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.

Newsletter no 9 – Editorial

Newsletter no 09 - Land grabbing

Land grabbing

Illustrations by Anna Loveday-Brown

“How firm we stand and plant our feet upon our land determines the strength of our children’s heartbeats.” Poolly Koutchak, Unalakleet, Alaska

This April the World Bank is organizing again its annual conference on land and poverty.
It is a big event gathering international bureaucracy, government representatives, mainstream academics, few big NGOs and the private sector. Under the title Land governance in a rapidly changing environment they will discuss, among other issues, how to deal with the governance challenges raised by large agricultural investments. In plain language, how to continue the appropriation of peoples’ lands and waters by private investors while pretending to help the poor. Also in April the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will hold a consultation process about the best use of natural resources for boosting living standards in developing countries. The IMF seeks to reassess its policy advice on the use of natural resources in development due to the growing importance of natural resources in many economies. Despite disastrous consequences, the International Financial Institutions (IFI) continue exercising a de facto ruling role in the international governance of land and natural resources. This role is profoundly illegitimate. A small group of rich countries defending the particular interests of business and finance together with their technocrats think they can decide over our lands and territories.

But this ruling role started to be challenged: Last 9 of March, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) completed the intergovernmental negotiations of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Tenure of Land Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security. With the successful completion of these negotiations after a participatory process lasting nearly three years, the CFS has shown that it has the capacity to convene multilateral negotiations with broad social participation to discuss and propose solutions to one of the most pressing problems of our time. The Guidelines contain valuable points that will provide backing to organisations in their struggle to ensure the care and use of natural resources in order to produce more nourishing food, so helping to eliminate hunger by addressing its root causes. The CFS is a new international space with more democratic rules that allows people’s organisations to challenge the IFI’s recipes and ruling. This is a first step to democratize the decision making processes related to food and agriculture at the international level.

April is also the month of the international peasant struggle. La Via Campesina has called on all of its members and allies, fisher-folk movements, agricultural workers organisations, environmental groups, women organisations and social justice movements to display massive popular resistance to land grabbing, to corporate control over land and natural resources and to defend small-scale, family based agriculture and food production as the most socially, economically and environmentally sustainable model of using resources and ensuring the right to food for all.

Let’s take action!

Sofia Monsalve, FIAN International

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Land grabbing, no 9

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Newsletter no 8 – Editorial

Newsletter no 08 - Water

Water

The sound of water
At the ancient pond
a frog plunges into
the sound of water
Frog Haiku by Matsuo Bashô, Translated by Sam Hamill

Water for life, not for death!
Rallying cry of the International Movement of Dam Affected Peoples

Illustration, Anna Loveday-Brown

For centuries, in every part of the world, water has been a pivotal force of civilisation, culture and progress. Proximity to secure water sources has guided the itineraries of nomadic peoples and other travelers, and determined where communities and nations have established their settlements. Water has inspired poetry, music, art and literature, and has shaped the diets, cuisines and health of our families and societies. Like the air we breathe, water is the very essence of life and possibly for this reason, its use and governance are fraught with conflict and vested interests. Water has been dammed, diverted, piped, bottled, transported, contaminated, poisoned and purified, and through all these, it has been responsible as much for life, as for death. This issue of the Nyéléni newsletter describes the pressures and demands on our planet’s water sources, attempts to control access through privatisation and commodification, and the intensifying struggles by extraordinary people all over the world to defend their rights to water and to protect water from elite capture. Governments cannot be allowed to give corporations and wealthy classes preferential access to and control over water. It is imperative and urgent that we join forces to protect water as commons, as the shared, collective wealth of current and future generations.

Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South

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Water, no 8

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Newsletter no 7 – Editorial

Newsletter no 07 - Fishery and climate change

Fishery and climate change

Illustration, Anna Loveday-Brow

Fishing for their futures – small scale fishing communities fighting for their way of life.

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

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

Small-scale fishing communities can build and strengthen their capacity to adapt if they are supported, and not forced to leave their waters.

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

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Fishery and climate change, no 7

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Newsletter no 6 – Editorial

Newsletter no 06 - Women and food sovereignty

Women and food sovereignty

Illustration, Anna Loveday-Brow

What is the necessary strategy to change the situation of women around the world?
Some feminists think that women’s distinctive characteristics, which are made invisible and/or considered inferior by a male chauvinistic and patriarchal society, should be recognized. Others claim that it is necessary to fight for wealth redistribution between men and women, thus overcoming the causes of inequality resulting from sexual division of labor and power. But many feminists have already realized that this is a false dilemma. In order to move forward it is necessary to coordinate the seemingly contradictory actions of recognition and distribution. The principle of Food Sovereignty increasingly recognizes women’s contribution in food production: from agriculture to preparing food for their families or school cafeterias and other community facilities.

