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.

Boxes

Newsletter no 19 - Territorial defence

Box 1

The Permanent People’s Tribunal in Mexico

“Free trade, violence, impunity and the rights of peoples”

The Permanent People’s Tribunal (TPP from its Spanish name) was born as the Russel Tribunal, established to judge the crimes of the United States in Vietnam. In subsequently judged the dictatorships of the CONO SUR and was converted into the “permanent tribunal” where peoples could express in their own terms the aggressions they had suffered, be recognised as active subjects in the trial and denounce those responsible for their chaos and suffering.
The TPP was established in Mexico in 2011 at the request of hundreds of peasant, workers, and civil society organisations which accused the Mexican state of the crime of diverting power: systematically favouring businesses while impeding people from achieving justice with all its juridical and economic powers.

This diversion of power was articulated through seven processes derived from the regime established under free trade: violence against workers, violence against migrants, censorship and violence against the media, environmental destruction, violence against the maize and autonomy of the people, gender violence, and dirty wars and impunity.
On the autonomy of peoples, the claim is the removal of potential for livelihood, at the heart of which is maize, as a vital food and integral part of territory. It may have been the first time that an international jury has addressed the interrelated nature and complex relationships between dispossession, food sovereignty, migration rates and grabbing territories and commons. The TPP recommended that the government of Mexico withdraw form the Free Trade Agreement with North America; failure to do so makes national sovereignty and autonomy impossible; and to ban GM maize as it constituted an attack on future civilizations. It found that Mexico violated the Rome Statute on genocide, and made government abuses against the people visible internationally.

The TPP opened spaces for dialogue and making links, where those who have been aggrieved systemize their experiences and regain centrality as subjects. It encourages and promotes struggles, and gives a sense of achievement – making room for the expression of grievances in an environment of trust, in people’s own words, with their own references and on their own terms.

Box 2

Atlas of Environmental Justice

The Atlas of Environmental Justice comprises an atlas of thematic and regional maps covering socio-environmental conflicts around the world. Most of the cases covered in the atlas focus on situations where communities are mobilized and struggle for environmental justice.

Key highlights from the Mapping process reveal that:
1. Ecological conflicts are increasing around the world, driven by material demands fed primarily by the richest subsection of the global population. The most impacted are poor and marginalized communities (…).
2. Both old and new forms (fracking, eco-system services) of extraction are expanding. Much of this resource drive is focused on the last pristine ecosystems on the planet, which are often occupied by indigenous and subsistence communities.
3. The current wave of enclosures is leading to reckless and irreparable environmental destruction including water contamination and depletion, land degradation, and the release of dangerous toxic materials, as well as the loss of community control over resources necessary for their livelihoods. (…)
4. These environmental injustices involve a variegated web of actors, including corporate actors already operating in large-scale capital resource investment, as well as new financial actors. (…)Peoples’ resistance is emerging. Communities are fighting to regain control of their resources and assert their right to a healthy environment. Forms of action include formal means, such as court cases, lobbying government and referenda as well as informal mobilization including street protest, blockades and land occupation.
5. Companies continue to enjoy widespread corporate impunity for environmental and human rights abuses. Companies continue activities amidst strong citizens’ protests, sometimes relying on private security forces and sympathetic governments to suppress resistance. This increased persecution and violent targeting of environmental activists is undermining human rights (Nyéléni newsletter no 14: Rights and repression).
6. Increased corporate accountability, as opposed to voluntary corporate responsibility, and reduction of consumption are the only way to stop the spread of ecological conflicts worldwide. Continued monitoring and mobilisation by citizens’ groups is essential.
7. Amidst the stories of environmental devastation and pollution, there are many cases of environmental justice victories(…). The grassroots resistance of impacted communities is key to moving to a more equal and sustainable economy.

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 19 - Territorial defence

We, the common people

It has never been as clear that peoples and communities, the common people, continue to exist — at the same time as the “dominant” systems of the world become more and more desperate to control them.

We are speaking of the people who protect, save and guard their native seeds and who in the widest sense grow food for their own communities across the world. The people who live in resistance and demand with increasing strength their own autonomous governments in order to defend their ancestral lands. They are communities which have always placed their lives at the service of the world — exercising a care and balance between plants, animals, water sources and between “natural and spiritual beings” – and cultivating a memory and presence in the environment around us of both our living and our dead.

How many we are and what we do

A new report from GRAIN offers a deep analysis of the data available on agricultural systems and food production internationally, and makes six central conclusions.

The first conclusion is that the peasantry continue to be those who , on small areas of land, producer the majority of the world’s food needs – above all in terms of feeding families, communities and local markets.

