La Via Campesina: Day of Action Against Violence Towards Women
by La Vía Campesina
LA VIA CAMPESINA: DAY OF ACTION AGAINST VIOLENCE TOWARDS WOMEN [1]
_LA VIA CAMPESINA PRESS RELEASE _
On this International Day of Action Against Violence Towards Women, La
Via Campesina is again denouncing the structural violence that women
have to confront each day and that has been systematically silenced,
made to appear natural, and rendered invisible by patriarchal capitalist
society.
In 2008, in its Vth Conference, La Via Campesina launched the Global
Campaign to End Violence Towards Women, both as an urgent appeal for a
social, cultural, and political change in peoples, in communities, and
in organisations, and as a challenge to society as a whole to effect a
cultural transformation in order to overcome the relations of inequality
between men and women.
Violence and oppression against women existed in pre-capitalist
societies, but it is since the onset of capitalism that violence in all
its forms - political, economic, physical, and pyschological - has
intensified. Today, violence against women is found among all social
classes, generations, and sexual orientations, affecting both urban
women and rural women.
For La Via Campesina, the violence experienced nowadays by rural women
is directly related to agribusiness and to capitalist production
methods, which exploit and dispossess peasant women who have,
historically, guaranteed Food Sovereignty for their Peoples, and who are
the caretakers of ancestral knowledge -both with respect to food
production and to biodiversity conservation.
Agribusiness is the strategy of patriarchal capitalism in the
countryside, one which ignores the essential role of women in peasant
agriculture. Neo-liberal structural adjustment policies have exacerbated
the conditions of oppression, discrimination, and increasing violence
suffered by rural women.
This November 25th, 2014, women across the world are calling for a day
of mobilisation and denunciation, challenging ourselves to strengthen
our forms of resistance and struggle, in order to make a definitive
break with the silence imposed by capitalist patriarchal hypocrisy and
to establish new human relations.
Our political project as La Via Campesina is to construct a new vision
of society that is based on the principles of respect, equality,
justice, solidarity, peace and freedom, and which is linked to the
struggles for land, water, seeds, comprehensive land reform, Food
Sovereignty with gender justice, and for the dignity of rural peoples.
_WOMEN SOWING STRUGGLE AND HOPE,_
_FOR FEMINISM AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY_
See the new set of post cards of the campaign [2] : you can print and
send them around
More videos about Women on Via Campesina TV [3].
Publication of the Campaign to stop violence againts Women [4]
Links:
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[1]
http://www.viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/women-ma...
[2] http://tv.viacampesina.org/-RADIO-PICTURES-?lang=en
[3] http://tv.viacampesina.org/La-Via-Campesina-End-violence?lang=en
[4]
http://www.viacampesina.org/downloads/pdf/en/Cartilha-VCSudam%C3%A9rica-i...
10 years, 1 month
Nutrition is not for profit: Second International Conference on Nutrition
by La Vía Campesina
NUTRITION IS NOT FOR PROFIT: SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
NUTRITION [1]
_(Rome November 20th, 2014)_
La Via Campesina and URGENCI, jointly with other Social movements,
gathered in Rome for the Second International Conference on Nutrition
(ICN2), where Member States of FAO and WHO are discussing and adopting a
framework for action on nutrition. This event, organised jointly by FAO
and WHO, is happening 22 years after the first ICN, 22 years in which no
improvements have been made by the international community; 22 years in
which the private sector has captured nutrition as a business
opportunity to provide a never-ending list of "nutrient-enriched" and
GMO pseudo-solutions to consumers. Transnational corporations have no
place in trade agreements or our food systems!
As movements of small-scale farmers and consumers, LVC and URGENCI feel
the need to remind the Member States that the problem of malnutrition is
not just a technical issue, but a systemic one. It is not possible to
have healthy and culturally appropriate nutrition without food
sovereignty. Teikei, the original Japanese CSA movement was founded in
the 1970s as Japanese housewives' answer to the problems caused by
industrial heavy metal pollution of their food. These issues, as well as
those of land-,water- and ocean grabbing, mono-cropping and pollution
from agrochemicals have become much worse in the last 40 years.
As Marciano Da Silva, a member of the movement of small-scale farmers in
Brazil says "The people of the world could all be well fed, if peasant
agricultural systems were protected by States. Nutrition can not exist
without food in all its diversity"
Tianle Chang, of the Beijing Farmers' Market says that " ...in China,
there is an emerging movement of small organic producers working with
local consumers to create sustainable food communities together.
Initiatives like farmers' markets and Community Supported Agriculture
(CSA) have proved to be good solutions to nutrition while supporting the
health of environment and communities"
The issue of building and defending sustainable local food systems is
central for producers and consumers alike. Agroecology combined with
alternative food distribution systems and economic change are central to
achieving nutrition, the right to food and food sovereignty!
Nutrition should be grouped together with food and jointly covered under
the auspices of the CFS (Committee on World Food Security) within the
inclusive framework of the CFS. Public Institutions and States' policy
on food and nutrition must also remain separate and independent from all
private business interests.
_NUTRITION IS NOT FOR PROFIT!_
LVC and Urgenci press contacts in Rome:
Judith Hitchman (EN, FR), Advocacy officer, Urgenci International
Network +(33)680600391
Andrea Ferrante (EN, ES, FR, IT), La Via Campesina, This email address
is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view
it. +39 3480189221
Links:
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[1]
http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/sustainable-...
10 years, 1 month