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 41 – Editorial

Newsletter no 41 - Beyond land - Territory and food sovereignty

Beyond land – Territory and food sovereignty

Illustration by Luisa Rivera / www.luisarivera.cl

Land has always been a highly contested good. Control over land and related resources reflect the power relations in a country/region, and are an indicator of existing social injustices. At the same time, these resources are central to the rights, livelihoods and identity of small-scale food producers, and they have been at the heart of the food sovereignty movement from its beginning.

This issue of the Nyéléni Newsletter is the second edition this year dedicated to the theme of land. In a historical review, we look at how land-related struggles have evolved over the past decades, starting with demands for agrarian reform to a more comprehensive framing, which asserts people’s and communities’ close and multi-faceted relationships to their territories.

Despite persistent challenges to people’s struggle for land, this issue celebrates important victories and features the ingeniousness of communities around the world to assert their rights and manage their territories. Social organizations are finding ways to include emerging issues such as the challenges of climate change and digital technologies into their struggles. In the light of aggressive digitalization, financialization and authoritarianism, as well as an increasing overlapping of agrarian and ecological questions, we point out the need for movements to revive and refocus their strategies.

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Beyond land – Territory and food sovereignty, no 41

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Voices from the field

Newsletter no 40 - Land grabs and land justice

Voice from the field 1

Agrarian Reform, a response to the current pandemic

Jaime Amorim, Member of the National Coordinating Body of the Brazilian Landless Peoples’ Movement and the International Coordinating Committee of La Vía Campesina

Today the demands of historical struggles like Agrarian Reform have shown themselves to be urgent, current, and necessary. A broad, deep, and people-centered Agrarian Reform that definitively resolves the problem of concentrated land ownership is needed, leaving behind the historical evil of the latifundio (plantation economy) and its entire feudalistic power structure that continues in the service of agribusiness; an Agrarian Reform that ends the models of rural development based on exploitation and export-based agricultural monocultures.

The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of the capitalist model of development, particularly its current conservative, neoliberal model, which destroys local economies and national sovereignty, attacks democracy and the democratic rule of law, promotes wars against nations, destroys public services, rapidly spreads to consume natural and mineral resources, and advances labor laws promoting precarity, all in the name of capitalist development, that converts anything and everything into commodities in the name of economic globalization. As a result, in times of pandemic, we have seen increases in unemployment, hunger, misery, and violence. In an interview with the newspaper Brasil de Fato, João Pedro Stédile, leader of the Brazilian Landless Peoples’ Movement (MST) states that “The Coronavirus pandemic is the most tragic expression of the current stage of capitalism and the civilizational crisis that we are currently experiencing.”

The realization of a broad and radical Agrarian Reform can be a contemporary and modern response to the multiple current world crises: political crisis, environmental crisis, ideological crisis, social crisis, and economic crisis, which is structural in nature and is no longer capable of resolving the problems it itself has created through its exploitation and capitalist accumulation. Nor is the capitalist economic structure capable of responding to the societal challenge of safeguarding the survival of the human species—human existence and the life of the planet itself are under threat. Agrarian Reform with agroecology is necessary for food sovereignty, and in order to leave behind dependence on The Market and the large-scale food distributors.

Voice from the field 2

Land grabbing, land justice and pastoralists

Lorenzo Cotula and Ced Hesse, IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development)

Over the past 15 years, changing commodity prices and skewed public policies fostered a surge in commercial investments across the natural resources sectors – including agriculture, mining and petroleum. Governments of different political stripes saw the wave of investments as an economic opportunity – to promote economic development, create jobs and generate public revenues. But the deals have also prompted public concerns about the development pathway and the types of investment being pursued, and how the costs and benefits were being distributed in practice.

A vast body of research has documented land conflict and dispossession in connection with agribusiness plantation projects and extractive industry operations. More recently, deal making slowed, partly as a result of changing commodity prices. But at the local level, the pressures continue to be felt, particularly in strategic hotspots where minerals, petroleum, fertile soils, freshwater and infrastructure are concentrated. Many abandoned projects left behind a legacy of disputes, and many governments continue to identify the natural resource sectors as a foundation for national development.

Wrongly perceived to be “empty”, or “idle”, pastoral lands have long been a key target for both governments and businesses. In Uganda’s Karamoja region, for example, mining operations have been impinging on pastoral lands.[[https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/03/how-can-we-survive-here/impact-mining-human-rights-karamoja-uganda]] While promised benefits in schooling, hospitals, jobs and water development fail to materialise, pastoralists are losing access to rangelands and mineral deposits and suffering water contamination. Mining also constrains herd mobility and excises key dry season resources. These developments undermine the functionality of pastoralism and its ability to support local livelihoods.

In such contexts, skewed laws often undermine the rights of pastoralists and facilitate dispossession. Although evidence shows that pastoral land use practices are resilient and sophisticated, pastoralists’ resource rights enjoy variable but often limited legal protection in practice – including in countries where legislation or even the constitution formally affirms local rights. For example, many land laws condition actual protection to proof of “productive use”, and skewed notions of productivity undermine pastoralists’ resource claims. Pastoralists’ lack of legal proof of land ownership often compounds the risk of dispossession.

We need policies that support, rather than undermine, pastoral systems, thereby advancing land justice and confronting land grabbing. While the specifics will inevitably depend on context, this often requires recognizing pastoralism as an economically and ecologically sound form of resource use; protecting pastoralists’ collective rights to land, water and grazing; and facilitating herd mobility where this provides the foundation of pastoral livelihoods.

Voice from the field 3

Rural women, grassroots feminism, and land rights

Maria Luisa Mendonça, Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, Brazil

From the perspective of women’s grassroots movements, defending basic rights to land and food is a constant struggle. Around the world, the expansion of agricultural production for export, controlled by large landowners and corporations, continually displaces rural communities. They are forced to leave their lands and means of subsistence, and become vulnerable to labour exploitation in large plantations or in urban centres, facing a condition of poverty and hunger. Monopoly over land and market speculation increases food prices, affecting low-income women disproportionately. The case of Brazil illustrates this situation, since it has one of the highest levels of land concentration in the world. Currently, there is an increasing re-concentration due to international financial speculation in rural land markets. This process increases monopoly over land and expands mono-cropping of commodities for export, causing environmental destruction and displacement of rural communities that produce the majority of food for internal markets.

