Call to Action: There is no Future without Food Sovereignty, Now is the Time to Transform!
by La Via Campesina
CALL TO ACTION: THERE IS NO FUTURE WITHOUT FOOD SOVEREIGNTY, NOW IS THE
TIME TO TRANSFORM!
Food Sovereignty is Land, Water, Seeds, Bread and Solidarity!
_CALL TO HUMANITY TO TAKE ACTION FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY_
(Harare, September 23, 2021) On October the 16th, we celebrate 25 years
of envisioning food sovereignty. This 25-year celebration and
reflections are happening at a time when the planet and humanity is
facing unprecedented crisis upon crisis. Climate change (heat waves,
droughts, floods etc.) ravages the planet and biodiversity loss at
catastrophic levels. Pollution is pervasive and chokes both terrestrial
and marine life. Hunger, poverty and inequality are on the rise.
COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the already dire situation. We urgently
need to transform our way of life to adapt and survive. Now is the
moment to globally coordinate people's actions in rural and urban to
build equitable and healthy food systems. Food sovereignty is the
solution to transform food systems, end hunger and malnutrition and to
cool the earth, to preserve biodiversity, and respect the rights of
peasants and workers! There is no future without food sovereignty.
The global food systems dominated by big businesses have not only failed
but cause most of the problems and crisis we face today. The recent big
business initiative at the UN Food Systems Summit to entrench their
interests in and capture global food governance spaces and shape policy
must be resisted. This coming October we call on our members, allies,
friends, activists and other likeminded civil society organisations to
mobilise for food sovereignty and against corporate capture of food
governance systems. The people, the planet and not profits should come
first in all our relations.
We, the peasants, men and women, indigenous peoples, rural populations,
agricultural workers, the youth in urban and rural areas, have the
solution -FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND PEASANT AGROECOLOGY.
LET'S UNITE TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE!
We can only build and guarantee a future with food sovereignty if we
unite to transform our society by doing the following:
* Take action in your farm to make food sovereignty practices visible
to the world (exchange seeds, organize farmers' fair for local food
producers and consumers etc.).
* Adopt a seed(s) and start growing own food to strengthen local
production. Share a photo(s) of this action with the
_#NOFUTUREWITHOUTFOODSOVEREIGNTY_
* Put pressure on governments and local authorities to prioritize food
sovereignty in public policies and implement the UN Declaration of
Rights of Peasants and other people working in Rural Areas (UNDROP).
* Engage in direct action, starting October 1st, to expose the
agribusinesses and transnational corporations that affect our way of
life and violate our rights and call them out in our communities. Resist
corporate capture of our food system! Share a photo(s) of your action.
* In light of the worsening climate crisis, let's engage in more
awareness activities on social media to give visibility our solution
"_#AGROECOLOGYCOOLSTHEEARTH"_
* Solidarity through food donations: Let´s share the food we produce
with those in need in our communities.
* Write and draw for food Sovereignty (see Call for Artists [1] and
for Writers [2])
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Send us your actions, images, posters and articles to our email:
lvcweb(a)viacampesina.org, tag us on social media twitter (@via_campesina
[3]), Instagram (@la_via_campesina_oficial [4]) and Facebook
(@viacampesinaOFFICIAL [5]), and make visible globally our collective
mobilization for a better society based on food sovereignty.
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FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IS LAND, WATER, SEEDS, BREAD AND SOLIDARITY!
_#NOFUTUREWITHOUTFOODSOVEREIGNTY_ _#FOODSOVEREIGNTYNOW_
Facebook [6]Twitter [7]WhatsApp [8]Telegram [9]Email [10]
Links:
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[1]
https://viacampesina.org/en/artists-for-food-sovereignty-call-for-solidar...
[2]
https://viacampesina.org/en/call-for-articles-twenty-five-years-of-envisi...
[3] https://twitter.com/via_campesina
[4] https://www.instagram.com/la_via_campesina_official/
[5] https://www.facebook.com/viacampesinaOFFICIAL
[6]
https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fviacampesi...
