Newsletter no 26 - Land reform and food sovereignty

Editorial : Land Reform and Food Sovereignty
A wave of financial capital is crashing down upon the resources held in rural corners of the planet in the world today. In this process we see a financialization of rural goods and assets along with a (re)capitalizing of capitalistic extractive efforts through agribusiness. This is especially apparent in terms of monocrop exports, forestry plantations, agrofuels, mining companies and in the construction of megaprojects like dams, highways and (...)

Marabá Declaration International Conference of Agrarian Reform
Marabá, Pará, Brasil, 13- 17 April 2016
There are ever more cases of land-, forest- and water-grabbing, attacks against democracy and popular will, political prisoners, etc. in Latin America, Asia Africa, Europe and North America. In the current historical period, we are witnessing the emergence of an alliance between financial capital, transnational corporations, imperialism, broad sectors within national states (almost without (...)

Box 1 - Classic Land Reform vs... In the past, land reforms were won in numerous countries because large estates were seen as growth-inhibitors and unproductive. Landowners focused their efforts on high production and low investment and generally failed to use even half of the land they held. This was obviously unjust : a select few had vast swathes of underworked land while millions of families were deprived of any at all.
Class alliances were forged between peasant farmers and domestic (...)

Voices from the field
The struggle for the planet is part of peoples’ daily struggle for life
María Everarda, Guatemala, Conavigua
My name is María Everarda de León. I am 42 years old and was born in a town called Maya Achí. I work with the national coordinating committee for the widows of Guatemala (CONAVIGUA), a part of La Vía Campesina. We don’t own land. Instead, we rent plots where we sow beans, maize and vegetables. Today, climate change has made production very difficult. We believe this (...)