In this context, the resistance of rural women is crucial to deal with the simultaneous economic, ecological and food crises. Women face specific challenges in times of crisis, since they usually take the main responsibility for social tasks in their households, such as providing food and healthcare. Therefore, neoliberal policies to cut governmental support for social programs and the increase in food prices mean an extra burden for working women. In addition, the displacement of rural communities forces women into the worst jobs on plantations and in urban areas.

Women’s rural movements that advocate for agrarian reform and common use of natural resources, including collective land rights, will be important. Women’s grassroots movements are promoting a new agricultural system based on local cooperatives and ecological food production. There are international human rights mechanisms but it also needs solidarity. Especially in Europe and in the United States there is a growing awareness in public opinion about the need to support small scale, local and ecological agriculture. In order to expand this movement internationally we need to increase solidarity between women’s organizations in the Global North and the Global South, as well as in urban and rural areas in support of affordable production of healthy food to benefit low-income women in rural and urban areas. We need strong alliances to transform our food system.

Abridged from Rural Women and Grassroots Feminism

Voice from the field 4

Farmworkers and the land

Rosalinda Guillén, Community to Community Development, US

As farmworkers, the value of what we bring to a community is blatantly waved aside. We’re invisible. Our contributions are invisible. That’s part of the capitalist culture in this country. We are like the dregs of slavery in this country. They’re holding onto that slave mentality to try to get value from the cheapest labor they can get. If they keep us landless, if we do not have the opportunity to root ourselves into the communities in the way we want, then it’s easy to get more value out of us with less investment in us. It’s as blunt as that. We need to look at farmworkers in this country owning land, where we can produce. That is the dynamic change we need in the food system. We all know Cesar Chavez talked about owning the means of production. I think a lot of farmworkers talk about that.

Farmworkers being a landless people in the United States leaves them in a much more vulnerable position, and in the US this is easily ignored. It doesn’t even come into a discussion on a policy level or a social level. And we can go all the way back to our land being taken from us in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. It’s a legacy of that conquest, and we’ve accepted it. We don’t talk about a way for us not to be landless. What would that look like? I went to the World Social Forum in Brazil and met with the leaders of the landless workers’ movement. We’ve had ongoing conversations since then, and they’ve come to visit us.

What we’ve learned from a recent visit and dialogues with the MST women leadership in São Paulo makes us confident that we are on the right path. Building a strong and bold base in the farmworker community is critical to transforming agriculture and land access in the US. We are constantly learning from the indigenous leadership of Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Continuing dialogues and strategic thinking with them will help create new ways of engaging with consumers, markets and the powerful agricultural lobby.

Other strategies like earning enough money to buy land just aren’t enough. The USDA has programs so that Latino farmworkers can own land. But you end up with maybe a few Latino farmers farming the conventional way. Latino farmworkers become Latino farmers who hire Latino farmworkers and exploit them. That’s wrong. That’s not what we want. We want to change the whole system. So what’s it going to take?

Edited and abridged from an interview with David Bacon in Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons in the United States.

Voices from the field 5

Alternatives and opportunities for land justice in Detroit

Malik Yakini, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, US

Communities are built on the land, and we—as human beings—get most of our food, fibres and materials from it. In our present society, to be without land ownership is to be without power. If we hope to create a society with any possibility for justice, then the question of power distribution and land access is primary. To continue to amass land in the hands of the same individuals is the antithesis of freedom, and it must be struggled against. Traditional capitalistic logic would have it that selling land to the highest-bidder and waiting for “trickle-down” impacts to occur is the only way for Detroit to move forward from its current economic struggles. However, there are many alternative and better ways to build economic resiliency and equity.

It is difficult to imagine how land justice could be reached in the United States, considering the history of land theft and dispossession. How can we have true justice without returning land to the indigenous people that European settlers took it from? How could we find a solution that brings true justice to the people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and brought to this land against their will? Finding true “justice”—steps that make amends for these historical acts—is essentially impossible within current realities. However, there are steps that could move us forward.

In cases where the courts can prove that the United States broke treaties or acted in duplicitous ways, I believe that land should be returned by the US government to Native Americans. I also support reparations for the African Americans who are descendants of those Africans that were enslaved on this land and did much of the labour that created the nation’s prosperity. Additionally, we must cease the confiscation of land owned by African American farmers. At the time of writing (2016), land is still being unfairly seized from local land-owners and government agents are complicit in the process. This must be investigated and stopped.

Additionally, I believe that community land trusts can be established to allow communities to exert their collective voice in what they want to see happen with land in their communities, and to play a role in decisions regarding green spaces, industrial projects, housing, or anything else that they, themselves, envision for the well-being of their communities. It is important to create policies that give the maximum number of people access to land, as opposed to policies that concentrate ownership in the hands of the few, and support for land trusts could play a role in this.

Finally, I believe that in order to create good analyses of land issues we must understand history. A real telling of the real history is important so that governments, non-profit organizations, and community organizations can have an understanding of how we’ve gotten to this point. To do this, we must continue lifting up stories of dispossession, disempowerment, resistance, and building power.

Edited and abridged from Land Justice: Re-Imagining Land, Food, and the Commons in the United States.

Boxes

Newsletter no 40 - Land grabs and land justice

Box 1

Many faces of land grabs

Land grabbing is not new. But what is new is the massive scale of land grabbing that has taken place recently since the 2008 financial and food crises.

“Land grabbing takes on different forms. Women may be expelled from their land due after their husband dies, mining companies expel peasants and small farmers, as well as plantations, military bases, and eco-tourist projects. Investors are not only multinational companies or financial institutions, but may also be local and domestic.” [International Conference of Peasants and Farmers: Stop land grabbing!]

