longer needed.

This process is also allowing Africa’s genetic heritage to be privatized by a handful of multinational corporations, while undermining the contribution and role of local seed diversity and exchange networks.
Agriculture is being used to tear our cultural and social fabric apart, destroy our environment and make us subservient to the forces of global capitalism. The bright side is that we are making food sovereignty and agroecology our story, our solution, and our future.

AFSA has provided a continent-wide political platform on food sovereignty in many venues, contributed to policy discussion on food sovereignty and agroecology, broadened the food sovereignty agendas to include the impact of Food System on nutrition and health and successfully challenged the Regional Economic Commission on laws related to seed and biosafety.

AFSA has doubled its membership to reach 30 networks. It now covers 50 African Countries out of 56. Today AFSA is recognized as one of the biggest, loudest grass-roots voice in Africa. It is a broad-based alliance of African regional farmers, fisher folk, consumers, youth, women, and faith-based and African non-governmental organisation networks, along with various other allies. The aim is to bring greater continental cohesion to an already developing food sovereignty movement in Africa.

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 30 - Advancing food sovereignty

In the spotlight 1

The UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas

Introduction
Peasants and people living in rural areas, such as small-scale fishers, pastoralists and rural workers, still represent almost half of the world’s population. The great majority of them have to face massive and systematic violations of their rights: they suffer disproportionately from hunger and malnutrition, are being increasingly dispossessed from their lands, water bodies, fisheries, forests, seeds, and are being alienated from their sources of livelihood. They cannot maintain and develop their local economies and earn an income which allows them to live in dignity. They are often arbitrarily detained, harassed, easily criminalized, and even killed for defending their rights. Moreover, rural women carry out a disproportionate share of unpaid work, are often heavily discriminated against in the access to natural and productive resources, financial services, information, employment and social protection, and still face violence in manifold forms.

The international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has been championing the recognition of the rights of peasants in the international human rights system since 2001. After eight years of internal discussion, LVC presented in 2009 its own declaration on the rights of peasants — women and men— in which they succinctly expressed their aspirations and demands. Shortly after, in 2010, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) mandated its Advisory Committee to elaborate a study on ways and means to further advance the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas [Final study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee (on the advancement of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas), UN doc. A/HRC/19/75, 24 February 2012.]. The study recommends “(a) to better implement existing international norms, (b) to address the normative gaps under international human rights law, and (c) to elaborate a new legal instrument on the rights of people working in rural areas” (Par. 63). In September 2012, the HRC passed a resolution establishing an inter-governmental working group with the mandate to elaborate a draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural areas.

Relevance of the declaration
The former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, has stated that there are “four main reasons for adopting a new international human rights instrument on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas: it is needed in international law; it will improve the fight against hunger; it is a means of protecting small-scale, family-owned farms from the pressure of large, agro-industrial farms; and it will increase access to the means of production in rural areas.” He has also underlined that “the adoption of a declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas would increase visibility on the rights that are already recognized in international law, and help to recognize new rights, such as the rights to land, to seeds and to compensation for the losses due to food subsidies given to farmers in other countries”.

Rallying for the rights of peasants, small-scale fishers, pastoralists and other people working in rural areas
In countries like Indonesia or Colombia, peasants have historically faced deep entrenched discrimination and pervasive violence. The call for recognition of the rights of peasants has been able to capture the attention of people on the ground in these countries and has been instrumental in helping them assert their rights. It has also strengthened their organization and mobilization capacities as well as their initiatives towards policies and laws which protect and promote their rights. In recent years, several laws and policies specifically addressing the situation of peasants have been passed in Indonesia. Peasant and rural people’s mobilizations and demands have been at the top of the national agenda in Colombia after decades of disastrous neglect.

Way forward
The inter-governmental working group elaborating the draft declaration held its fourth session in May 2017 [See the joint statement of La Via Campesina together with the World Forum of Fisher People, the International Indian Treaty Council, the International Union of Food Workers and other CSO on the outcome of this session]. Besides the importance of having a UN declaration asserting the rights of peasants and other rural people, the process of drafting bears in itself the potential of becoming a vehicle to:
– deepen the dialogue and alliance among different constituencies and groups of rural people; and
– raise awareness and contribute to capacity and movement building.
The recognition of the rights of rural people goes beyond the UN Human Rights Council. It can be demanded from other UN bodies and more importantly from local, national and regional authorities. It is up to all individuals, groups and organizations to join this struggle in their own creative ways.

In the spotlight 2

The right to resist

Thirty-five Filipino farmers, including 10 women, are facing imprisonment as landowners of a large coconut estate filed 19 criminal cases of theft against them in 2016. The coconut estate is an agrarian hotspot for land distribution under the Philippine agrarian reform program. Now the farmers need to raise more than USD $22,000 as bail money to grant them temporary liberty. Due to poverty and the recent destruction of their crops by a typhoon, they are unable to raise this amount, prompting many of them to hide and doing so preventing their children from going to school this coming term. Criminalization is one of the tools used by landlords and business interests to harass landless peasants and rural communities, and they use the legal system to oppose agrarian reforms that threaten their monopoly of control and ownership of lands. Similar cases can be seen in other countries of the South, where institutions and structures of justice are becoming instruments of repression, and judicial proceedings are manipulated by those with wealth and political power.

The violence surrounding peoples’ struggles for food sovereignty has become appallingly common across the world. This comes in the form of threats, intimidation, physical force and abuse of power by state agencies, elites and non-state actors. From Cambodia to Brazil, rural communities increasingly encounter the danger of violence as they defend their lands, waters, forests, resources, livelihoods and rights from extractivist and destructive projects/policies, often in the name of ‘development.’ Women, youth and children are particularly at risk. The systematic failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice deepens the culture of impunity and constitutes a denial of victims’ rights to justice and redress.