The second conclusion is that the majority of farms internationally are small farms, which continue to be reduzed in number due to a myriad of eradicating forces. If this tendency is not reversed through resistance which includes a process of genuine agrarian reform, the existing process of expulsion of people, including children, will be even more brutal.
Thirdly, the the entirety of these small scale farms are squeezed into less than a quarter of the world’s agricultural land — and this proportion is decreasing.

A fourth certitude is that while farms, lands and peasants are being lost there is a corresponding increase in the number of large industrial agriculture projects. In the last 50 years around 140 million hectares of land — significantly more than the entire agricultural land area of China — has been appropriated to plant monocultures of soya beans, palm oil, canola, sugar cane and corn — all by industrial means.

The fifth conclusion is that technically — using data extrapolated from national census records from almost every country in the world — small farms are more productive that enormous industrial agriculture operations — in spite of the enormous power and resources held by internaitonal agricultural companies.

The sixth and last conclusion is that the majority of peasants are women. In spite of their contributions that continue to be marginalised, are not recognised in official statistics and as so continue to be discriminated against in terms of the control of land.

Who is attacking us

Today we must recognize that the life of peoples — and the very future of peasant communities – is in radical confrontation with systems which aim only to control the greatest amount of riches, relations, people, common goods and any profitable activities through the development of laws, dispositions, policies, programs, projects and cash payments. Agroindustry is a representation of this — the production of crops (not just foodstuffs) through increasingly sophisticated (not necessarily more efficient) methods on large land areas aimed at harvesting large volumes and maximum profit at any cost.

This industrial logic perpetrates extreme violence against natural scale processes and vital cycles and promotes so called “vertical integration” – the crazed race to add economic value to foodstuffs through the addition of more and more processing and privatisations systems (landgrabbing, certified seeds, the sterilization and fertilisation of soils by agrochemicals, agricultural mechanisation, transport, cleaning, processing, packaging, storage, and again transport) before food is finally made available to the public through supermarkets and restaurant chains.

As we already know, this sum of processes contributes to the extreme warming which is part of the climate crisis (around 50% greenhouse gases come from the combined process of “vertical integration”). This system also contributes to the subjugation of people trapped – through one form or another — in this transnational and globalized food system. A system which does not feed communities or neighbourhoods but instead looks for their labour to do the most damaging aspects of the chain — while the futures of farmers are robbed by industrial agricultural systems which reduces their creative, dignified and enormously careful stewardship of the land to semi-slavery. For these reasons, to produce our own food independently of the so-called global food system is something profoundly political and subversive.

Landgrabbing, memory and resistance

It is undeniable that there is direct relationship between the loss of lands on one hand and the advance of megamining projects, oil and natural gas extraction, and monoculture agriculture on the other. As outlined in the editorial, an enormous amount of research remains to be done in order to uncover the true extent of the extractivist projects and the fragmentation, dismantling and loss of indigenous and peasant held territories and lands. As a minimum we can say that in Mexico alone 26% of the national territory is in the hands of mining concessions, and in Colombia the figure is 40%. Mining in Colombia goes hand in hand with rights abuses; “80% of the violations of human rights which have occurred over the last 10 years occured in mining-energy regions, and 87% of all displaced peoples from this period originated in these areas”. If we run through country by country — a study which should be undertaken in a systematic way — we would encounter similar situations, including the extreme case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where percentages of lands handed over no longer serve as a measure, but the number of dead in conflicts over minerals, diamonds, coltan and gold: more than 7 million have died violently in the last 15 years.

Conflicts over water are also recurrent. “In Africa for example, one in three people suffer from scarcity of water and climate change is worsening the situation”. The development in Africa of highly sophisticated indigenous water management systems could help to alleviate this crisis, but these same systems are those being destroyed by land grabbing — in the midst of claims that water in Africa is abundant, underused and is ready to be utilised for agro-export agriculture” as we affirm in one of GRAIN‘s reports. Of course, this is not only a phenomenton in Africa.

Beyond the causes, which go from the monoculture fields of the industrial agricultural system to the most severe and polluting forms of extractivism, passing oil wells, electricity generation centres, biosphere reserves, REDD projects, megatourism, real estate developments, motorway routes, mega-dams, multi-modal corridors, narcotraffiking and cultivations, the reality is that there is a real attack underway — against our territorial memory, our memory of place — the lands which are our vital surroundings, our common environment we need to recreate and transform our existence: the spaces we give meaning to with our shared wisdom and knowledge, with our common history.