Land grabbing occurs both in the Global South and Global North, driven by local, national, and transnational elites, as well as financial investors and governments. In search for new and increasing profits, large swathes of land are either taken by force or purchased cheaply with the help of local and national governments and elites.

What is at stake is a major shift in who has “the power to decide how the land and water can be used now and in the future.” [ The Global Land Grab: A Primer] The desire to reshape land for the use of profits is leading to a global expansion of industrial agriculture, plantations of different kinds, mining, infrastructure projects, and many other types of uses. Peasant agriculture and food sovereignty are being continuously threatened by dangers as land is lost and as peasant farmers become immersed in global-supply chains.

However, peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, and their communities continue to organize and mobilize to defend their rights to the land and defend an agriculture that puts food, people, and the environment before profits.

Box 2

Securing community land rights in Africa

In a continent where 70% of the population depends on agriculture, secure access to land and natural resources should be an unassailable right for all. But that is far from the case.

Customary governance of farmland, forests and pasturelands by traditional community leaders has been overlain with colonial and post-colonial land laws, leaving rural communities uncertain of their rights to the land they rely upon for their food, livelihoods and cultural integrity.

Recent trends of urbanisation, economic growth, and neo-liberal policies have commodified natural resources and created markets for land as a tradable asset. The financial crisis of 2007/08 and the sudden spike in food and oil prices saw a massive influx of capital into land. Between 2000-2016, African governments signed 422 large-scale land deals with investors, covering ten million hectares. Land grabs have been associated with multiple human rights abuses and social injustices, with thousands of communities forcibly evicted and left destitute. Women and youth, already disadvantaged in land access and control, often suffer the worst impacts.

In response to this crisis, global and continental guidelines were set up to establish principles for good land governance and define policies to protect customary and community land rights, notably the African Union’s Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy and the UN’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land. But these progressive policy frameworks have largely been ignored at the national and local level — where the land decisions are actually made. Thus the tenure rights of rural people across Africa, particularly women, remain weak and fraught with uncertainty.

It is essential that increased political pressure is brought to bear to accelerate the institutionalization of progressive policies to strengthen community land rights. Civil society advocacy needs to target the African Union and the regional economic communities to press their member states to institute the progressive policy guidelines. Crucially, because land rights policies only have real traction at the national and local levels, it is important for civil society to push for stronger national land rights legislation, and hold governments to account at the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.

We need to promote community land use management systems, highlighting the growing evidence that these can successfully improve livelihoods in equitable and sustainable ways whilst protecting and restoring ecosystems.

AFSA’s recent work on land rights includes a continental land policy study Policy Trends and Emerging Opportunities for Strengthening Community Land Rights in Africa, capacity building workshops for civil society and faith-based organisations, a series of African land case studies, and policy advocacy at continental level to promote community land use and management systems.

We must learn from the good land governance principles of our great-grandparents who bequeathed the land to us. We must develop and adopt sustainable land use and management systems that satisfy the needs of all land users: farmers, pastoralists, hunters, fishers, wild fruit collectors, and wildlife.

For more information go to www.afsafrica.org.

Box 3

Climate and land grabbing

From a grassroots perspective, there has always been a strong link between the climate and environmental crises and land grabbing. For example, the causes of the climate crises and land rights violations are the same — an economic system based on endless natural resource extraction where extractive industries including industrial agriculture and plantations are leading contributors to both. At the same time the connection is also more immediate since corporate projects that cause the environmental crises such as mining and agribusiness are also responsible for the most documented killings of land and environmental Human Rights defenders.

Recently there has been a massive increase in interest for land and nature based climate mitigation and adaptation. But unfortunately many of these pose grave threats to peoples’ collective rights over their land and territories with a new wave of land grabbing for conservation projects but also via the commodification and integration of nature into financial markets — what we call the financialization of nature.

A key issue is so called “negative emissions technologies” or NETs which aim to remove carbon from the atmosphere — industrial countries and corporate emitters are now relying on NETs due to their historical failure to reduce emissions as rapidly as needed in line with climate justice demands.

One prominent corporate NETs scheme is to grow and burn massive areas of trees and crops for bioenergy and then store the carbon emitted in underground bunkers. This is known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or BECCS and estimates suggest BECCS could require up to 3000 million hectares of land globally. Other options for NETs are so called ‘natural climate solutions’ or ‘nature based solutions’ which can include forest restoration, reforestation and afforestation. Each of these will have differing impacts on the environment, land and peoples’ rights depending on who controls them and how they are implemented.

Corporations are already seeing nature based solutions as an opportunity to offset their emissions. Offsets allow historically big polluters like oil companies to continue emitting and pass on their responsibility to reduce emissions onto conservation projects in communities in the Global South. Offsetting does not reduce overall emissions and will therefore exacerbate climate impacts on land. It is also unjust as it retains and extends control over territories by those most responsible for climate change. Offsetting amounts to a double land grab because corporations end up controlling land use at two locations — the site they are destroying and the location they are claiming as offset.

On the other hand decentralised solutions to the environmental and land grabbing crises, based on ecological, autonomous control and governance by Indigenous people, forest peoples, small scale food producers of their own land and territories – such as agroecology for food sovereignty and community forest management – are possible and are gaining importance as solutions for environmental justice.

Community forest and territorial management is the best way to preserve ecosystems such as forests, mangroves, wetlands and water bodies. Agroecology cools the climate by removing the need for fossil fuels, recycling nutrients on farms, re-localizing food systems and stopping the destruction of the environment for the production of agricultural commodities for profit. As ever it is vital that land justice and environmental justice movements work together to expose false solutions and demonstrate our own vision for a just future.

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 40 - Land grabs and land justice

The new global land grabbers: Wall Street

Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis farmland has increasingly become an important financial asset for corporate investors, sparking both mass protests by farmer organizations and significant attention from international institutions. But while efforts to commodify farmland are not new, there are some marked differences in the latest chapter of the land grabbing story, posing new challenges, impacting different geographies, and offering opportunities for international and cross-sectoral solidarity.