While violence, abuse of power and impunity are not new to much of the rural world, the violation of peoples’ rights and criminalization of rights defenders have expanded and escalated to alarming levels over the last few decades [Check Nyéléni newsletter no.14 Repression and Rights and Newsletter Volume III No. 4, August 2016]. These can be attributed to the powerful nexus of political and business interests, repressive laws, and a model of development that criminalizes those who resist land grabbing, deforestation, mining, dams, and socio-economic injustices. Local communities and peoples’ movements that are practicing and building food sovereignty are primary targets, as food sovereignty directly challenges narratives of economic growth and development based on large-scale investments, industrial agriculture and food systems, privatisation, and extractivism. A convenient and efficient way to undermine food sovereignty is to disable its proponents. Legal and physical violence have become preferred weapons by which corporations, elites and many governments silence dissent and opposition, and prevent people from imagining worlds outside the dominant economic paradigm.

However, communities and peoples’ movements around the world are organizing to end the criminalization of small-scale food providers and the impunity of state and corporate perpetrators even in countries where spaces for genuine democracy are shrinking or absent, for example, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Ecuador, Brazil, etc. These struggles aim to defend human dignity and nature, protect fundamental rights and freedoms, and exact accountability from institutions, structures, and people in power. The unwavering commitment of peoples’ movements to defend food sovereignty stress the importance of strengthening and defending alternatives to neoliberalism and corporate power, as well as articulating well-being and progress from the perspectives of those who have been victims of various forms of injustices, especially women.

Newsletter no 30 – Editorial

Newsletter no 30 - Advancing food sovereignty

Advancing the paradigm of food sovereignty

Illustration: Angelo Monne | www.angelomonne.com

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the historic International Forum on Food Sovereignty that was held Mali in 2007. The Forum brought together more than 500 peasants, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, workers, migrants, women, youth, consumers, researchers and press/media from 80 countries to build a global movement on food sovereignty. The Forum was named Nyéléni, as tribute to and drawing inspiration from a legendary Malian peasant woman.

Nyéléni has since become a space of praxis, to convene, synergise and build forces to strengthen the different conditions for food sovereignty. These include defending and protecting land, water, territories, seeds and biodiversity; redistributive agrarian reform; secure access to land, territories and resources; agroecology and sustainable peasant agriculture; cooperative production and marketing; preventing corporate domination, capture and control over seeds, lands, water, technology, knowledge, markets and policy-making; resisting privatization; dismantling neoliberal trade-investment regimes; stopping the criminalization of frontline communities and rights defenders; and upholding the rights of small-scale food providers and workers.

As the paradigm of food sovereignty has expanded, so too have threats against it. The convergence of climate, finance, economic and energy crises over the past decade have triggered an explosion of large scale infrastructure projects, mining, oil and gas extraction, logging, industrial tree plantations, luxury resorts and property development, Special Economic Zones, and bogus climate ‘solutions’ such as REDD, blue carbon and soil carbon trading. Rural populations are losing their lands and territories, and facing escalating criminalization, violence and militarization as they organize to protect the very foundations of their lives.

New generation free-trade agreements (FTAs) threaten food sovereignty through extreme tariff cuts, changes in domestic regulation that remove supports for small-scale producers, and mechanisms for investor ‘rights’ protection that give corporations unfettered access to critical sectors such as food, agriculture, retail, medicines and public health. Equally dangerous are policies that enable corporations to control the production, use, price and marketing of seeds, promote genetic engineering, and to patent seeds and plant varieties (many of which are derived from bio-pirated materials).The mega-mergers of six corporations–Bayer + Monsanto, Dow + Dupont and ChemChina + Syngenta—will increase corporate control over seeds, agricultural technologies and equipment, undermining the productive potential of small-scale food producers worldwide.

These threats are being confronted at multiple fronts and levels by the growing global movement for food sovereignty. The recurring crises the world is facing are inherent to capitalism which is adept at re-inventing itself to maintain structural power. Tinkering with the wiring of the capitalist model will do little good. What is needed is deep systemic change, a complete paradigm shift from competiveness to solidarity, from extractivism to respect and from exploitation to dignity. This is the paradigm of food sovereignty, which the global movement is advancing through diverse knowledge, capacities, resources and social bases.


Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South

Icon

Advancing the paradigm of food sovereignty, no 30

1 file(s) 0.00 KB
Download

Voices from the field

Newsletter no 29 - FTAs and agriculture

Voices from the field 1

Solidarity between movements

Lucile Falgueyrac from the Seattle to Brussels network (S2B), France

These past four years in Europe, we’ve built a real movement against the transatlantic free trade treaties.

Far from being limited to a few NGOs, this fight has brought together both local and international social movements, syndicates, peasants and activists from all horizons and sectors. From Bulgaria to Finland, the campaigns against the EU-US agreement and the EU-Canada agreement reinforce the solidarity between movements that are usually far-removed from one another.

The election of Donald Trump to lead the US, and his first measures bringing racism, discrimination, attacks against the rights of women and the re-questioning of certain free-exchange agreements is a boon for those who wish to discredit our movements.

The ratification of CETA is now presented by the partisans of the agreement as a political act against Trump, and a signal that Europe and Canada are now at the forefront of a free and open world, two defences against the madness of the new American president.

This is a scam. The free trade treaties bring increasing inequalities, productivism, extractivism, create new rights for the multinationals and make some of the solutions to social and climate crises illegal. They are not the antidote to the extreme right, but create all the conditions to make them prosper.

Voice from the field 2

Our struggle for an alternative economic model

Guy Marius Sagna, Coordinator of the National Coalition No to the EPA, Senegal

The Economic Partnership Accords (EPA) make the Senegalese population fear for the worst, as the great European capitals will crush our small peasant initiatives and small businesses. These accords will reinforce the international division of labour which makes our ‘underdeveloped’ countries into consumers of goods coming from other countries, which in this neocolonial system play the role of producers.

It is regrettable that in Senegal, the fight against the EPA has become very complicated. Previously, some heads of business led the struggle, but now, for fear of reprisals, none will raise their voice. There are still, however, activists, politicians and trade unionists who organise the mobilisation against the EPA. And in spite of the very difficult context in which they work, we have noticed that there are a lot of people who wish to be informed. A number of intellectuals and political figures have signed the petitions against the accords and more and more citizens, in towns as well as in cities, have asked that conferences about the EPA be organised, in order to better understand them and to organise against them. Through our struggle, we put forward an alternative economic model, based on inter-dependence and solidarity, opposed to the EPA and its free-market values of competitiveness and competition.