To provoke scarcity and economic dependence, the international and multilateral transnational systems have promoted the disabling of the capacity of communities to feed themselves, or provide healthcare education and other needs. The effect of this imposed precarity is the expulsion of populations and the jeopardising of their futures.
For these reasons Food Sovereignty remains deeply pertinent and a source of profound hope as a tool to rebuild autonomy and the defence of our territories, as it represents a living manifestation of our memories. The production of food from the smallest community level upwards is a vital proposal — and examples exist that show it is possible to reverse the damage that has been done.

Newsletter no 19 – Editorial

Newsletter no 19 - Territorial defence

Territorial defence, community struggles for the defence of their territories

Landgrabbing continues unabated worldwide.
When GRAIN started investigating the issue we highlighted the fact that at the same as certain governments were invoking their commitments to resolve food security they were also attempting to take control of increasing amounts of land across the world. Very quickly various financial groups (including various pension funds) jumped to the centre of the negotiations, exposing the speculative nature of many of these land agreements and the renewed urgency of transnational corporations to grab land.

We have always been conscious of the fact that landgrabbing is much more vast and ominous than we have shown until now. It is not only about the use of industrial agricultural means to engage in the monoculture of primary resources for exportation, or the delocalised production of foodstuffs for other countries. It implies extractivism: control of water, mining, oil industries, deforestation, drug trafficking, environmental services and REDD projects (land areas held in disregards or so called marginal lands), and the subsequent speculation on these, followed by real estate, tourism, urban development, military geopolitics and much more.

In this edition of the Nyéléni Newsletter we want to make an overview of this process and of the possibilities of resisting it from our communities.

GRAIN

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Community struggles for the defence of their territories, no 19

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Voices from the field

Newsletter no 18 - Creating knowledge

Voices from the field 1

Documenting successful cases for horizontal learning

Peter Rosset , La Via Campesina

The “academy” is no longer the epicenter of knowledge production– if indeed it ever was. In today’s world, much of the important new knowledge, and even theory, on alternatives to conventional, exclusionary development, is being generated by social movements.

I had the opportunity to participate in one of the self-study processes of La Via Campesina (LVC). In this case the object of analysis was the campesino-to-campesino (farmer-to-farmer) agroecology movement of the National Association of Small Farmers of Cuba (ANAP-Via Campesina), one of the most important cases of successfully bringing peasant agroecology to scale as part of food sovereignty. By consciously using a social process methodology, ANAP was able, in a bit more than a decade, to build an ecological farming social movement inside a national farmer organization – a movement that has come to embrace 50% of all the peasant families in Cuba. They use few or no off-farm inputs, farm agroecologically, and have dramatically raised the total and relative contribution of the peasant sector to national food production, thus boosting food sovereignty.

LVC and ANAP wanted the peasants to re-construct their own history, and do their own analysis of the keys to success. And they wanted the result of this process to be presented in a format that would both help ANAP with it’s internal process, and also help organizations in other countries learn useful lessons from it. A small team traveled the length of the island, facilitating workshops at peasant cooperatives, where the participants of the movement themselves, re-created their history and collectively drew their own lessons. The team was then responsible for organizing this information into a book for use in LVC’s training schools, and to support campaign work.

Other teams in LVC are now engaged in similar processes to analyze other cases. One of these is the experience of the Zero Budget Natural Farming Movement in southern India, in which more than million Indian peasants have stopped their use of purchased chemicals and raised production though autonomous, ecological practices.

Voices from the field 2

Food Sovereignty in the Andes

Maruja Salas

Here are the life stories of some of the community-based persons in the food sovereignty process who have been thinking with the power of nature and defending their individual and collective rights to eat healthy food. Their language is peaceful, yet allusive – even sometimes enigmatic. They personify their communal knowledge with varying degrees of coherence. Yet, when they speak about their lives of nurturing, farming, fishing and herding, they do so with a joy embodying a world-view which harmonises celebration and work. There is also a deep spiritual sense to their attentiveness to signs from nature, particularly towards the Altiplano’s sacred mountains and Mother Earth. These men and women are fully attuned to interpreting dream symbolism to guide seed selection, cooking, or food storage, constantly replenishing the traditional rules for familial well-being. More information about their work can be found at the website of the Andean Program for Food Sovereignty.

Lucía Paucara
Lucia is from Vilurcuni, where she has spent much of her 54 years working in her fields and storing potatoes to feed her extended family. For her potatoes are like daughters and she celebrates all the phases of their growth. Since her fields are near the lake, she has many varieties that she uses for cooking special local dishes like patasca, chayro, and watia. She and her extended family who are living in Lima or Tacna will never go hungry because she produces enough potatoes for all of them.