[7] https://viacampesina.org/#twitter
[8] https://viacampesina.org/#whatsapp
[9] https://viacampesina.org/#telegram
[10] https://viacampesina.org/#email
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The UN Food Systems Summit is hogwash. It is a threat to peoples’ food sovereignty.
by La Via Campesina
THE UN FOOD SYSTEMS SUMMIT IS HOGWASH. IT IS A THREAT TO PEOPLES' FOOD
SOVEREIGNTY
La Via Campesina's Press Statement | September 22nd 2021, Harare:
La Via Campesina is among scores of other social movements of organized
small-scale food producers, workers and indigenous people boycotting the
United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), slated to take place in New
York - September 23rd, 2021. Peoples' movements are united in condemning
the illegitimacy of this 'summit' and in denouncing the attempt by
transnational corporations to usurp the institutional spaces within the
United Nations.
Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples' Mechanism (CSM) that comprise
social movements including La Via Campesina has pointed out that the
pre-summit events held in July are now erecting parallel governance
structures. UNFSS is undermining the existing institutions and
multilateral bodies responsible for developing global policy frameworks
for food and agriculture. Several member states are left wondering what
this Summit intends to achieve and whether its outcomes would be binding
upon developing national policy frameworks. It will override the
existing institutions such as the Committee on World Food Security (CFS)
and forebodes a corporate takeover of the global food governance.
For sure, the global food systems must undergo a radical overhaul.
Rising hunger, ecological harm from food production, including
deforestation, soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, decimated
fisheries, polluted waters, growing rural poverty, the continued
repression of peasant and indigenous movements worldwide, displacement
and climate crises - all point to the need for urgent transformation.
The demand to transform the global food system and skew it in favour of
small-scale food producers has been a long-standing one, stated first
during the Civil Society Forum in Rome in 1996.
Yet when the Secretary-General of the United Nations announced two years
ago that a Food Systems Summit (FSS) would be held in late 2021, the
news was puzzling. Why did the Secretary-General initiate this food
summit in partnership with the World Economic Forum - a private sector
body - when the FAO hosted all the previous editions after specific
mandates from the Members States? To leave no further doubt about the
corporate interests driving the Food System Summit, the Special Envoy
appointed for the Summit, Agnes Kalibata, is the president of Alliance
for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). This Gates/Rockefeller funded
agency is pushing high input, high tech agriculture and GMO seeds.
Founded in 2006, this Alliance has worked in 13 African countries to
increase productivity for 30 million smallholder farming households by
encouraging industrial farming adoption. Despite AGRA's promises of
doubling crop productivity and incomes while halving food insecurity by
2020, backed by billions of donor dollars, it has been unable to provide
documentation of delivering on these goals [1]. AGRA's failures on the
continent and Ms Kalibata's apparent conflicts of interest in her role
as UNFSS Special Envoy resulted in broad resistance from social
movements and civil society.
THE FARCE OF 'INCLUSIVENESS.'
The Summit organizers follow a multi-stakeholder approach as against a
multilateral arrangement. Multilateral Summits, based on human rights,
with transparent decision-making processes and accountability
mechanisms, are meant to prioritize the voices of rights-holders and
hold governments responsible for upholding those rights. But this "UN
Food Systems Summit" is based on the idea of "multi-stakeholder" -
treating all stakeholders as equal, without considering power imbalances
or their position in the system. This fiction of equality leaves the
powerful both unchallenged and unaccountable, hiding or ignoring any
conflicts of interest. By conflating private corporate interests with
the public interest, it overrides and erases the latter. To advertise
"inclusiveness", it has proliferated a dizzying array of platforms,
dialogues, consultations, committees, documents and forums for
participation. Private citizens and governments are being drawn into
these processes. Some of these are open, but many are for invited
participants, bypassing and undermining autonomous, democratic
organizations while favouring hand-picked individuals. The entire
process lacks transparency and legitimacy. Who is making decisions? On
what grounds? Who is accountable? To whom?
THE GUISE OF PROGRESSIVE LANGUAGE
In July this year, La Via Campesina was among the members of the CSM
that co-organized counter mobilizations - to call out the
unacceptability that has come to define this year's food systems summit.
A wide variety of attendees came together and catalyzed and amplified a
counter-narrative to the official proceedings. With critical articles
and pieces published in major media outlets, and several thousands of
#FoodSystems4People posts on social media seen by potentially 10 million
users, the counter-mobilization succeeded in reaching a broad public
with its vision for genuine transformation of unsustainable food
systems.
This organized resistance rattled the organizers of the official Summit.