Voices from the field 3

The struggle goes on

Luciana Ghiotto, ATTAC Argentina

In Latin America there are many free trade agreements which have been in force for more than twenty years. Vast experience has also been gained in fighting against liberalization and in building integration with alternative projects. Perhaps the strongest moment in the struggle was the Continental Campaign against the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), which involved a popular consultation in Argentina against the FTAA in 2003, and the Peoples’ Summit in Mar del Plata in 2005, which ended the FTAA.

Stopping the FTAA did not mean the end of liberalization. In other ways, with other names, we have seen the expansion of corporate privileges. Several powers are advancing in the regional agenda of free trade: the Trans Pacific Treaty (TPP) has been very evident, bringing together twelve countries in the basin.

The European Union, China and South-East Asian countries like South Korea aim to conquer the natural resources of the Americas. There are campaigns to denounce these negotiations which take place behind the backs of the people. In Argentina, the assembly “Argentina – better without Free Trade Agreements”, which coordinates social movements, trade unions, politicians and environmentalists, works in this direction.

Our experience against the FTAA was essential and today we renew the struggle to curb the corporate agenda and give precedence and priority to human and environmental rights.

Voices from the field 4

The TPP is dead: The terrain of struggle has shifted

Eric Holt-Gimenez, Food First, US

Donald Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was already moribund, thanks to the unrelenting opposition from popular movements. The bilateral approach preferred by the Trump administration is nothing new.

Having seized control of pretty much every economy on earth, protectionism – under new corporately-drawn boundaries – is going to be much more important for the monopolies controlling our energy and food systems than rampant free trade. In this move, Trump is only sealing the first deal in a trend that will further strengthen the power of corporations.

We should worry tha right-wing populists, with deep rhetorical roots, grounded in white supremacy and xenophobia, have captured the anti-globalization banner. They are not our allies. Neither are the neoliberal “progressives” who took the world down the free trade rabbit hole.

Trump’s presidency reflects a crisis in capitalism’s political model, signifying a coming shift in corporate strategies for dispossession and accumulation. For popular movements, the terrain of struggle is moving from global to local in new and important ways. This new moment is still unfolding. Now, more than ever, it is essential to raise up food sovereignty’s principles: social justice, solidarity, pluralism, and the right to determine our own food systems.

Voices from the field 5

A State struggles against FTA’s

Sridhar R, Programme Director at Thanal, India

Farmers in Kerala, a state in India, face yet another an onslaught from a trade pact, this time the RCEP (a regional partnership auguring well for the lobbies that matter, but which is recognised as a death-knell for the local farmers).

The Indo-ASEAN trade pact was forced onto them by the Government of India and the farmers and even the State Government protested against it in 2009. The farmers’ organisations and the civil society warned about the fallout from the deal. Tariff barriers were removed or reduced from tea, coffee, edible oil, pepper, rubber, copra, coconut, coir, cashew, cardamom, and coconut oil, the main farm produce of Kerala, putting in danger the livelihood of the large majority of local peasants.

People responded with a mammoth human chain right across the state against the Central Government’s decision. The State Government of Kerala supported this, in what became a federal-state conflict. Hundreds of thousands of people joined to hold hands in probably the largest human chain protest ever. But the Central Government, with doctor Manmohan Singh, a staunch promoter of global trade pacts and liberalisation as PM, tricked us: he pacified a delegation from the State, promising that the trade pact would not be signed without taking the stakeholders in Kerala into confidence, but he simply went and signed the agreement. Farmers across other states (including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and many north eastern states) have also suffered the impact of the Indo-ASEAN agreement, but little has been done to compensate them for their losses. No assessment was ever done before signing the FTA to predict its impacts, nor to mitigate its effects afterwards.

Learning from this lesson, the farmers of Kerala and civil society groups are now once again leading a lone fight against the newly proposed RCEP. The State Government, reacting to the issue, has already written twice to the Central Government demanding a transparent discussion with all stakeholders, before proceeding with the RCEP negotiations and has spelt out the possible impacts.

We are opposed to the RCEP and other FTAs being signed directly with various ASEAN nations. India is going through a miserable period, and no government with a sense of responsibility to its massive farming population would push a nation to another negative benefit pact such as the RCEP.

The farmers in Kerala have protested, but many farmers in other states are also suffering, or dying out in the crisis. State governments are being asked to address farmer debts and suicides through loan-waivers. But this cannot be the way forward. It is high time the governments realise that protecting their farmers from the market pressures and global trade is a fundamental duty, and should not be compromised at the altar of increasing trade demands.

Boxes

Newsletter no 29 - FTAs and agriculture

Box 1

Chile vs. Trans Pacific Partnership

Since Trump announced the US withdrawal from the TPP, many people claim the agreement will end.
But Chile’s peoples are struggling against the TPP, being certain that some version of it will remain.

These are its main dangers:

1. The TPP is a continually evolving agreement, always giving more room to move to corporations, while closing the juridical paths for people to achieve justice.
2. National sovereignty becomes ambiguous; countries lose their freedom to legislate, develop public policies or plan investments outside the TPP framework.
3. Countries are submitted to private foreign parallel tribunals through Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement mechanisms (ISDS) that impose compensation if corporations don’t earn the profits they could obtain due to government actions.
4. The TPP fosters “transnational supply chains”, linking peasants with big corporations to produce according to industrial agriculture standards with very low wages, fragile labour conditions, and no safety nor health. Corporations impose delayed payments, low prices and production standards. Countries even commit to harmonise their labour laws, thus further damaging workers’ rights.
5. The TPP promotes more restrictive and expansive intellectual property rights (IPR) on pharmaceutical drugs, adjusting the lifespan of patents to corporate interests. All seed and plant material will be privatised. Using, keeping, exchanging seeds freely is criminalised including possible jail terms. Patents on living beings will become the rule. Even photocopying material for private use will be penalized if there’s a claim by some corporation. Traditional and local knowledge systems will be forced into an IPR framework, thus eroding communities’ relations and culture.
6. The TPP bans any protection from the State if it affects corporations’ profits.
7. There is a tendency to privatise many actual functions of the government’s operations.
8. The TPP mandates the acceptance of GM crops, eliminating technical barriers to commerce.