Presentación Velásquez
Presentación learned from her grandmother to cultivate Andean crops in the Aynoqas system (rotational sector agriculture) as well as chase away hail by mobilising the community. She has promised her granddaughters to continue to work in her fields until the end of her life, so that all the family will have plenty of Andean tubers and grains to eat without having to buy them in the market.

Domitila Taquila
Domitila lives in Aychullo and she was not born with much ‘knowledge’, she says, but learned from working in the fields alongside her grandmother. Her mother taught her how to weave and cook. Her ability to read the natural indicators was revealed in dreams. Today, she demonstrates to her children the advantages of eating from the fields and avoiding contaminated food from the market.

Boxes

Newsletter no 18 - Creating knowledge

Box 1

Decolonizing research and relationships: Revitalizing traditional Grease Trails

Indigenous scholars and holders of traditional knowledge in British Columbia, Canada, are developing a research protocol to guide their collaborative research. The Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (WGIFS) will bring together key Indigenous scholars and holders of traditional knowledge relevant to the Grease Trails (traditional trade routes) to solicit input and direction in the development of its research strategy and protocol. The Revitalizing Grease Trails research project arose in response to a series of strategic planning meetings and the large number of research proposals received from within numerous organizations and research institutions across Canada.

A workshop to discuss the research strategy and protocol will outline criteria that will enable the WGIFS to engage in research that strategically aligns with the vision, values and goals of communities. The protocol will outline an ethical process for working across cultures (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) to decolonize methodologies for reviewing relevant literature and conducting community based interviews that will shed light on relevant issues, concerns, situations and strategies. Decolonizing methodologies strategies can range from day to day practices that promote more harvesting, cultivating and sharing Indigenous foods, to a more complex challenge of critical thinking and redesigning institutional frameworks and methodologies in research. In this context, the work shop will provide the time and space to concentrate energy and ideas that will lead to the development of a template of culturally relevant protocols for positioning Indigenous voice, vision, paradigms and priorities in institutional frameworks for research and community development. The research strategy will lead to the generation of a body of knowledge that will ultimately enable Indigenous communities to conduct research on their own terms and respond more effectively to their own needs for culturally adapted foods.

Box 2

NGO-academic alliance for researching gender, nutrition and the right to food

When so many call for the inclusion of women and a gender perspective in food security, why is the status of women and girls still not improving? This question led to the creation of an NGO-academic alliance to develop a focused approach on gender, nutrition and the human right to adequate food and nutrition. It brings the long term experience of CSOs (FIAN International and the Geneva Infant Feeding Association, member of the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN-GIFA)) in documenting cases of violations and abuses of the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition in collaboration with affected communities and social movements, together with the theoretical and research expertise on the subject of the Gender Nutrition Rights (GNR) Research Group, which is made up of Syracuse University in cooperation with the University of Hohenheim. Their research found that the existing food security framework for the right to adequate food and nutrition is unable to identify the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition in all its forms, and therefore, is unable to propose the adequate public policies and programs needed to overcome them.

Building upon the discussions of two public workshops, an expanded conceptual framework [This expanded conceptual framework is proposed in Anne C. Bellows, Flavio L.S. Valente, and Stefanie Lemke. (Eds.) Gender, Nutrition and the Human Right to Adequate Food: towards an inclusive framework. New York: Taylor & Francis/Routledge] for the right to adequate food and nutrition has been proposed. This expanded framework for the right to adequate food and nutrition, which is based on the food sovereignty framework and integrates the dimensions of gender, women’s rights and nutrition is intended to support popular struggles against land grab and Big Food, among others. It also seeks to sharpen our human rights tools, adjusting them to the current challenges in order to provide adequate mechanisms for ensuring a life of dignity for each and every human being, and especially for the most disadvantaged and marginalized in our societies.

Box 3

Power equalizing research for food sovereignty

Research for food sovereignty aims to give the least powerful actors (marginalised farmers and food providers, women….) more significant roles than before in the production and validation of knowledge [These reflections are based on ongoing participatory action-research with indigenous and local communities in the Andean Altiplano (Bolivia and Peru), Asia (India, Indonesia, Nepal and Iran), Europe (France, Italy, UK) and West Africa (Mali) where research is done with, for and by people — rather than on people — to explore how locally controlled biodiversity-rich food systems can be sustained. See: Pimbert, 2012]. Power-equalising research seeks to intervene throughout the research and development (R&D)cycle. A focus on the entire R&D cycle (including scientific and technological research, evaluations of results and impacts of research, the choice of upstream strategic priorities for research and development, and the framing of overarching policies) allows for a shift from narrow concepts of participatory research that confine non-researchers to ‘end of the pipe’ technology development (e.g. participatory plant breeding) to a more inclusive approach in which farmers and other citizens can define the upstream strategic priorities of research and governance regimes.