New geographies, different tactics, same companies

Land grabbing in both the Global South and North is accelerating and spreading, often with financial links to institutional investors from the Global North. North American and European pension funds and university endowments are investing major funds in large-scale agriculture projects in regions such as the Brazilian Cerrado, where communities are displaced, land rights defenders are assassinated, and forests are burned for industrial agriculture [“Harvard and TIAA’s Farmland Grab in Brazil Goes up in Smoke.“]. Meanwhile, family farmers in Europe and North America continue to struggle through severely low prices and cuts to social safety nets, making them vulnerable to land grabbing by many of the same institutional investors.

While the exploitation of weak institutions and corruption is central to violent land grabbing in places like the Brazilian Cerrado, land grabbing in the Global North utilizes well-functioning institutions to underwrite predatory investment tactics. Financial firms like the US retirement fund TIAA and Harvard University’s endowment have spent tens of billions of dollars, much of it from pension funds of public sector workers like teachers, to acquire millions of hectares of farmland in places like Illinois and Mississippi in the United States. While TIAA has become the largest institutional owner of farmland in the world, their business goals are not focused on food production, but rather speculating on land and other essential farm inputs. While likely not explicitly illegal, companies’ targeting of farmers in financial distress is a predatory tactic that leads to farmers selling their only means of livelihood: their land.

Land grabbing in North America may increase dramatically in the coming years. Decades of ongoing institutional discrimination has left many black farmers with informal property titles and insecure land tenure that makes them particularly vulnerable to land speculators and investors [Atlantic]. Indigenous land remains under constant threat. Family farmers in general are struggling in North America, as agribusiness corporations get bigger and more powerful, and half of all farmland in the US and Canada is expected to change hands in the next 15 years as farmers retire. Without action, much of this land may end up in the hands of investors and corporations.

Pathways forward

For decades, farmer organizations and allies have advocated for key policy reforms to address land grabbing in the Global North and South, including: strengthening the land rights of marginalized communities (such as heirs property in the US along with land rights for indigenous communities and landless farmworkers); restricting corporate land ownership; and implementing policies to ensure family farmers receive fair prices to keep them on the land. Workers with pension funds, particularly in North America and Europe, can act in solidarity with farmers and peasants globally by ensuring their money is not fuelling land grabs and risky speculation. Together, these efforts will strengthen rural communities and protect workers’ financial stability.

More information on land grabbing by institutional investors here.

Newsletter no 40 – Editorial

Newsletter no 40 - Land grabs and land justice

Land grabs and land justice

Illustration by Boy Dominguez, the Journal of Peasant Studies special issue on Green Grabbing, 2012

Land is the basis for social life. It is a foundation not only for agricultural production, but also shapes and is shaped by societies’ political, economic, and cultural dynamics: power affects land access, and land access grants power.

Given land’s central role to human society, it is unsurprising that it has also been central to profit accumulation in the expansion of global capitalism. Long distance land grabs – the expropriation, commodification, and privatization of distant lands – have been a central feature of world history for 500 years. Governments have always sought to control land, but since the enclosures of peasants’ land in England and European conquests of indigenous lands starting in 1492, land grabbing has been entwined in the colonial and imperial interests of private capital alongside states. The result: continuing waves of dispossession, genocide, and enslavement of Indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples. So while recent land grabs reflect continuity, contemporary drivers and impacts must also be understood in their current context.

This issue of Nyéléni is the first part of two editions (June and September) dedicated to the theme of land. This issue examines the challenges of the current rush for land by financial and corporate actors, from the local to the global. It assesses current opportunities and maps out strategies and solutions to promote change. Land is a site of contention and injustice; it is also an area of struggle, and advancement, for food sovereignty and justice.

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Land grabs and land justice, no 40

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Voices from the field

Newsletter no 39 - Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

Voices from the field 1

Women play a critical role

Evangeline Gonzales, Progressive Alliance of Fisherfolk in the Philippines (PANGISDA-Women), Philippines

The neoliberal policies of President Duterte’s administration undermine the right to food by pushing for demolition, reclamation, and privatization of land and water. These policies (1) rob us of our right to produce our food, (2) favour importation as the primary approach to meet local food needs, and (3) encourage the monopoly of a few corporations over food production, which gives them the power to dictate prices that in most cases cannot be afforded by the poor. The deprivation of peoples of their right to food is a violation of their right to life. Women are most severely affected by these policies because they have primary responsibility for providing food for their families.

At present, a third of farmers (34.3%) and fisherfolk (34%) are considered poor. This situation is further aggravated by the authoritarianism of the Duterte administration. The government physically, emotionally, and mentally abuses those who oppose Duterte’s policies, as is evidenced by the number of grassroots leaders who have been killed, tortured, criminalized, and intimidated under this administration. The suppression of our right to food, our right to freedom of speech and expression, and our right to a peaceful life reflects the fascism of the Duterte administration.

We need to overcome the fear created by the tyrannical rule of the current government. Women play a critical role. They have the ability, wisdom, and strength to contribute to the struggle against authoritarianism and fascism. Under the Marcos dictatorship, people overcame their fear and united in the struggle to topple the fascist government. Many were killed, jailed, and forcibly disappeared. In order to fight against the Marcos dictatorship, we needed to do patient, diligent, prudent, and determined community organizing and conscientization to build solidarity and resistance.

We need to foster solidarity and resistance against anti-people laws and policies that exacerbate the poverty and hardships we experience. A concrete action to defend food sovereignty is to resist policies like the Rice Tariffication Law and so-called development projects like the Manila Bay Reclamation. We should also share and popularize peoples’ knowledge, practices, and systems on natural resource management. We should support local production and help enrich food sovereignty values and principles. We firmly believe that women will stand up, fight, and struggle for food on the table for their families, for food for their communities, for the peoples’ right to food, for food sovereignty, and for the future.

Voices from the field 2

Walking popular unity to resist conservatism and build food sovereignty

Francisca “Pancha” Rodriguez, ANAMURI, Chile

For decades The National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women of Chile (ANAMURI) has been part of the first line of resistance to neoliberalism, but has also been articulating a social and popular struggle to advance towards the sovereignty of its people. Decades of building an organization and movement, through political training and the deepening of proposals in alliance with various popular sectors in order to reverse the disasters of the Chilean “miracle”.