In response, they have now ramped up the use of progressive language
("sustainability", "nature-positive-solutions", "planetary boundaries",
"women's empowerment", etc.) and references to human rights in their
documents. But the primary orientation of the FSS remains firmly rooted
in the corporate interests that initiated it rather than the demands and
rights of people producing food and those most impacted by current food
systems. It continues to confirm a narrow range of scientific partisans
data while ignoring the traditional and experiential knowledge of
small-scale farmers, indigenous, peasant, and rural peoples.
Digitalization, genetic modification, precision agriculture, and other
chemical-, capital-, and fossil fuel-heavy approaches are taking centre
stage because these so-called solutions are the most profitable to
corporations (at the expense of the environment and farmers'
livelihoods).
As the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food notes [2], "Intensive
industrial agriculture relies on high-input, high-output agricultural
systems, dominated by large-scale specialized farms. Ever since
Governments started adopting the Green Revolution in the 1950s, the
world's food systems have been increasingly designed along industrial
models, the idea being that if people can purchase industrial inputs -
synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and carbon-reliant machines - then
they can produce a large amount of food. Productivity was not measured
in terms of human and environmental health, but exclusively in terms of
commodity output and economic growth."
Unfortunately, the UN Food Systems Summit ignores all these warnings and
continues to bat for an intensive corporate-led agricultural model that
masquerades as "solutions".
FOREBODINGS OF A NEW GLOBAL GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE?
This Summit attacks from the front and will undermine existing global
policymaking spaces and institutions like FAO and the CFS. Instead, it
erects a parallel architecture to suit agribusiness interests. The
Summit organizers are now encouraging stakeholders to form "coalitions
of action" to implement "solutions". Governments are encouraged to
develop "national pathways" with stakeholder coalitions, many of which
will inevitably be dominated by those who can afford to fund them.
Middle and Low-income countries are vulnerable to entering "coalitions"
with investors and philanthrocapitalists, such as the Gates Foundation,
to carve out "national pathways" profitable for their coalition
partners.
The resistance to this parallel structure is coming from within the
official Summit too. In her resignation letter (dated August 25/21), Dr
Kristy Buckley, Chair of the UNFSS Governance Action Area, derided the
attempts to view the global food governance "through the lens of
innovation, finance, technology and data, with no regard to human
rights, gender, and Indigenous Peoples". Her statement is a vindication
of what social movements have been warning for a long time.
The real solution to climate crises, hunger, distress migration and
extreme poverty lies with the people. It must emerge from the principles
of food sovereignty and social justice. It must recognize food as a
fundamental human right and not as a commodity for speculative trade. It
must respect the diverse agroecological small-scale food systems that
exist in our territories.
The "UN Food Systems Summit" of 2021 is an anti-thesis to these
principles and threatens peoples' food sovereignty. La Via Campesina
will not remain silent. THE UNFSS HAS NO MANDATE, LEGITIMACY, OR
AUTHORITY TO EXTEND BEYOND SEPTEMBER 23RD, 2021. WE MUST PREVENT THE
SUMMIT'S CORPORATE AFFILIATES FROM FURTHER EMBEDDING THE
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER STRUCTURE INTO THE UN FOOD AND AGRICULTURE AGENCIES.
Throughout this week, La Via Campesina's member organization will hold
counter mobilizations in Asia, Africa and Europe. Our North American
members and allies will be holding a VIRTUAL COUNTER-SUMMIT ON SEPTEMBER
23RD [3] to expose the real agenda behind this Summit while also
presenting the elements of the radical transformation we seek in the
global food systems.
Globalize the Struggle! Globalize Hope!
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#NOTINOURNAMES | #BOYCOTTUNFOODSUMMIT | #FOODSYSTEMS4PEOPLE
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For media requests, write to lvcweb(a)viacampesina.org.
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ALSO READ: NO TO CORPORATE FOOD SYSTEMS! YES TO FOOD SOVEREIGNTY! [4]
Links:
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[1] http://www.ipsnews.net/2021/08/fiddling-nairobi-africa-goes-hungry/
[2] https://undocs.org/A/76/237
[3]
https://viacampesina.org/en/north-american-coalition-mobilizes-to-counter...
[4]
https://www.csm4cfs.org/no-to-corporate-food-systems-yes-to-food-sovereig...