When combined, the following enabling factors are important in this regard:

– Free prior informed consent, jointly developed rules of engagement and a mutually agreed code of ethics between food providers and researchersFormation of safe spaces — non-threatening spaces in which wo/men farmers and other actors involved can gain confidence, discuss, analyse, mobilise and act on the basis of a shared vision.
– Reversals from normal professional roles and practices. For example, research is conducted by and with food providers themselves, – with outside professionals in a facilitating and support role. Marginalised wo/men farmers are central instead of richer farmers, research stations, scientists, abstract theories, and a pro-urban bias.
– Cognitive justice — acknowledging the right for different knowledge systems to exist. The idea of cognitive justice emphasises the right for different forms of knowledge — and their associated practices, livelihoods, ways of being, and ecologies — to coexist.
– Extended peer review. Both small scale farmers and scientists must be involved in the co-validation of the knowledge and outcomes of intercultural dialogues. We need to recognise here that there are many legitimate perspectives on every issue. Each actor, — be it a farmer or a scientist -, has partial and incomplete knowledge. ‘Extended’ peer review is necessary at a time when ‘we do not know what we do not know’ and when everyone everywhere is faced with the uncertainties of a fast-changing world (environmental and climate change, unstable markets…).
– Communicating for change should not be seen as the exclusive right of communication professionals working in scientific and policy research institutes as well as in agricultural extension departments. There is a need for a new communication practice and allocation of resources that emphasises the devolution and dispersal of power. Advances in new communication technologies (digital video camera, radio, the Internet) as well as popular theatre, mapping and visualisation techniques offer new opportunities to decentralise and democratise the production of knowledge and communication messages — allowing even remote village farming communities to share stories and messages that can influence research agendas, policy and practice at local, national and international levels.

Box 4

Agricultural research for food sovereignty in West Africa

As part of the Democratising Food and Agricultural Research initiative (see www.excludedvoices.org), a series of citizens’ juries have been held in Mali over the last seven years. Their aim was to allow ordinary farmers and other food producers, both men and women, to make policy recommendations after cross examining expert witnesses from different backgrounds. Three citizens’ juries explored the following themes:
1. GMOs and the future of farming in Mali.
2. What kind of knowledge and agricultural research do small scale producers and food processors want?
3. How to democratise the governance of food and agricultural research?
The citizens’ juries were guided by an oversight panel to ensure that the entire process was broadly credible, representative, trustworthy, fair and not captured by any interest group or perspective.

Altogether, the farmer jurors made over 100 recommendations on the priorities and governance of agricultural research for West Africa. Recommendations covered issues such as models of agricultural production, land tenure and property rights, and food and agriculture markets, as well as issues of research funding, organisation, practice and governance.

In the follow up to this unique deliberative process, West African farmers asked to have a Policy Dialogue with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and its main donors. Farmers wanted a face-to-face discussion on research priorities with AGRA because it is a key player in setting the agenda for agricultural research for development in West Africa. This policy dialogue took place in Accra (Ghana) on 1st to 3rd February 2012. The three-day event was chaired by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, and was also attended by representatives of farming communities in Asia, East Africa and Latin America. A video link with London allowed participation by UK donors and members of parliament. Both farmers and AGRA presented their vision for agricultural research in Africa. Overall, farmers analysis and policy recommendations significantly differed from those promoted by AGRA. For example, West African farmers were clearly against research that leads to the privatisation of seeds and proprietary seed technologies which allow companies to control the seed sector. They also felt that AGRA wrongly views farmers’ local seeds as unimproved, – thereby denying the plant breeding and seed selection work done by wo/men farmers.

Most notably, AGRA and the African farmers framed their respective research agendas within radically different visions of food and farming. The wo/men farmers argued that a vision of farming that de-links and separates crop production from other sectors (livestock, fisheries, forestry) is not acceptable. By prioritising crop production alone, AGRA is inducing an imbalance which farmers want to avoid in West Africa. Farmers reject AGRA’s development model and type of agriculture which, – they feel -, encourages bigger farms and the disappearance of small family farms, as well as the poisoning of the earth, water, and people. Instead, West African farmers called for a research agenda that supports family farming and food sovereignty.

Box 4 Sources:
Pimbert, M.P, B. Boukary, A. Berson and K. Tranh Thanh, 2011. Democratising agricultural research for food sovereignty in West Africa. IIED, London.
APPG on Agroecology, CNOP, Kene conseils, Centre Djoliba, IRPAD and IIED, 2012. High level policy dialogue between the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and small scale farmers on the priorities and governance of agricultural research for development in West Africa. A photo story available in English and French.