Today’s “Chile Awakens” cannot be explained without a process of popular articulation that has taken place over the last decade. Since the student mobilizations of 2011, passing through the platform of resistance to the TPP which communicated to the common people the implications of the TPP in our right to food and therefore an understanding that defending our Food Sovereignty is not only a matter for the peasantry but for all peoples.

The strong popular reaction to oppression is the daughter of that process of political accumulation and Food Sovereignty, as an anti-systemic project that confronts cultural, political and religious conservatism, is a central tool to be able to work on popular sovereignty from a specific place and make a difference for the majority.

Voices from the field 3

Principles of democracy underpin peoples’ rights to food

Suraphon Songruk, Organization: Southern Peasant’s Federation of Thailand (SPFT) – Surat Thani, Thailand

Principles of democracy underpin peoples’ rights to food. On the contrary, if a country is ruled by an authoritarian regime, people are deprived of political and civil liberties as well as economic, social and cultural rights, including their right to food. In this context, political and economic powers are concentrated in the hands of an authoritarian or oligarchic regime that upholds monopoly over food productions and systems. Authoritarianism corrodes peoples’ rights and control over their land, forest and water as sources of food. People then lose their rights to access food and define their own food systems.

Food sovereignty promotes human rights and dignity. Peoples’ movements can legitimately use this concept as a means, strategy and goal to assemble like-mind people and movements to extend their negotiating power. People can use food sovereignty to protect their territories and resources as sources of food production. It is a progressive concept that strengthens people’s struggles. It ensures that people have safe food and creates an environmentally friendly system.

Food sovereignty is the foundational principle of people’s sovereignty. Building food sovereignty is the starting point for people to liberate themselves from the corporate control of food. Ultimately, food sovereignty empowers people’s movements and small-scale farmers to resist authoritarianism.

Voices from the field 4

Private companies and the military are working together

Mr. Suon Sorn, Ou Kansaeng village, Samraong commune, Samraong municipality, Oddar Meanchey province, Cambodia

The political dictatorship has implemented an order that allows the military to be based inside our community forests, using the Thai-Khmer border conflict as justification. The military are clearing the forests and selling the lands to powerful high-ranking officials from the government, private companies and other privileged groups. These people steal the forest, water resources and local food systems from communities, undermining their rights to food. In Cambodia’s governance structure, central power and control rest with the military and it is very difficult for people to stand up against the military. Communities’ problems and issues are ignored by the government and peoples’ rights to food, land, water and natural resources are violated.

Private companies and the military are working together: companies give money to the military; the military protects the companies. If we remain dependent on these companies, we will face disaster. Food sovereignty is important to support and strengthen our communities, and resist what the military and companies are imposing. Companies are selling agricultural products that are unsafe, including fertilizers, seeds and other inputs. We need to go back to natural and ecological ways of farming. If we do not support the companies, they will not have profits and will not be able to support the military. We can start small, build community solidarity and sharing, and contribute to changing the system starting from our communities. Cambodian civil society and communities may find “sovereignty” a complicated term to understand at first, but popular education, training, sharing knowledge, and discussions on the principles and values of food sovereignty will bring more people into the movement.

Voices from the field 5

Agriculture in Palestine: Pillar of Steadfastness and Sovereignty

Joseph Schechla and Murad al-Husani de HLRN Housing and Land Rights Network, Palestine

The Palestinian farmer is the first line of resistance against occupation and colonization, far more effective than meagre negotiation. Notably, the majority of Palestine’s West Bank agricultural land (67%) is classified as “C” areas, according to the Oslo Accords. These lands fall under the military occupation’s direct control. The occupiers seek to concentrate the Palestinians in urban centers in the so-called “A” areas (the rump of the Palestinian state) to prevent their presence on the lands.
Israeli forces issue military orders that replace sovereign law–violating The Hague Convention (Article 43)–and impede all aspects of the agricultural sector, preventing Palestinians access to and cultivation of their lands. This causes desertion and degradation of agricultural lands, whereupon Israel imposes the “legal” pretext that the land is “unexploited.” This legal Catch 22 triggers the devolution of land ownership to the (occupying) “state.” The following statistics show the magnitude and ferocity of the Israeli occupation’s attack against indigenous agriculture:

table_en.pdf
This clearly indicates the occupation’s strategy to suppress agriculture as an effective means of resistance against colonization. It is the steadfast hands of farmers who plant the iconic olives in the occupied land Palestine, and their feet that give the land its fertility. The farmers’ breath gives shine and flavor to its fruits, as the Palestinian farmer’s symbiotic link to the land has bestowed its indelible identity.

On the front line

Newsletter no 39 - Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

On the front line

These interviews were made with the special support of Real World Radio

1 – Food Sovereignty resists the rise of fascism because it allows us to organize life in a different way

“By organizing life in a different way — questioning how and what we eat, supporting small farmers, and sharing domestic chores so that they are not only in the hands of women —Food Sovereignty helps us to resist the rise of fascism,” said Miriam Nobre, agronomist and feminist activist with the World March of Women in Brazil.
Among the key threats facing Food Sovereignty, she highlighted: attacks on indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities whose territories are looted; persecution and physical violence against women considered “witches”; and criticism from neo-pentecostal religious figures against the community rituals that allow for knowledge to be passed down between generations, for instance, when sowing maize.

“Attempts by conservative sectors to return to the patriarchal family model are added to the dismantling of public policies that promote young people staying in the countryside, and the alliance between agribusiness, drug trafficking and militarization as constant threats to communities. We must fight for the right of young generations to be farmers and for them to be able to practice agroecology,” said Nobre.
Full piece here.

2 – The fight for Food Sovereignty: a battle against the fascist offensive

Peasant leader Carlos Marentes, a long-standing leader from La Vía Campesina International, tells Real World Radio about the challenges in the struggle for food sovereignty “in these political times of oligarchy and increasingly extreme conservatism, of States leaning to the far-right wing with terrible neofascist positions such as in the US.”