These warnings are part of the Chilean educational campaign vs TPP.

Box 2

Binding farmers to corporations

The World Economic Forum ‘s major initiative, New Vision for Agriculture” (nicknamed Grow and known as VIDA in Latin America), led by 17 global food and agribusiness companies aims to build a binding relation between agricultural producers in Asia, Africa and Latin America and major corporations that will profit from this bond. This so called new vision is promoted under the tools of various free trade agreements (FTA) that advance a logic of “public-private partnership [For more info – Nyéléni Newsletter no 25]” and “market-based solutions”. Corporate giants as Nestlé, PepsiCo and Monsanto, and the governments involved, promise “increased food production, environmental sustainability and economic global opportunities”.

This initiative will increase corporate control over markets and supply chains. While claiming to promote food security and benefit small farmers, Grow/VIDA works to expand the production of a handful of commodities that benefit a few corporations.

Grow/VIDA was launched in 2009 and involves companies linked to agriculture, food processing or retail, promoting their common set of interests in “key political fora”. Nevertheless the core of the project is building vertically integrated supply chains of commodity crops and input markets, with a heavy emphasis on contract farming.

This creates farmer dependency on corporations. It deepens the segregation of local peasants who produce their own food by their own means with their own seeds, and claims to benefit people who are tied to contract-farming (through “high technology” and chemical inputs), while they are forced to accept delayed payments and low prices paid by the retail giants.

This scheme functions in twelve African countries, five in Asia and four in Latin America expanding a model of huge mechanised monocultures, greenhouses with hybrid or GM crops, never ending demands on the farmers bound to corporations, strictly formulated standards and people hired to work in the worst possible conditions.

Box 3

Fighting against RCEP

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a mega-regional trade and investment agreement being negotiated between ASEAN members and six Asia-Pacific countries that ASEAN has bilateral FTAs with: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

They are harmonising trade rules among them to form one common regime. There is a high risk that this brings a strong corporate agenda from states that signed onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership into India, China and southeast Asia. Policy space for governments would be lost. Key social movement demands in the region for improved public services, genuine agrarian reform, protection of small-scale food producers and retailers, and overhauling the current bilateral investment treaties could become impossible.

Since 2014, civil society groups obtained and analysed leaked negotiating texts. In 2015, a major meeting of social movement activists and CSOs took place in Kuala Lumpur, leading to plans for coordinated action. Now, we are organising regional days of action, joint statements, workshops, websites and lobby work to pressure governments. Key concerns are: access to medicines, seeds’ privatisation, land grabbing, the impact on peasants, public services, pressure on wages and increasing corporate control imposed through ISDS mechanisms. The common call is to stop RCEP, not get a better one!

With Trans-Pacific Partnership’s future being in question, RCEP could change direction and gain momentum. We should work to stop it .

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 29 - FTAs and agriculture

In the spotlight 1

Who is pushing FTAs?

Free trade and investment agreements (FTAs) are deals between two or more governments outside the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Many political and economic elites in countries like the US, members of the European Union (EU), Japan and Australia have looked outside the WTO since they claim it doesn’t go far enough in setting global rules for the benefit of their corporations and their geopolitical objectives, while multilateral talks have moved slowly. Since the beginning of this century, these elites seek more powerful deals on a bilateral or regional basis with tough enforcement teeth. The idea is that by getting countries to commit to deeper and more comprehensive levels of corporate freedom through these agreements, a uniform global market that is “wide open” to transnational business and finance capital flows can be built from the bottom up.

It’s not surprising that these deals are drawn up in secret: parliaments have no role other than setting broad objectives while the public is denied access to actual negotiating texts. Corporate lobbyists are actively consulted throughout the process on the outcomes they want: indeed, transnational corporations and industry coalitions are major players in shaping these deals in the first place. For example, in the early phase of talks between the US and EU on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), agribusiness corporations like Cargill and Coca-Cola were the top interest group telling negotiators exactly what they wanted written into the deal [1].

FTAs cover a very comprehensive range of issues — from intellectual property rights (IPR), telecommunications and energy to food safety — spelling out exactly what countries can and cannot do in a vast number of areas as they open their markets to foreign investors. As a result, the governments that sign on are forced to rewrite their laws, and make binding, enforceable commitments against going backwards. Through these deals, companies even get the right to scrutinise draft policies and regulations that they claim may affect them in the FTA partner country.

Right now, social movements are fighting powerful new FTAs such as:
– CETA between Canada and the European Union (The European Parliament has voted to approve the agreement on the 15th of February 2017);
– TTIP between the US and the EU;
– TPP between the US, Japan and 10 other countries (the US has pulled out but that does not necessarily mean the deal is dead);
– RCEP between ASEAN, China, India, Japan, Australia, Korea and New Zealand;
– TISA, on services alone, between the US, EU, Japan and 20 other countries;
– EPAs imposed by the EU in Africa;
– and bilateral deals being pushed by the EU with India, Vietnam, Mexico, Japan, Mercosur, Chile, etc.

In addition to political and regulatory power, all of these treaties would give corporations access to natural resources, labour and new markets.

While some of these deals seem to be on shaky ground now since new right-wing governments in countries like the UK and the US have promised to replace a host of old trade agreements with new ones, this does not necessarily mean that the old deals will simply disappear. They may change shape or membership or go more slowly. Moreover, it would be a mistake to believe the propaganda that new and “better” trade or investment agreements will save local jobs or create trickle down well-being for farmers, consumers, small companies or the environment. Nothing has changed in the agenda of seeking to prop up the super 1% of big business, including agribusiness, through these deals.

In the spotlight 2

Investor state dispute settlement, what is at stake?

One of the most damaging elements of free trade agreements and investment treaties is the “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS). The mechanism stems from colonial times, when powerful empires wanted to protect their companies working overseas to extract minerals or produce cash crops. They created legal texts that evolved into today’s investment treaties, aiming to protect investors from “discrimination” and expropriation by foreign states.