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 18 - Creating knowledge

In the spotlight

It is not surprising that peasant, local and indigenous knowledge is important to food sovereignty. Food sovereignty was built by peasants themselves, based on their own experiences and collective analysis — first that of La Via Campesina, and since then an increasingly diverse group of actors who have been enriching this dynamic concept with their own perspectives.

Over the past few years, however, the rhythm of innovation, experimentation and dialogue related to knowledge for food sovereignty seems to be picking up pace. New visions, approaches and spaces for collective knowledge creation are emerging, some of which are captured in the brief stories in this newsletter. These developments reflect the growing importance of the food sovereignty movement in national, regional and international debates, the strengthening of alliances for food sovereignty, the enhanced confidence of the movement, as well as the deepening crises that it is faced with. Social movements are also increasingly aware that realizing food sovereignty requires radically different knowledge from that on offer today in mainstream institutions (universities, policy think tanks, governments, corporations…).

Dialogue between a diversity of actors

One of the most promising alliances in terms of developing knowledge is with indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples have been taking their place in the food sovereignty movement more assertively in recent years and their contributions are having profound effects on concepts of knowledge and ways of knowing for food sovereignty. They are reclaiming the validity of their own epistemologies [“Epistemology” refers to theories of what knowledge is, what can be known and how knowledge is to be acquired.] which question the mechanistic worldview of positivist science [Positivism is the philosophy of science which believes in objective truth. Positivism recognizes only that which can be scientifi cally verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof.]. Indigenous peasants in the Andes, for example, assert that to develop food sovereignty, they rely on the knowledge that is embedded in their stories and rituals, and that is rooted in experiences in the visible world as well as the world of dreams (see Voices from the field 2). Collaboration between indigenous peoples and indigenous and “settler” scholars in Canada has led to challenges to the “colonising methodologies” of academia and to developing emancipatory methodologies (see Box 1).

Creating spaces for inter-regional and cross-cultural dialogue and mutual learning is crucial. A global movement like La Via Campesina or LVC is taking advantage of its diversity to develop horizontal networks for knowledge creation. LVC has an important internal self-study research process underway. The goal of this process is to identify, document, analyze and “systematize” (i.e. not only to document but also to analyse with a view to drawing lessons) the best examples among the member organizations in America, Africa, Asia and Europe, with agroecology, peasant seeds and other aspects of food sovereignty, like local markets. The purpose is two-fold. One is to develop and contribute their own study materials, based on their own experiences, to the more than 40 peasant agroecology schools and numerous political training schools inside LVC. The other is to support campaigning directed at public opinion and policy-makers, with data that prove that the alternatives exist, that they work, and that they should be supported by better public policies (see Voices from the field 1).

Another example of a diverse space for mutual learning is the Democratising Food and Agricultural Research initiative which aims to create safe spaces in which citizens (food providers and consumers) can engage in inclusive deliberations on how to build a research system for food and agriculture that is democratic and accountable to wider society (www.excludedvoices.org). More specifically, the methodological approach seeks to facilitate the participatory design of alternative, farmer and citizen-led agricultural research (see text box on agricultural research for food sovereignty in West Africa). Since 2007, this global initiative has unfolded in the Andean Altiplano, South Asia, West Africa, and West Asia. In September 2013, the partners of Democratising Food and Agricultural Research initiative organized an international workshop to share lessons and reflections from Africa, Asia and Latin America with a wider community of European farmers, policy makers, and representatives of the donor communities. Known as the St. Ulrich Workshop on Democratising Agricultural Research for Food Sovereignty and Peasant Agrarian Cultures, this international workshop brought together 95 participants from a total of 17 countries. Most participants were farmers and half of them were women. The St Ulrich workshop focused on the need to both transform knowledge and ways of knowing for food sovereignty and peasant agrarian cultures.

Scholars and activists engage in critical dialogues…

At the conference “Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue” held in the Hague in January 2014, Elizabeth Mopfu, General Coordinator of LVC, invited scholars to share constructive criticism of concept of food sovereignty. “We want to hear your doubts,” she said. The presence of hundreds of scholars, students, peasants and activists in such a forum reflects both the growing interest of researchers in food sovereignty, and the growing willingness of the movement to engage with them in critical dialogue and collaboration (see Box 2).