Marentes is member of the organization “Border Agricultural Workers Project” located at the border between US city of El Paso, Texas, and Mexican city Juárez, Chihuahua State. The organization is part of La Vía Campesina International.
The leader explained that his organization works to organize rural workers to fight for food sovereignty. Marentes considered that this struggle takes place in two ways: the work against “this war led by (US President ) Donald Trump and the most regressive sectors experienced in the different countries,” and the rebuilding of peasant economies and the economies of rural and indigenous communities so as to avoid the displacement of human beings.
Full piece here.

3 – Controversial Citizenship Law in India brings new wave of mobilizations against the far-right

A new Citizenship Law that discriminates against Muslims and the poorest sectors of society in India has given way to a wave of massive protests that challenge the far-right wing and that are key in the struggle for land rights.

“They don’t want Muslims, they don’t want tribal (communities), they don’t want Dalits (the “untouchables”, the poorest and most discriminated people in the Indian caste system), they don’t want the poor or working class. All this nationalism, controlling the power in a few hands, needs to be challenged,” said activist Roma Malik, from the organization All India Union of Forest Working People, in an interview with Real World Radio. “And I feel that the land struggle is the fundamental struggle, and women are at the forefront, they are already challenging the fascist government,” she stressed.

The leader believes that the struggle for food sovereignty carried out by peasant organizations must ensure that those who grow food have the right to land and ownership over the means of production.
Full piece here.

4 – Fascist/nationalist discourses are taking advantage of the crisis in the European countryside to promote neoliberal policies

Andoni García, a farmer from the Basque Country and member of the Coordination Committee of La Vía Campesina Europe (ECVC) warned in an interview with Real World Radio about the use of “nationalist sentiment” in right-wing political discourse as a feature of the rising conservatism and fascism on the continent.

Contrary to other European countries, “the Spanish government does not hide the fact that they are neoliberal or that they do not support public policies, but they take advantage of the feeling of abandonment and impotence in the countryside and the lack of responses to the crisis to co-opt farmers and build xenophobic discourse against migrants that come to Europe to work”, said García.

The ECVC also warns about the criminalization suffered by farmers (especially cattle farmers) by some animal welfare movements and announced that the conflicts between urban and rural areas will be addressed in the next assembly of LVC Europe, planned for April this year.

To resist the rise of fascism, García said that we must raise awareness of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and that the left wing parties must think about how to address peasant problems because they are not giving an adequate response.
Full piece here.

5 – The Right to say NO

Rural women across Southern African are resisting against the patriarchal advance of militia groups and dictatorial governments in some countries of the region, says activist Mercia Andrews, regional coordinator for the Rural Women’s Assembly.

“The Rural Women’s Assembly joins hands with farmers’ movements, with peasant movements, and we have joined campaigns that say we have the right to say NO: We have the right to determine the nature of development in these areas. We have the right to say NO to mining, NO to agroindustry. We have the right to say NO to the way in which forests are being cut down,” stressed Andrews.

The actions of the Rural Women’s Assembly focus on defending the commons, against the invasion of multinational corporations, and land/resource grabbing. The defense of food sovereignty and native seeds is at the center of their struggles and campaigns.
Full piece here.

Boxes

Newsletter no 39 - Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

Box 1

Violence and capitalism

Violence and capitalism are no strangers to each other. Indeed, they are twins. The necessary conditions for the emergence of capitalism in the 15th to the 16th centuries were the violent expulsion of peasants from common lands in Europe and colonial plunder, genocide, and enslavement in the global South. This toxic brew resulted in what Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of wealth that produced capitalism.

Today, in what has been described as “accumulation by dispossession,” the drive for profit globally is witnessing the deployment of force to turn into commodities the commonly held lands and resources that have long resisted the process. Whether they are indigenous people in the Amazons, smallholders in Honduras, the Maasai people protecting their lands from government-sponsored land-grabbing in the Serengeti in Tanzania, or the millions of Adivasis or tribal people defending forest lands in India, the devastating combination of capitalist expansion and state action in support of it is displacing millions of people.

The prominent use of force does not only occur when capitalism expands and needs to throw out smallholders and indigenous people that are in the way. When people are able to use democratic institutions to achieve reforms peacefully, the capitalist and state elites often resort to extra-constitutional means to reverse the process and preserve their economic and political hegemony. The outcome is often a massacre, as in Indonesia in 1965-66, where efforts at land reform and peaceful parliamentary change provoked the elites, led by the military, to slaughter from 500,000 to one million people. In Chile, the military drowned the Popular Unity’s peaceful road to socialism in blood in the seventies, killing thousands of people. While the violence in Chile and Indonesia was terrible in both urban and rural areas, it was especially vicious in the countryside and, in Chile, especially so against the indigenous Mapuches, who were defending their communal lands.

Today, capitalist expansion, commodification, and the preservation of systems of capitalist political hegemony are combining to promote a new wave of global violence. In the Philippines, drug users are being used as a scapegoat for the country’s ills stemming from the marriage of neoliberal economics and extreme agrarian inequality, with some 27,000 of them having been subjected to extra-judicial execution in the three and a half years that the Duterte government has been in power. In India, Muslims have been singled out as the “enemies” of “Hindu civilization” by the BJP, which has wed neoliberal economics to Hindu nationalism, leading to mob violence against them, including gruesome cases of lynching.

It is unfortunate that large numbers of the middle classes have bought into the scapegoating rhetoric and ideology of right-wing forces. This middle-class—and even working class–support for right-wing racist forces is also becoming prominent in the global North, where it is being directed at migrants who are being scapegoated for the loss of jobs, inequality, and poverty created by corporate-driven globalization. There is the very serious danger that anti-migrant mass sentiment might be transformed by demagogues like Donald Trump, the Brexiteers, Marine Le Pen in France, and Viktor Orban in Hungary into movements like those of classical fascism that ravaged Europe in the 1930’s.