To do this, the treaties grant transnational corporations (TNCs) a special right to take foreign governments to binding arbitration when they consider themselves treated unfairly. This means that TNCs can ‘sue’ governments when they adopt public policies like anti-smoking laws or regulations to cut air pollution that might restrict their investments and profits. Domestic companies don’t get this same right: the mere threat of such a lawsuit can drive policy-making (chilling effect).
International investment disputes are taken to special arbitration panels, usually at the World Bank in Washington DC or at arbitration courts like the one in The Hague. This allows them to bypass national courts altogether, on the grounds that they may be biased. Proceedings are conducted by private lawyers and usually in secret with no appeal possible.

In the last 15 years, ISDS disputes have skyrocketed. In most cases, the investor’s demands are fully or partially satisfied. As a result, governments have payed awards that typically amount to millions, if not billions, of dollars — taxpayer money that could be used for public benefit. This threat has some governments putting their investment treaties on hold as they rethink strategies.

ISDS affects food sovereignty in several ways. It gives companies powerful legal leverage to overturn domestic policies that support small farmers, local markets and the environment. Initiatives to fight climate change in the food sector — e.g. to promote short circuits by granting preferences or subsidies to local producers — can be challenged by TNCs if they expect to be negatively affected. Recently, Canada stopped a US company from proceeding with an open pit mining project in Nova Scotia because the damage it would bring to local fisherfolk was too great. The company took Canada to an ISDS tribunal and won, costing Canadian taxpayers US $100 million.

Mexico had to pay US $90 million to Cargill, because of a tax on beverages containing high fructose corn syrup — a sweetener linked to obesity, produced by this corporation. The tax helped safeguard the Mexican cane sugar industry, with hundreds of thousands of jobs, from the influx of the US-subsidized syrup.

ISDS gives foreign investors more rights than domestic investors, and they use this to their benefit in the agricultural and fisheries sectors. Trade deals generally assert that foreign investors should have equal access to farmland and fishing grounds as domestic ones (“national treatment”). ISDS gives these corporations an extra tool to assert that right that national companies — or farmers or fishers and their cooperatives — don’t enjoys. Sometimes national agribusiness investors set up companies abroad and then invest in their home country just to avail of these extra protections.

The linchpin of strengthening food sovereignty in the context of international and even regional trade relies on states’ power to give preference to local and national food producers through subsidies and procurement policies. These subsidies and preferences are generally banned under free trade commitments (even though they are widely used by big actors such as the US or the EU), and ISDS gives foreign corporations a tool to make sure that competition from domestic producers supported by such policies does not threaten their bottom line.

Newsletter no 29 – Editorial

Newsletter no 29 - FTAs and agriculture

FTAs and agriculture

Illustration : Anthony Freda | www.AnthonyFreda.com

There is growing distrust and mobilisation against Free Trade Agreements (FTAs).
FTAs hurt food sovereignty because they:
– Erase the possibility of public strategies supporting local markets.
– Lower or remove tariffs on imported goods, hurting local small-scale food producers who cannot compete with large subsidised agribusiness imports.
– Harmonise standards on food safety, pesticides, GMOs and animal welfare benefitting corporations: the imposed lowest standards protect their profit margins.
– Rewrite patent laws, requiring countries to privatise plants and animals; criminalise peasants who save and exchange seeds and breeds thus damaging biodiverse food systems.
– Require that foreign investors be treated better than domestic ones, gaining more access to land and water, and powerful rights to defend themselves through investor-state arbitration that is fundamentally anti-democratic.

FTAs aren’t just about ‘trade’. They’re comprehensive agreements to lock in free market capitalism, strengthen the power of global corporations, finance, and powerful governments, and advance their geopolitical objectives. There are direct links between FTAs, climate change, ecological devastation, and violations of Indigenous Peoples’, workers’ and farmers’ rights. Trump’s election and Brexit partly reflected public outrage at free market economics – but channelled support for exclusionary, divisive racist nationalism. We must struggle for real systemic change, saying “no to FTAs and global free market capitalism”, combatting racist politics and defending mother earth.

We can’t turn FTAs into tools of people power. They should be buried, not born again.

bilaterals.org and GRAIN

Icon

FTAs and agriculture, no 29

1 file(s) 0.00 KB
Download

Agroecology in practice

Newsletter no 28 - Agroecology at a crossroads


Agroecology in practice 1

Spreading agroecology and building resistance for food sovereignty

Shashe Agroecology School

The Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF), a member of La Via Campesina (LVC), runs an agroecology School at Shashe which promotes the exchange of agroecological peasant farming experiences through horizontal learning among farmers from Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries.

The school is part of LVC’s network of more than 50 Agroecology schools worldwide, and is the cornerstone for collective development of strategies to fight against dependence on agrochemicals and fertilizers, and to survive climate change. At Shashe, farmers employ various agroecological practices to ensure food sovereignty, mitigate climate change and reduce dependence on purchased agro-inputs, thus keeping farm income in the family’s pocketbook. These practices include the use of manure, mulching, minimum tillage, multiple cropping, the exchange and use of traditional seeds, among others. Such practices are the foundation for building a new future for peasant farmers, not only at ZIMSOFF, but globally. In addition to planting crops, most farmers keep a wide variety of livestock. Our agroecological systems are designed so that these livestock do not compete with humans for food, but eat what humans don’t eat, such as weeds and insects.

Peasant families in ZIMSOFF also are experimenting with local food processing, storage and preservation. This is critical not only for reducing post-harvest losses but so to initiate the growth of small local industries which are key for the employment of youth. Crops such as sunflower and groundnuts are processed to make cooking oil and peanut butter respectively. At Shashe the farmers are creating a vibrant local market for produce, and strengthening relations with consumers.

In April of 2016, the school hosted 20 farmers from Manica province in Mozambique, who came to learn and exchange information on peasant seeds and struggles against policies intended to criminalise their production and exchange. Bad policies facilitate the marketing of commercial registered seeds, build a policy framework to enforce the privatization of germplasm, and constitute an attack on peasant seeds. Fighting these policies is a key complement to agroecology, and such exchanges are fundamental for organizing resistance and building peasant seed sovereignty.

