HARARE: OCTOBER 11, 2019:
La Via Campesina and its allies around the world celebrate the
_INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION FOR PEOPLES' FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND AGAINST
TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS_ on 16 October each year.
We celebrate this day to remind people that it is only possible to end
hunger in the world with food sovereignty and peasant agroecology. The
current economic and agricultural policies only perpetuate the food
crisis and the destruction of biodiversity, promoting agribusiness and
expelling peasants from their territories. The direct result of these
policies is land grabbing and seed control by a handful of
multinationals, which flood international markets with uniform, toxic
and nutritionally poor food products while increasing poverty in rural
areas.
Food sovereignty allows the peoples of the world to design their own
agri-food policies, by promoting the production and distribution of
peasant products to local markets, according to the demands and needs of
the populations, while respecting the environment and the rights of
peasants and consumers.
We celebrate this day as global climate change intensifies and manifests
itself more and more, hunger has been on the rise since 2018 affecting
hundreds of millions of people, especially in rural areas.
The perpetrators of this crisis, we call multinational corporations,
convert suffering and human lives into money and drive rural populations
to despair. The world is seeing the violations of human and peasant
rights that these companies commit: dispossession of land, contamination
of water, looting of resources and land, poisoning of food with
agrotoxics, and even the murder of peasant and indigenous activists and
leaders. We have seen them burn Amazonia and forests in Africa. We have
seen how a private court overturned the Ecuadorian court's decision
against the oil giant Chevron, responsible for an environmental disaster
in the country's Amazon region, and then the IMF just imposed an
austerity policy on the Ecuadorian people.
We, peasants, men and women, indigenous peoples, rural populations,
agricultural workers, in urban and rural areas, have long been claiming
that we have the solution. Food sovereignty is able to cool the planet
and bring relief to the climate crisis. Peasant agroecology is able to
end famines, feed urban and rural inhabitants with healthy food, feed
the soil with organic matter and preserve biodiversity.
The international peasant movement has fought for almost two decades for
the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Others
Working in Rural Areas since full respect for peasants' rights
eliminates the conditions that allow the exploitation, repression and
displacement of hundreds of millions of peasants and rural populations
and saves them from poverty.
MAJOR MOBILIZATIONS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND CITIZENS ARE ALSO TAKING
PLACE ALL OVER THE WORLD IN OCTOBER.
We join all initiatives against the power of multinationals and for the
food sovereignty of peoples. We will be in Geneva in the process of the
United Nations Binding Treaty on Multinationals and Human Rights to
demand the rights of peoples and an end to impunity for multinationals.
We will be in Rome to propose our solutions to the Committee on Food
Security. We will also be in Palestine, at the International Conference
for Food Sovereignty. We will be everywhere with young people mobilised
against climate change. We will say everywhere that agroecology and food
sovereignty are the way not only to solve these crises, but also the way
to prosperity in cities and the countryside.
ACT NOW!
This October 16, we call for action by organised social movements,
unions, universities, the media and people's governments that prioritise
their peoples. We call for increased pressure to enforce farmers' rights
and for public policies based on food sovereignty and not on the
interests of the global market and agribusiness. There can be no food
sovereignty without respect for peasant rights. There can be no food
sovereignty without agrarian reform and social justice, organise actions
in the territories, denunciation mobilisations, forums, seminars,
farmers' fairs, film screenings, all expressions are important to
demand the implementation of peasant rights through land reform and
social justice.
Send us all the actions planned for this day to our address
lvcweb(a)viacampesina.org, we want to make them visible on our global
action map. Also send us articles, audio, photos and videos of all the
actions to be published on our website and on ViaCampesinaTV.
Follow us on our social networks:
#FoodSovereignty, #PeasantsRightsNow, #LaViaCampesina
LET US GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE, LET US GLOBALIZE HOPE
WE FEED OUR PEOPLES AND BUILD THE MOVEMENT TO CHANGE THE WORLD!