More than ever, the demands of justice and peace necessitate the creation of the broadest possible front against capitalist and fascist violence.

Box 2

Against consercativsm! We live to resist, we march to transform!

Conservatism is essential for the rise of the extreme right. Authoritarian governments around the world promote the ideal of the heteropatriarchal family to reinforce the sexual division of labor and the responsibility of women in the reproductive work of life. Far-right forces attack the right to abortion, pursue dissident sexualities, promote violence and harassment against women, and institutionalize racism. It is an anti-feminist agenda that, in some countries and territories, is associated with anti-western discourse. In others, it classifies as “disorder” the actions of women organized in grassroots movements. What these regimes have in common is that they exercise brutal violence against women who lead resistance processes.

Capitalism advances on women’s bodies, on their work and on nature, strengthening corporate power and expanding militarization. In many parts of the world, women are at the front line of resistance. They have demonstrated a great capacity for mobilization: the challenge is to expand permanent and popular organization. This requires confronting authoritarian capitalism and building processes capable of reorganizing the economy, putting the sustainability of life at the center. And to confront nationalism with internationalism and solidarity among peoples.

For women who are under attack today, building alliances is more important than ever. For neoliberalism is diverse, fragmenting identities and depoliticizing historical struggles. Feminism is not for the few, it is a project of equality, freedom and autonomy for all, which will only be possible with a systemic transformation, with sovereignty and self-determination of peoples. Women are recognized in the resistance that saves lives and guarantees a collective community. Therefore, the motto of the World March of Women in the 5th International Action, in this 2020, is Live to resist, we march to transform!

Box 3

Social networks: Promoting hate, maximising profit and social control

Fake news, data manipulation, hate speech, racism and misogyny. It is increasingly evident that the uses and abuses of the extreme right in digital social networks are part of their power strategy. Not only to win elections, but also to promote the normalization of violence that authoritarian capitalism needs to prevail in order to destroy democratic values.

Those uses and abuses take place in corporate infrastructure to which a significant part of the population is connected, such as Facebook. They are not public or democratic spaces. On the contrary, the algorithms and scopes are defined by a company that practices opacity and that is enriched by the collection and manipulation of data. The functioning of the system is not revealed, nor is it in dispute, and we users have to ‘accept’ the applicable terms and conditions, even though we know that Facebook does experiments, manipulating feelings, needs and opinions, and promoting extremism.

Data is converted into capital. And data is not there to be harvested, but instead is a product of people’s lives and relationships. Whether through phone apps or sensors in cities, coordinated mass surveillance between corporations and states is part of maximizing profits. And, as such, it is not isolated but systemic.

Racism and hatred of the poor and women do not multiply only as an idea, but are in daily life generating a social fascism. The virtual is nourished by the concrete lives of people who daily battle against living conditions with increasing precariousness and violence. The virtual has a material base, which drives and needs extractivism, energy and specific territories to store and process so much data.

The construction of counter-hegemony requires much more than a good communication strategy on social networks. It is a long-term challenge that involves expanding our anti-capitalist alliances with those who are fighting digitally, facing opacity and building free and non-proprietary technologies .

More info on this theme in the Nyéléni newsletter num 37 on The Digitalization of the food system.

Box 4

Peasant food production: a thorn in the side of the capitalist system

The challenges and potential of the struggle for food sovereignty against the global conservative wave

A substantial part of the battle against the capitalist system is fought in the countryside, specifically, around how food is produced. The rise of the extreme right wing in different parts of the world worsens the serious threats and human rights violations already suffered by rural workers.

In Brazil, a global leader in terms of violence against rural people, 1678 peasants were murdered between 1985 and 2003 according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT); moreover, Global Witness warned that 2017 was the worst year on record: 207 peasants, community members, indigenous peoples and environmental activists were murdered.

In the past years, agribusiness became the main cause of conflicts in the countryside. Large agroindustrial transnational corporations, the weak role of States (due to lack of action or collusion) and corporate abuses in each country reinforced an already deadly machinery, reaffirming the control of capital over natural resources with the new global fascist wave.

“We will not achieve food sovereignty if we can’t recover control over our communities and territories, if we can’t take back control over food from the corporations,” warned peasant Carlos Marentes, a long-standing leader from La Vía Campesina (LVC) and a representative of the organization “Border Agricultural Workers Project” from North America. Neofascism can be seen in the alliance between agribusiness-drug trafficking-militarization, which threatens and loots communities, dismantles public policies and attempts to go back to the patriarchal family model to prevent women and children from being key actors of system change, stressed feminist agronomist Miriam Nobre (World March of Women Brazil).

In Southern Africa, in response to repressive regimes and traditional authorities which control territories and make decisions to the detriment of peoples´ livelihoods, Mercia Andrews (from the Rural Women´s Assembly) said: “It’s important that organizations, peasant movements, farmers movements resist this level of violation of their rights. The Rural Women´s Assembly in many cases joins hands with farmers movements, with peasant movements and we have joined campaigns that say we have the right to say NO.”

In Europe, the fascist movement promotes xenophobia and a “false protectionism”, warned Andoni García, from the Coordination Committee of La Vía Campesina Europe. “Food Sovereignty implies an end to the fascist movement because it speaks of rights, of public policies based on the right to protect local agriculture, peasant culture, and these ways of living, without them conflicting with individual and collective rights, in solidarity, rather than in conflict,” he added.

Roma Malik also made reference to this false protectionism, which often relates to exacerbated nationalism. She also highlighted how important it is for the struggle for food sovereignty in peasant organizations to be linked to the right to land. “Companies are coming in a big way, they are building dams, power stations, privatizing the rivers, cutting forests, killing the people, evicting people from their homelands. So, in a way, the struggle for land rights is a struggle against fascist governments also,” she said.

Meanwhile, Marentes added that food sovereignty is “one of the aims to face this war against poor people that is related to a more vicious, predatory system determined to ensure that multinational corporations control food production and the means of production, as well as nature.” The key is in the work to organize, to raise awareness to defend the right to life, to food, and protect natural resources.