It also contemplates the need to equally distribute land and the conditions of production between men and women. It is necessary to take a step forward and recognize the need to redistribute the work done by women to take care of the family – even preparing food- among all the members of the family living together. Rural and urban women and girls around the world work more hours than men, considering the number of hours dedicated to paid work and to housework taken together. They are the first ones to get up and the last ones to go to bed. Enjoying Food Sovereignty means changing both the food production and consumption model. This implies having time to cook, eat and share as well as having time for themselves. This change cannot be based on the increasing work of women. In order to have more time, we neither need fast-food nor canned food, but we do need public policies that support reproduction, such as food in schools and popular restaurants and… distributing work among all!

Miriam Nobre, Coordinator of the International Secretariat of the World March of Women

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Women and food sovereignty, no 6

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Newsletter no 5 – Editorial

Newsletter no 05 - Nyéléni Europe

Nyéléni Europe

As we follow the road to Krems, we advance towards people’s food sovereignty.
In Europe, more than a thousand farms, along with the people who make them possible, dissapear every day. The loss of cultivated biodiversity continues to increase. The best lands are falling into the hands of financial capital, which is also speculating with food and as a result food crises are rocketing. The European population is increasingly suspicious of a food system that regularly puts their health at risk… These are some of the serious consequences of a global food system based on an unsustainable neoliberal model, driven by transanacional companies and financial markets. Current European agricultural policies have been developed according to the doctrines of the World Trade Organization.

And, more importantly, the CAP has evolved from a mechanism to ensure food security on the continent to an instrument without political vocation, which leaves agricultural regulation at the mercy of pure neo-liberal competition, where multinationals always win and small farmers in Europe and in many other countries always lose. It is time for change, and it is time to fill the false democracy in which we live with politics. Food Sovereignty should be considered as the framework for agricultural policies in Europe and worldwide. Producers and small-scale producers, with their farming, despite what the agro-industry may say, are the only ones who can feed the people while preserving the richness of our planet for future generations. While political and economic interests persist in the wrong direction, throughout Europe, citizens are organising themselves to regain control of their food and agricultural systems: movements for the multiplication of seeds, anti-GMO organizations, young farmers reviving the countryside and productiondistribution-consumption cooperatives are among the many alternatives that are being built in Europe. The Nyeleni Forum 2011 will offer the possibility for a collective reflection on these emerging initiatives, and how we can work together more effectiviely. In Austria, we will strengthen the pillars on which we’re building the European movement for food sovereignty.

Javier Sanchez, ECVC and Steering Committee for Nyéléni Europe

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Nyéléni Europe, no 5

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Newsletter no 4 – Editorial

Newsletter no 04 - Food price volatility and food markets

Food price volatility and food markets

Illustration, Anna Loveday-Brow

A new food price crisis: the time has come to put people at the centre of the food system!
Chronic, persistent and increasing hunger levels. Rising demand on top of a collapsing resource base. Unsustainable consumption patterns and waste. Feedstocks diverted from food to fuel. Extreme vulnerability. Climate chaos. Political unrest and food riots. Markets rigged against the many in favour of the few. Spiralling food prices… The dominant food system is not delivering. This is because it is a food system moulded by a market where purchasing power is more important than rights, where food, land, and water and other resources have been restricted to a mere commodity. It is a system where the power to decide who produces what, how, for whom or by whom is concentrated in a handful of companies, and where public policies to regulate agricultural or financial markets have been largely dismantled. This system today is colliding with inherent limits. It traps a billion producers and consumers in poverty and fails to address the ecological boundaries of a flawed food system. Inequalities are increasing, and peoples are excluded from their fundamental rights. In the midst of a second severe food price crisis in three years, some governments have lost confidence in the capacity of international markets to deliver their needed food. The international community is forced to address the problem. But it still fails to recognise the main causes of the persistent crisis and to develop coordinated and coherent responses that go beyond the defence of short term interests. The time has come to put people at the centre of the food system. In that system the supply of food is accomplished by agro-ecological, resilient, small-holder farming, producing sufficient and accessible food for all. Policies need to be grounded in the right to food and food sovereignty to deliver on food, nutritional and ecological security. Small food producers and civil society organisations call for the needed radical changes by mobilising forces and contributing to the debate for transformed policies at national and international levels.