The experience at Shashe shows that with agroecology and their seeds and livestock, peasants can produce healthy food at a low cost, in harmony with nature, for their families and for the market. More importantly, agroecology provides an environment for peasants to experiment and shape their own sustainable rural development, and build better social relations based on respect and mutual learning.

Agroecology in practice 2

Turning the Green revolution upside down

Native and Criole Seed Network of Uruguay

For thousands of years the production of foodstuffs for human consumption was based in the utilization of “natural” seeds by indigenous peoples, peasants and farmers. — meaning that using our own knowledge, capacities and skills we have been capable of domesticating wild species, adapting them, improving them and above all reproducing them to satisfy our food needs. It can be clearly seen how three distinct crops — maize in America, wheat in Africa and rice in Asia gave sustenance and life to three models of civilization.

Following processes of migration these original local seeds were moved to other territories with distinct ecosystems, climatic conditions and environments. Once again it was the peasants and farmers of these territories who had the ability to adapt and reproduce these seeds.

This gives rise to the term “criole seeds” which are distinguished from “native seeds” by just this process of adaptation.
It is calculated that human beings had about 6000 types of domesticated vegetables suitable for consumption.
Today we use only about 200 of those and of these 12 are the basic crops which make up our main diet.

From the second decade of the last century central countries[[Central countries vs those in the periphery]] began to impose the model of the green revolution internationally, with technological packages including industrial and transgenic seeds with their associated agrochemicals among other things. Hunger was never tackled seriously and the economic, social and environmental costs were huge. However, it is possible to slow and even reverse the advance of large scale industrial agriculture driven by agribusinesses and supported by huge transnational corporations. In Uruguay in the Native and Criole Seed Network we are marking the path in demonstrating that the majority of native and criole genetic materials continue in the hands of peasant and farming families who continue to conserve and utilise them through the generations to feed their people.

However we are speaking now of Food Sovereignty and all of us agree it is a right, but the exercising of that right is not only the task of those who produce food. Today all of us, regardless of the role we occupy in society, have to commit to the struggle to defend food sovereignty. Nor are we alone — across the world millions of peasants, farmers and communities are doing the same. As long as a farmer exists who has a seed, and who is willing to struggle for land to plant it, and for water to water it, the perpetual nature of life is guaranteed.

Agroecology in practice 3

A real solution to the agrarian crisis in India

Zero Budget Natural Farming in India

Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) is both a set of agroecological practices and a grassroots peasant movement in India, especially Karnataka, where some 100,000 peasants participate. This has been achieved without funding, as ZBNF inspires a spirit of volunteerism among its peasant members, who are the protagonists of the movement. The word ‘budget’ refers to credit and expenses, thus the phrase ‘Zero Budget’ means without using any credit, and natural farming means with Nature. The movement was born out of collaboration between Subhash Palekar, an agricultural scientist who put together the ZBNF ‘toolkit’ of practices, and the state farmers association of Karnataka (KRRS), a member of La Via Campesina (LVC).

There is an agrarian crisis in India, with farmers reeling under debt due to expensive inputs, poor market prices, and faulty policies. More than a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the last two decades. Various studies have linked these suicides to debt. Under such conditions, ‘zero budget’ farming promises to end a reliance on loans and drastically cut production costs. ZBNF farmers who have given up chemical monocultures to practice ZBNF, say they now produce way more with virtually no cash outlays.

The key practices of ZBNF include: Jivamruta- a microbial culture made of cow urine, dung, pulse flour, raw sugar and a handful of soil; a similar seed treatment called Bijamruta; intensive mulching and cover crops; and regulation of  moisture. ZBNF requires less than half the water of conventional farming, and is apt for arid areas. There are a host of other principles like intercropping, local earthworms, indigenous cows, bunds, and ecological pest management.

At the local level, the movement has a self-organized dynamic and runs in an informal way. Most practicing ZBNF farmers are loosely connected to each other and carry out both organized and spontaneous farmer-to-farmer exchange activities and other pedagogical activities. The main centrally organized activities at the state level are massive and intensive training camps, taught by Palekar, with an attendance that ranges from 300 to 5000 farmers
and last up to five days.

“In ZBNF our expenses are very low. It doesn’t matter what the yield is, I still make a profit because my costs are negligible. Plus I’ve added intercrops to this, so I get income from many crops, not just one. Yield is not an important
concept for us.” – Belgaum a ZBFN farmer

Agroecology in practice 4

Building the Community Supported Agriculture movement in Europe

Urgenci Europe

We are building the Community Supported Agriculture movementin Europe. We are working to develop the joint pillars of food sovereignty and solidarity economy.

With a very rapidly growing movement, there was an increasing need to build a common narrative, so we started a year-long process to develop a shared Declaration for all the Urgenci members throughout Europe. And as the recent  European survey of CSAs shows, there are almost a million CSA members right across all European countries, so this was a big challenge. Not all countries or members were involved, but it was a participatory and collectively owned  process from the start, and we set out to reach agreement on who we are and what we stand for: a sort of “identity card” of the movement to help us to develop as a whole, and to prevent the corporate capture of the CSA concept.

Box schemes, the Food Assemblies and other “look-alikes” have been springing up and eating into our market. But none of them have the unique characteristic of shared risks and benefits that CSA consumers share with their producers!  The process to build the European Declaration on Community Supported Agriculture reinforced both the European CSA platform and the local and national networks, fostering critical discussions on what we stand for and how to share it widely. The process has also been a way to nurture the future sustainable movement building process.

The Declaration was adopted by the 3rd European CSA Meeting on 17th September in Ostrava, Czech Republic and it is the best way to take position on behalf of our movement; because if we don’t do it, somebody else will!
Since then, it has been hailed with great enthusiasm, not just in Europe, but also in countries around the world. It has been translated into many different languages, and has helped those practicing CSA who are not necessarily Urgenci members to come closer to us. It’s still early days, but the Declaration is proving a powerful movement-building tool for us all. And we all feel proud to have been part of this unique process!

You can read the declaration here.