To read the full interviews check the section “On the front line” of this newsletter at page 4

In the spotlight

Newsletter no 39 - Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

A brief look at contemporary political trends

“Whether one calls them fascist, authoritarian populist, or counter-revolutionary, there is no doubt that angry movements contemptuous of liberal democratic ideas and practices and espousing the use of force to resolve deep-seated social conflicts are on the rise globally.” Walden Bello, Counter Revolution, the Global Rise of the Far Right, Page 3. Fernwood Publishing, 2019.

Facing down, resisting and living under extreme authoritarian, violent regimes are not new to most of us: the histories of many societies/nations are scarred by periods when political leaders used a combination of personal charisma, religious fervour, economic insecurity, fear of “others,” and promises to restore (usually imagined) glorious legacies, to impose political regimes that privilege particular classes, faiths and social groups while clamping down on the fundamental rights, freedoms and dignity of others. At numerous moments in colonial, apartheid, fascist, military, dictatorial and even democratic regimes, we have witnessed how the toxic synergy of interests driven by class, culture, religion and ideology can produce oppression, extreme violence and terror.

More recently, we have seen the rise of authoritarian regimes that seem to be consequences of the structural crises created by neoliberal capitalism and paradoxically, of the response by left forces and progressive peoples’ movements against the onslaught of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism and corporate-led globalisation not only failed in delivering social and economic well-being for the majority, but also destroyed the environment, weakened workers’ and small-scale food producers’ rights, undermined working class organisations, entrenched inequality, and increased hunger and malnutrition. Lower and middle classes saw their savings devalue and debts increase because of financial deregulation and prioritization of corporate over public interests. People mobilized to demand change, but two important trends enabled right wing forces to hijack these demands: 1) left political forces in many countries made uneasy alliances with ruling powers to gain footholds in the political system; 2) right wing forces used their resources to build the Post-truth era, where reality is deliberately distorted to influence public opinion and social behaviours, and strengthen the power of national-global elites.

Allied with ruling forces, left political forces were unable to show how their own programmes and visions for change were different. This left political and ideological fields open to capture by right wing forces who harnessed the anxiety, disillusionment, anger and desperation of the millions of people battered by the recurring financial-economic crises that have become hallmarks of global capitalism and corporate globalisation.

Although right wing forces presented themselves as deeply critical of the prevailing system, they shifted the blame for economic and social crises away from neoliberalism, towards particular sectors of society, naming them by economic class, social grouping and religion. This helped them to gather support from a wide swathe of classes and social groups–including the middle and wealthy classes–and build movements around prejudice and hate, while leaving the capitalist economic system unchanged. Although each regime is a product of particular historical conditions in its region, the above characteristics appear in varying degrees and nuances across them.

Despite rhetoric about addressing worsening social-economic conditions, these regimes remain committed to capitalism and neoliberalism. Since assuming political power, the conditions of rural and urban working classes have not improved, and the promised savings, incomes and jobs have not materialized. But, corporations and elites close to the ruling regimes have continued to win contracts for resource extraction, large infrastructure projects, industrial agriculture and property development.

Many right wing forces came to power through elections and claim democratic mandates to enact policies and laws that serve their agendas. However, they are opposed to liberal democracy, where all citizens, regardless of class, culture or religion enjoy the same rights, liberties and equality before law, and where robust oppositions provide checks and balances. Threats of political opposition from parties and social organisations are neutralized by dissolving some parties and making opportunistic alliances with others, and persecuting dissenters in the media and/or legally. Democratic procedures are used to build majoritarian societies where those identified as minorities face increasing disenfranchisement, marginalization and insecurity.

The reinvention of truth and facts – through the construction of narratives that present fictitious realities – are crucial strategies for the new regimes. These include: the decline of the nation and need for strong leaders to return it to greatness; racial, religious and gender superiority; threats to national security, identity and sovereignty; improvement in economic-social conditions, etc. These narratives are crucial for fascist regimes to be able to consolidate power, and are presented to the public through mainstream news, social media, text books, films, entertainment and public service programmes. They provide rationales for criminalizing and unleashing violence on those who are presented as enemies/threats (particular communities, migrants, rights activists, lawyers, journalists, movement leaders, etc.), and keep the populace in a state of uncertainty and anxiety, justifying the need for a “strong hand” to hold the nation together.

Authoritarian/fascist regimes threaten food sovereignty by their opposition to peoples’ rights, equality, diversity, local autonomy, cooperation and solidarity. They support the appropriation and control of lands, water, seeds, natural wealth, public resources and food systems by transnational capital. They rob local communities of their agency, and suppress voices and actions attempting to build peoples’ democracies from the ground up.

More info on the situation in Asia here.

Newsletter no 39 – Editorial

Newsletter no 39 - Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence

Illustration: Rosanna Morris, rosannamorris.com

In every region of the world, we are seeing the rise and consolidation of social, political and cultural forces that are racist, xenophobic, misogynist, male chauvinist, homo-lesbo-transphobic, anti-pacifist, antidemocratic and totalitarian. Variously called fascist, authoritarian populist, dictatorships and even democracies, these forces are identifiable by their opposition to pluralism, racial, religious and cultural diversity, social equality, gender autonomy, and secularism. They sway and control public opinion through discourses that are made up of bits of information cleverly stitched together to portray their own versions of reality. They demonize inconvenient truths as “fake news” and make up their own facts based not on objective reality, but on the ideological values of their respective movements.

All political regimes are authoritarian in varying degrees. However, the authoritarian/fascist regimes that have risen over the past decade are notably dangerous because of the support they have from astonishingly large cross sections of their populations and transnational capital, giving them the power to polarize and fracture societies, and reverse important, hard won gains in human rights, civil liberties, and secular, democratic governance.

In this edition of the Nyéléni newsletter, we examine the implications of these political-social configurations for the food sovereignty movement. We especially highlight how food sovereignty is itself a strategy of resistance against the dangerous wave of extreme authoritarianism sweeping the world.

Friends of the Earth International and Focus on the Global South

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Food sovereignty in an era of authoritarian and fascist resurgence, no 39

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