…and work together to challenge policy and governance

Opportunities for collaboration with researchers are sometimes linked with the policy spaces. As the movement invests in creating spaces for participation in the governance of food and agriculture, it finds that occupying these spaces requires collaboration with researchers. The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), for example, played a key role in the reform of the UN’s Committee for World Security (CFS) which took place in 2009. Following the food crisis of 2007/8 there were calls for the reform of the system of governance of food and agriculture. The IPC argued for a multi-lateral governance with a system of one-country-one-vote and with the meaningful participation of the organisations of small-food providers and other CSOs. Proposals for less transparent governance mechanisms, including from the G8, were eventually defeated and the reformed CFS was declared the “foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform” for the governance of food and agriculture [More information here].The CFS set up its own new expert wing — the High Level of Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) — to provide inputs into its decision-making by developing analysis and policy recommendations. The HLPE’s mandate recognises from the outset the importance of the knowledge of “social actors” and field experience. The involvement of experts with links to the food sovereignty movement in the HLPE, and also the wider work of the CFS, has led to increased networking and collaboration between scholars and activists.

Drawing on multiple ways of knowing

As the number and range of collaborations with researchers grow, there is greater awareness of the need to develop new and appropriate research methodologies in cases where co-inquirers are rooted in different knowledge systems. Since academic knowledge has usually been seen as the superior validating standard for other knowledge systems it is especially important to develop methodologies that reach beyond rational knowledge and experiment with multiple ways of knowing such as humour, music, drama, etc. The “Day of Dialogue on Knowledge for Food Sovereignty“, which was held immediately following the Critical Dialogue in the Hague in January 2014, was one such attempt. The dialogue was open to about 70 activists and academics by invitation who had a history of collaboration. The organisers wanted to open up for a day a space where people could bring their creativity and curiosity to a collective dialogue. It was felt that space needed to made for more playful conversations without the pressure of trying to be efficient to get things done [See the report here ]. This is a key step to developing power-equalizing research (see Box 3).
As the opportunities for research and collaboration between different constituencies grows it will become important to share experiences and draw the lessons from these. Face-to-face encounters across cultures, worldviews and knowledge systems must becoming more frequent.

Newsletter no 18 – Editorial

Newsletter no 18 - Creating knowledge

Creating knowledge for food sovereignty

Illustration: Tree 213, Toni Demuro tonidemuro.blogspot.ie

There is movement in the many worlds that are creating knowledge for food sovereignty!

The stories in this newsletter provide a glimpse into some of these worlds.
They show that we are questioning the assumption of a single truth based on objective knowledge. Also that our understanding of the world is enriched by considering it from multliple perspectives, multiple cosmovisions. They indicate that for these multiple cosmovisions to enter into an equal dialogue, common languages must be found. They show the need to challenge academic knowledge, but also to be open to being challenged by it.

We need to radically transform dominant knowledge and ways of knowing for food sovereignty. To develop knowledge for food sovereignty we need to be humble and respectful of other voices and perspectives. We need to be bold in order to experiment with methods and ideas that may seem “unscientific”, while also working to demonstrate the quality in our inquiry processes.

We need to be playful in order to move lightly through the many obstacles on this path while keeping our curiosity alive. With these challenges in mind, one research question emerges which we invite you to join us in reflecting on: How do we nurture the human qualities that we need in order to develop knowledge, together, for food sovereignty?

Maryam Rahmanian and Michel Pimbert

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Creating knowledge for food sovereignty, no 18

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Newsletter no 16 – Editorial

Newsletter no 16 - Peoples struggle against WTO

Peoples struggle against WTO

WTO kills farmers!

Food and agriculture are central to our lives as peasants and small farmers. Agriculture is not only our livelihood; it is our life, our culture and our way of relating to Mother Nature. The logic of free trade runs counter to this, as it makes food a commodity; a mere product to be bought and sold. This principle of free trade is embodied and pushed forward by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture aims to make agricultural policies the world over more market oriented in order to facilitate greater trade flows.

This is why we in La Via Campesina have been at the forefront of the struggle against the WTO since its launch in 1995. Since the beginning, we have consistently called for “WTO out of agriculture”. We were in the streets of Seattle, Cancun, Hong Kong, Geneva and this year in Bali.

The commodification of food and agriculture through the WTO has caused the death of farmers – farmers’ livelihoods have been wiped out by cheap agricultural products being dumped in their markets below their costs of production. Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae killed himself on the fences of the WTO Cancun Ministerial wearing a sign that said “WTO Kills Farmers”. That still carries true today as hunger grows, lands are grabbed by transnational corporations, peasants go into vicious debt cycles as they are unable to sell their produce, family farmers are wiped out by large agribusiness and food is poisoned by genetically modified organisms.

We in La Via Campesina believe that the only way forward is to fight for Food Sovereignty. All peoples should have the right to culturally appropriate, nutritious and healthy food, and their food and agricultural systems should not be determined by the whims of the free market. We need to call for an end to the WTO and fight for an economy based on justice with food sovereignty at its heart.