Boxes

Newsletter no 28 - Agroecology at a crossroads

Box 1

“Getting into a bind”: trade and investment regime blocks the development of agroecology and access to land

Small-scale food producers are moving ahead with the exchange of knowledge, practices and movements for agroecology. Evidence from the ground shows that with appropriate public investments they can make even greater strides in achieving food sovereignty through action on agroecology. But current trade and investment agreements being signed by countries are actively blocking progress on agroecology.

These agreements are focused on attracting agribusiness and are geared towards generating profits for them.
This is being done by opening new markets through trade and investment liberalisation, using bilateral investment treaties (BITs), free trade agreements (FTAs), conditional loans, and aid agreements.

Provisions in all these agreements undermine and supersede the sovereignty of states and hinder their ability to develop or protect their economies or social and environmental interests. At the same time they provide comprehensive promotion and protection for agribusinesses’ profits at the cost of states’ and peoples’ welfare.

Key instruments are:

i) Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which enables corporations to sue states for billions of dollars in secret arbitration courts for implementing economic, social or environmental policies that may impede profitable activities.

ii) Agribusiness investment promotion policies such as tax-free zones, unilateral tariff reductions, subsidies for the consumption of services (such as electricity and water), subsidies for hiring and training workers. Favorable policies for agribusinesses are also often insisted upon by donors providing development assistance or food aid.

iii) Requirements to give foreign agribusinesses equal or better conditions than local businesses.

iv) Banning of performance requirements such as requirements to hire from the national workforce or transfer technology.

But food sovereignty and economic justice movements are fighting back!

Read the full report here.

Box 2

Food Sovereignty takes root in Eastern Europe

The second Nyéléni Europe forum on food sovereignty took place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania from the 26th to the 30th of October and brought together more than 500 participants from 40 European and Central Asia countries.

After five days of discussions, the groundwork has been laid through the planning of multiple actions and strategies to take back and re-localise Europe’s food systems. A huge diversity of people were present, including farmers, food and agricultural workers, trade unionists, researchers, activists, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, consumers, NGOs and human rights defenders.

A major accomplishment of the forum was the convergence of Eastern European and Central Asian organisations/movements, which initiated talks on collective regional strategies and stepped up the coordination of the food sovereignty movement there. The convergence also recognised the Mali declaration on agroecology as the basis for the European region to scale up agroecology in order to achieve food sovereignty.

The process towards the forum started in December 2015, when several organisations throughout Europe gathered in Paris to discuss the structure and functioning of a new Nyéléni Europe Coordination Committee, which three months later in March 2016 sent out the call for participation in the 2nd forum. The preparation work has been carried out by one full time coordinator and several working groups dealing with fundraising and financial issues, the establishing of a new website and newsletters, the preparation of the agenda and inputs of participants to the content of the forum, as well as the technical work done by COATI to ensure interpretation can happen in nine key languages with 60 volunteer interpreters.

Major part of the preparation of the forum has been the establishment of contacts and delegations in several countries, where neither of the initiators of the process had contacts. The result is a functional list of focal points per country.

The gathering is an important stepping stone for the building of a strong food sovereignty movement in Europe, especially Eastern Europe and important for the dynamics in several other European countries where no platforms exists. It is also a first step towards structuring the movement and giving it visibility with the planning of common actions.

Box 3

Building public policies for Agroecology

The International planning committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) has been involved in the debate instigated by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) about what public policies can be proposed to help agroecology. In the framework of this process the FAO organized an international symposium on agroecology for food security and nutrition in September of 2014, where it was agreed to decentralise the discussions and conversations through regional symposiums.

In 2015 the FAO, the IPC and a number of governments and academics organized symposiums in Latin America and the Caribbean (June), Sub-Saharan Africa (November) and in Asia and the Pacific (November). Following up on these symposiums in 2016 the regional conference of the FAO analysed the results of the meetings on agroecology and agreed on the following steps at a regional level to promote agroecology. In the last months, two more regional symposiums have been organised, as well as one specifically for and in China. Once again civil society, the FAO, governments and academics will meet in Latin America and the Caribbean (September) and in Europe and Central Asia (November).

In Latin America and the Caribbean a regional agenda of work between different participants and open to others was agreed upon, in order to: make visible the centrality of artisanal fishing and the contribution of agroecological agriculture to it; formulate and implement policies and legal frameworks for the promotion of agroecology from and to the territories, with social participation; to expand the generation and management of evidence-based knowledge on agroecology, integrating scientific knowledge with indigenous ancestral knowledge and practices from diverse sectors; promote institutional mechanisms for agroecological production and marketing; guarantee popular rights to seeds, water, land and territories; promote agroecology by valuing and respecting life and human rights, highlight the international peasant declaration; suggested the celebration of the International Year of Agroecology.

In Europe and Central Asia, at the proposal of civil society organizations, it was agreed to comprehend Agroecology beyond the technical aspects of production and include social, cultural, political, economic and environmental aspects, from an intersectoral perspective. However, a critical issue is the need for governments, in addition to accepting the positive impacts of agroecology, to implement public policies for its support. The IPC gave a very positive evaluation of the symposium as a good opportunity.

The symposiums continue to generate further opportunities to strengthen the links between the different actors involved in Agroecology.

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 28 - Agroecology at a crossroads

In the spotlight 1

Edited excerpts from the Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology

Nyéléni, Mali, 27 February 2015

We are delegates representing diverse organizations and international movements of small-scale food producers and consumers, including peasants, indigenous peoples, communities, hunters and gatherers, family farmers, rural workers, herders and pastoralists, fisherfolk and urban people. Together, the diverse constituencies our organizations represent produce some 70% of the food consumed by humanity. They are the primary global investors in agriculture, as well as the primary providers of jobs and livelihoods in the world.

In 2007 many of us gathered here at Nyéléni, at the Forum for Food Sovereignty… Similarly, We gather here at the Agroecology Forum 2015 to enrich Agroecology through dialogue between diverse food producing peoples, as well as with consumers, urban communities, women, youth, and others. Today our movements, organized globally and regionally in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), have taken a new and historic step.