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Press Release: Freedom from Hunger, Poverty, Debt and Death! Freedom from Free Trade Agreements!
by La Via Campesina
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_The 10__th__ of September is marked as the International Day of
Solidarity Action against WTO and Free Trade Agreements by La Via
Campesina, to commemorate the sacrifice of Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae,
who stabbed himself to death, outside the venue of the WTO Ministerial
at Cancun Mexico, 2003. His act was a desperate and angry reaction to
WTO-led free trade deals that led to a total marginalisation of
small-scale food producers in his country and the world._
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_Press Release: International Day of Solidarity Action against WTO and
Free Trade Agreements_
-------------------------
HARARE, THE 09TH OF SEPTEMBER 2021:
'Zero Hunger by 2030' and 'Ending Poverty in all its forms everywhere'
lists among the Sustainable Developments Goals that the United Nations
aims to achieve by the end of this decade.
Yet, as of September 2021, two trends stand in complete contrast to this
goal.
* Hunger has been rising since 2015, and the latest estimate of hungry
people stands at 820 million. The majority of the world's malnourished -
381 million [1] - are still found in Asia. More than 250 million live in
Africa, where the number of undernourished is growing faster than
anywhere in the world. Despite being the sites of aggressive
corporate-led agricultural operations, Latin American and Caribbean
nations are also home to nearly 84 million [2] people living in extreme
poverty, facing hunger and malnutrition.
* In May 2021, global food prices rose at their fastest monthly rate
in more than a decade [FAO]. A surge in the international prices of
vegetable oils, sugar and cereals has led to this increase.
All this is even though each year, an estimated one-third of all food
produced - equivalent to 1.3 billion tonnes worth around $1 trillion -
ends up rotting in the bins of consumers and retailers or spoiling due
to poor transportation and harvesting practices.
Clearly, the global food system is broken.
A host of multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements between
countries and continents form the central pillar of this broken system.
These instruments have enabled a host of mega-corporations - that are
engaged in seeds, farm inputs, meat, dairy, palm oil, cotton and
processed food businesses - to gain market entry into economically
developing and under-developed nations around the world. It has had
devastating consequences for local trade, peasant markets and peoples'
food sovereignty.
Almost all of these free trade negotiations on agriculture and fisheries
are inspired by the WTO's highly problematic Agreement on Agriculture
(AoA). This global framework essentially bats for lower import tariffs,
withdrawal of domestic subsidies, and abolishing public stock-holding
for food security purposes. It is an outdated 20th century model of
trade that serves corporate interests at the expense of planetary
boundaries and animal welfare and drives us towards untenable social
inequalities. The fact that industrial agriculture and its associated
practices contribute nearly half of the global greenhouse gas emissions
is not deterring its expansion through these trade deals.
At this point, at least 350 regional free trade agreements and more than
3000 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are in force worldwide. BITs
usually include the controversial investor-state dispute settlement
(ISDS) mechanism. ISDS enables companies to sue the governments, if they
deem that new laws or regulations negatively affect their business. This
controversial settlement dispute mechanism relies on arbitration rather
than public courts, and nearly 1000 [3] investor-state disputes have
been brought against governments by corporations worldwide.
Free Trade Agreements and Investment treaties aim to exploit cheap
labour and relaxed environmental and labour regulations in economically
less-developed nations. Major powers such as the US and the European
Union push other countries to adopt their intellectual property
standards. Under pressure, and under the guise of
ease-of-doing-business, most national governments end up dismantling
national regulatory mechanisms that offer protection to local trade,
local labour and natural resources.
In June 2021, at the 100th session of the Committee on Regional Trade
Agreements. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the WTO,
reminded the participants that the objective of the WTO is to raise
living standards, create jobs, and promote sustainable development and
human well-being across the world.
Yet, over the last five decades of its existence, global free trade
agreements have only delivered hunger, food riots, farmer suicides,
climate crises, extreme poverty and distress migration. These trade
agreements, laid the pathway for privatisation, deregulation and
withdrawal of the State's obligation in delivering essential public
services to its people. It has had a devastating impact on rural areas
in particular. Women and children face the extreme brunt of it, as
distress migration forces them to flee their villages and work under
sub-human conditions in the cities. Across countries, the availability
and quality of public healthcare and public education have suffered
immensely over the last five decades, especially in rural areas, thereby
denying a right to decent life to women, children and youth. South
Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae's desperate act of sacrificing his life,
right outside the venue of a WTO ministerial in Cancun eighteen years
ago, tragically expressed these crises in rural areas worldwide.
Tragically, instead of heeding to the voices of the peasants, indigenous
people, fishers and migrant farmworkers, the World Trade Organisation
and wealthy governments continue with their business as usual and pursue
these policies as if none of these crises ever existed.
PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD ARE PUSHING BACK MORE THAN EVER.
India's protesting farmers, who have been on the streets for the last
nine months, have cited how the new farm laws aim to corporatise Indian
Agriculture and can jeopardise the country's public procurement system.
They also point to further trade negotiations on the horizon (with the
US and EU) that threaten their food sovereignty, autonomy and biosafety
norms around GM foods. In Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines
and South Korea, peasant farmers resist CP-TPP, RCEP, FTAAP-21 and a
host of other regional trade agreements being pushed through by global
economic powerhouses like the US and China.
In Argentina,Ecuador, Kenya and Zambia, citizens protest against the
IMF-induced debt crisis. The EU-Mercosur deal is finding resistance from
peasants and civil society organisations on both sides of the spectrum.
They point out that in the Mercosur countries, soya, sugar and meat
production, for example, is becoming increasingly industrialised, mainly
in connection with the aggressive export-orientated model. The Amazonia
basin of South America, central to climate and biodiversity worldwide,is
forced to give way to this model.
Even as the global health pandemic demands worldwide solidarity and
empathy, Europe and the United States are at the forefront of blocking
the effort spearheaded by South Africa and India within the World Trade
Organization to waive intellectual property protections COVID-19
vaccines and other tools.
Those who resist these unjust trade agreements are oppressed and
criminalised. Most of the agrarian conflicts worldwide today arise from
the corporate grabbing of natural resources, often in connivance with
local governments and authorities. These forced acquisitions of our
territories are usually carried out to honour these negotiated trade and
investment deals, signed and executed without the approval or
participation of peasant and indigenous communities.
What use are WTO and a host of these Free Trade Agreements if they are
merely extending a colonial habit of subjugating a majority of the
people? These free trade agreements, often negotiated behind closed
doors through opaque processes, are the enduring symbols of imperialism
and neocolonialism of the 21st century.
Hunger is real. Rural poverty and starvation are real. Pandemic is real.
Vaccine inequity is real. Distress migration is real. Climate crises are
real. Do we know what else is real? In a time of a global health and
food crisis, Nestlé's shareholders and executives awarded themselves a
record dividend payout [4] of US$8 billion, more than the entire annual
budget for the UN's World Food Programme!
These agribusinesses have been repeatedly exposed and called out by
communities around the world. Pushed to the back foot by widespread
protests and adverse court judgements, these giant corporations are now
entering global governance spaces and co-opting the human rights
language with a renewed aggression, all in the hope of green-washing
their criminal conduct. The latest example of this image-building effort
is the UN Food Systems Summit - a facade behind which agribusinesses can
hide their countless human rights violations and unfair trade practices.
In the face of extreme human distress, hunger and poverty, we must fight
against this vulgarity of capitalism and neoliberalism. Under Article
16, the _UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION ON RIGHTS OF PEASANTS AND OTHER
PEOPLE WORKING IN RURAL AREAS (UNDROP) _affirms that States shall take
appropriate measures to strengthen and support local, national and
regional markets. They must do it in ways that facilitate and ensure our
full and equitable access and participation in these markets, to sell
our products at prices that allow them and their families to attain an
adequate standard of living. Our struggles in our territories must draw
their strength from the Peasants' Rights Declaration and demand public
policies that are in line with UNDROP.
AS WE MARK THIS INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY ACTION AGAINST WTO AND
FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS, LA VIA CAMPESINA ECHOES THE LAST WORDS OF FARMER
LEE FROM CANCUN IN 2003.
He said, "My warning goes out to all citizens that human beings are in
an endangered situation. That uncontrolled multinational corporations
and a small number of big WTO Members are leading undesirable
globalisation that is inhumane, environmentally degrading,
farmer-killing, and undemocratic."
As La Via Campesina, we pledge to struggle until victory. We will stay
alert to the 12th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO to be held in Geneva
from the 30th of November. We will press on with our demands to push WTO
and FTAs out of agriculture! We will insist on a global trade system
that respects the dignity of the people and bases itself on solidarity
and reciprocity beyond borders.
RESIST FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS!
END THE WTO!
SOLIDARITY TRADE, NOW!
Links:
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[1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/
[2] http://www.fao.org/americas/noticias/ver/en/c/1293339/
[3] https://www.bilaterals.org/?what-s-wrong-with-free-trade
[4] https://www.cadtm.org/Agro-imperialism-in-the-time-of-Covid-19
3 years, 4 months
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