Henry Saragih, Chairperson of Serikat Petani Indonesia

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Peoples struggle against WTO, no 16

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Newsletter 15 – Editorial

Newsletter no 15 - Smallholder agri-investments

Smallholder agri-investments

Illustration: Encouragement, Erika Hastings – mudspice.com

200,000 hectares of land given to multinational Louis Dreyfus in Côte d’Ivoire for rice export. 70 million pounds of UK taxpayer money to develop genetically modified crops. Privatization of seeds across continents. These are just a few
projects in the last years under the banner of ‘investing in agriculture’.

This is why social movements are gearing up for one of the biggest emerging battles over the future of food sovereignty – the corporatization of investment. The private sector portrays itself as the saviour of farming but as this newsletter shows it is small holders who are really investing in feeding people and building rural livelihoods. Being taken in by the story of the overriding importance of corporate investment means, for example, that ‘codes of conduct’ to continue land grabbing are being developed instead of regulations to stop it.

A closer look at Africa shows that corporate private investment is a strategy:
i) to sell more chemicals and seeds to African farmers, and

ii) to secure low cost access to land and resources for global supply chains that feed the rich – through controlling small holders. This will destroy the environment, kill genetic diversity and push thousands more into hunger.

In October the World Committee on Food Security (CFS) will meet to discuss principles for ‘Responsible investments in agriculture’. We must shout out the message that not all investment is the same. And ask important questions: Investment in what type of agriculture? By whom? For whose benefit? Colombian farmers have just succeeded in rolling back seed privatization by asking this. And as the Voices from the field show, small holders everywhere
are rising to the task.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth International

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Smallholder agri-investments, no 15

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Newsletter no 14 – Editorial

Newsletter no 14 - Rights and repression

Rights and repression

Eleven peasants and six policemen killed. 13 peasants prosecuted, and more than 50 incriminated in the course of one of the most violent land conflicts in Paraguay’s recent history. Fisherwomen, men and children who have been deprived of their access to Lake Victoria in Uganda are threatened with being shot by private security guards if they cross the borders established by investors who claim to have bought the lake. Female workers of big food retailers who are put under surveillance, sexually harassed at their workplace and underpaid in the U.S. Pastoralists who are trying to survive the consequences of the destruction of their habitat due to mining activities in Mongolia… These are but a few of the testimonies of human rights’ violations and abuses that this issue of the Nyéléni Newsletter has collected.

They all demonstrate the increasing criminalization of social movements defending food sovereignty all over the world. We can not know the true scope of this situation, as much abuse and many conflicts and human rights’ violations committed throughout the existing food systems remain invisible and go undetected. However even this sparse and scattered information has been enough for UN monitoring bodies and defenders – such as the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights – to state that the second most vulnerable group of human rights’ defenders are those working on land, natural resources and environmental issues. The International Labour Organization has also reported that the incidence of bonded and slave labour is particularly high in certain workplaces in the food chain – such as big plantations, industrial slaughterhouses and trawlers. The increasing criminalization of active practitioners within the food sovereignty movement is one of the major threats that we are currently facing. Depending on the context, the criminalization may be promoted by an authoritarian State that does not allow people to organize autonomously; or by the erosion of the institutions and human rights’ culture of countries that previously had a high degree of protection of human rights; or by non-State actors such as companies and the media who promote laws that impair or make the economic activities of pastoralists, fishing communities, peasants and gatherers illegal; or deprive these groups of access to natural resources; or dismantle labour rights’ protection, and environmental and sanitary regulations.

Our movements and organizations need to develop and improve their strategies to face the threat of increasing criminalization. This Newsletter collects some of our experiences and current strategic initiatives in this regard: We recall how the struggle of Indigenous Peoples for the recognition of their collective rights to their lands and territories, to their traditional knowledge, to free, prior and informed consent and to a self-determined economic, social and cultural development in international and national law has proven to be a forerunner of the food sovereignty movement. Other rural constituencies such as peasants and fishing communities are also reclaiming the recognition of their distinctive rights to natural resources, and to self-determination of their own food systems and economic activities. The current process of drafting a UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural
areas and the FAO Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries are two initiatives aimed at empowering peasants and fishers, and building legal frameworks that support smallscale food producers and public welfare.

We also need to deepen our alliance with the human rights movement to defend achievements in the field of the human rights, to fill the gaps and further develop and strengthen human rights law so that it really has primacy over commercial and investment law. We also need to continue enlarging our movement and building unity in our cross-constituency alliances: none of our constituencies alone will be able to defend their rights and effectively overcome the threats that lie ahead.

Sofia Monsalve, FIAN International

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Rights and repression, no 14

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