Building on the past looking to the future
Our ancestral production systems have been developed over millennia, and during the past 30 to 40 years this has come to be called agroecology. Our agroecology includes successful practices and production…we have developed sophisticated theoretical, technical and political constructions.

Our diverse forms of smallholder food production based on agroecology generate local knowledge, promote social justice, nurture identity and culture, and strengthen the economic viability of rural areas.

Agroecology means that we stand together in the circle of life, and this implies that we must also stand together in the circle of struggle against land grabbing and the criminalization of our movements.

Overcoming multiple crises
The industrial food system is a key driver of the multiple crises of climate, food, the environment, public health and others. Free trade and corporate investment agreements, investorstate dispute settlement agreements, and false solutions such as carbon markets, and the growing financialization of land and food, etc., all further aggravate these crises.

We see agroecology as a key form of resistance to an economic system that puts profit before life.

Agroecology at a crossroads
Popular pressure has caused many multilateral institutions, governments, universities and research centers, some NGOs, corporations and others, to finally recognize “agroecology”. However, they have tried to redefine it as a narrow set of technologies, to offer some tools that appear to ease the sustainability crisis of industrial food production, while the existing structures of power remain unchallenged. This co-optation of agroecology to fine-tune the industrial food system, while paying lip service to the environmental discourse, has various names, including “climate smart agriculture”, “sustainable-” or “ecologicalintensification”, industrial monoculture production of “organic” food, etc. For us, these are not agroecology: we reject them, and we will fight to expose and block this insidious appropriation
of agroecology.

The real solutions… will not come from conforming to the industrial model. We must transform it and build our own local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production by peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban farmers, etc…we see [agroecology] as the essential alternative to the industrial model, and as the means of transforming how we produce and consume food into something better for humanity and our Mother Earth.

Our common pillars and principles of agroecology
The production practices of agroecology are based on ecological principles like building life in the soil, recycling nutrients, the dynamic management of biodiversity and energy conservation at all scales. Agroecology drastically reduces our use of externally-purchased inputs that must be bought from industry. In agroecology there is no use of agrotoxins, artificial hormones, GMOs or other dangerous new technologies.

Territories are a fundamental pillar of agroecology. Peoples and communities have the right to maintain their own spiritual and material relationships to their lands…this implies the full recognition of their laws, traditions, customs, tenure systems, and institutions, and constitutes the recognition of the selfdetermination and autonomy of peoples.

Collective rights and access to the commons are a fundamental pillar of agroecology.

The diverse knowledges and ways of knowing of our peoples are fundamental to agroecology. Agroecology is developed through our own innovation, research, and crop and livestock selection and breeding.

The core of our cosmovisions is the necessary equilibrium between nature, the cosmos and human beings. We reject the commodification of all forms of life.

Collective self-organization and action are what make it possible to scale-up agroecology, build local food systems, and challenge corporate control of our food system. Solidarity between peoples, between rural and urban populations, is a critical ingredient.

The autonomy of agroecology displaces the control of global markets and generates self-governance by communities. It requires the re-shaping of markets so that they are based on the principles of solidarity economy and the ethics of responsible production and consumption.

Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.

Women and their knowledge, values, vision and leadership are critical for moving forward. All too often, their work is neither recognized nor valued. For agroecology to achieve its full potential, there must be equal distribution of power, tasks, decision-making and remuneration.

Agroecology can provide a radical space for young people to contribute to the social and ecological transformation that is underway in many of our societies. Agroecology must create a territorial and social dynamic that creates opportunities for rural youth and values women’s leadership.

The full declaration here.

In the spotlight 2

Agroecology at a crossroads — between institutionalization and social movements

Agroecology is in fashion. From being ignored, underappreciated and excluded by the institutions that govern agriculture internationally, it has become recognised as one of the key alternatives to confront the serious crises caused by the green revolution. This is unprecedented, and leaves agroecology facing a serious dilemma: give in to cooptation and message capture, or take the political opportunity to advance agroecology as a tool for transforming the current hegemonic, agroextractivist model. While international institutions are not monolithic and internal debates exist, the situation can be seen as a struggle between two competing camps. The first is made up of official government institutions, international agencies and the private sector, and the other is composed of various social movements, who defend agroecology as the only viable option to radically transform the prevailing agriculture and food system.

In this scenario we can see how green capitalism has “discovered” agroecology as a way of incorporating peasant agriculture, its territories and agro-ecological practices into global circuits of accumulation. Its objective is to commodify seeds and agro-biodiversity; appropriate the agroecological knowledge of peasants and indigenous communities; find agricultural products for food, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical markets; increase the profits made from carbon credits and neoliberal conservation and arrangements like REDD+; and profit from the expansion of markets for industrial organic products, which might even be rebranded as “agroecological” in the largest supermarkets. On top of this it is also offers an excellent opportunity for agribusiness to fine tune its production practices and partially revert its tendency to degrade the conditions of production, increase production costs and reduce productivity over time.

Through the classic strategies of development the intention will be to appropriate the knowledge of rural peoples — creating and imposing dependency on a system that in the future will provide agroecological services through states, opportunistic NGOs, transnational companies, and the projects of foundations and international organizations. We should avoid the naivety of believing that at last the doors have been opened to transform world agrarian structures towards agroecology; on the contrary, social movements have to remain alert that institutionalization does not strengthen dependency on public programs and projects, which can generate more bureaucracy and useless demagoguery.

We are at a crossroads which social movements cannot afford to ignore. To refrain from taking part in these discussions is to leave the way clear for capital to find its way out of its chronic crisis of over-accumulation, while temporarily restructuring the conditions of production. Above all however, it is an excellent opportunity for regrouping our forces as we resist this new attempt at appropriation, for giving new meanings to struggle, updating our forms of resistance, and finally for redefining the meaning of al ternatives.

In the end, one of the major contradictions of capital is that in the attempt to gobble everything up – in the efforts to bring every space and human activity into the circuits of accumulation, they end up reinforcing peoples’struggles, having the antagonistic effect of strengthening mobilizations and inspiring people to reappropriate their own knowledge and heritage, revalue their cultures, and redouble their efforts to build effective social processes for scaling up agroecology in their territories.

The full article can be seen here (in Spanish only):