Thierry Kesteloot, Oxfam-Solidarity

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Food price volatility and food markets, no 4

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Newsletter no 3 – Editorial

Newsletter no 03 - Farmers' seeds

Peasants’ seeds – rights and power

Illustration, Anna Loveday-Brow

The age-old process of creating and developing diversity in the fields has led to the development of a series of legal bases aimed at guaranteeing the exercising of collective rights, allowing for on-going co-evolution. Nation-states are responsible for determining how natural resources should be used and distributed, the rights that should provide access, use, and control of these resources, and who holds these rights. The balance of power within Nation-states and between states has now changed the nature of these rights, by imposing Intellectual Property Rights on seeds, and trying to undo the collective rights that communities or farmers have held and that have been codified over time. Against the violation of collective rights, such as those that guaranteed – or still guarantee – access, use and control of land, water and biodiversity, it is acceptable to exercise legitimate acts of self-defense, even if they are in breach of regulations.

The need for small-scale food producers to recover autonomy and sovereignty over the management of genetic resources is a fundamental tool. It is needed to adapt production to the needs of the world’s population and to the incessant changes of ecosystems. This must be explained to the ITPGRFA.

Antonio Onorati, President of Crocevia and international focal point for the IPC for Food Sovereignty

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Farmers' seeds, no 3

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Newsletter no 2 – Editorial

Newsletter no 02 - Factory farms

Factory farms

Illustration by Anna Loveday-Brow

Industrialized food production: the base of the junk food system.
There is no more potent symbol of the almost absolute control wielded by the international agri-food system (from landgrabbing to retailing), than the factory farm. These industrial complexes cause extensive pollution and disease in entire regions and emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases, all in order to produce food destined for the poor: “cheap” meat of dubious quality, whose true costs are never measured. This system is imposed on us, on humanity, and represent in one crisis the sum of multiple crises. In the almost endless list of calamities caused by factory farms, the genetically modified soy bean monoculture – farmed with pesticides and then used to feed imprisoned animals – means that everything returns to the same pockets at a harsh cost to the planet. However, the people are organizing and having more and more conversations and debates in an attempt to comprehend this together. This is very subversive, because our collective memory, and continuing to produce our own foodstuffs, according to our own peasant traditions, represents essentially the most fundamental basis for our autonomy – allowing our peoples, with all our ways and wisdom, to persist, and even to cool the earth, and attain lives of justice and dignity in the present and into the future.

GRAIN

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Factory farms, no 2

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Newsletter no 1 – Editorial

Newsletter no 01 - Climate change

Climate change

Illustration by Anna Loveday-Brow

Together we can create a thousand Cancuns for change!
International talks are hamstrung by industrialised countries failing to address their historical responsibility but our movements are forging ahead with real solutions to climate change. Across the world peasants and fisherfolk, pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples are articulating and living solutions – societies not based on high consumption of fossil fuels, protecting forests, and implementing food sovereignty. Increasingly they are joined by grassroots and workers movements in the industrialised world who recognise the harm that overconsumption and corporate control has done to their wellbeing.

The fact that these issues will now be taken from Cochabamba to Cancun is testament to the strength, integrity and interconnectedness of the climate justice and food sovereignty movements. But there are also real challenges to overcome. Proposals are on the table that would undermine the ability of people to make the urgent changes needed. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD) offset projects, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and geo-engineering are fundamentally flawed solutions, and arise due to the capture of the climate debate by corporations. This edition of the newsletter highlights the need for us to take the future of our planet into our own hands. Together we can create a thousand Cancuns for change!

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Food Sovereignty programme co-ordinator / Friends of the Earth International

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Climate change, no 1

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Newsletter no 0 – Editorial

Newsletter no 00 - Land

Land

Illustration, Damien Glez for Afronline

Fair winds for the Nyéléni newsletter!
Following the International Forum on Food Sovereignty held in Mali in February 2007, the social movements that brought this initiative to life have decided to create a tool for communication and exchange in order to continue the fight for food sovereignty and to defend the interests of disadvantaged groups such as small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and pastoralists. The situation of these groups continues to deteriorate due to the ongoing assaults of an increasingly inhuman capitalism. A new wave of land-grabbing can now be added to the problems of our times, a reality which the World Bank seeks to legitimize in its latest report. It is therefore urgent and critical for social movements to regroup and to strengthen our alliances in order to deal with the neoliberal offensives, unprecedented in the history of mankind. This newsletter aims to bring a small stone to the edifice of resistance that will be built to counteract transnational corporations, the World Bank and their allies. We urge all organizations and all movements committed to the struggle for food sovereignty to embark with us on this great journey.

Ibrahim Coulibali, president of CNOP (National Coordination of Peasants’ Organizations of Mali) and member of the International Coordinating Committee of Via Campesina

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Land, no 0

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