People's Food Sovreignty | Sunday, 15 November 2009
Small food producers have been saying for years that they can easily feed the world if they are given control over local land, water and biodiversity. Yet, as the number of hungry people in the world continues to grow vertiginously, small farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and indigenous peoples are being robbed of this control on an even heavier scale.
On Sunday 15 November 2009 over 100 people came together for a working group about control over food producing resources. The atmosphere in the room was intense, as there may never have been a time where conflicts over food productive resources have been so high.
At the top of the meeting's agenda was the current global farmland grab. According to Renée Vellvé of the NGO GRAIN, rich governments and private investors are targeting poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to take over farmlands to produce food for export, with the collusion of local governments. Already hundreds of deals have been signed or are being negotiated covering over 40 million hectares, with over US$100 billion having been mobilised. This landgrab trend is led by the private sector, and it is taking place in a larger context of growing trade, capital and investment flows in agriculture between countries of the South.
Participants were clear that this is a new phase of an ongoing and violent process to marginalise, criminalise and erradicate small food producers. All the deals are exclusively for large-scale industrial agriculture for export. This new landgrab is an unprecedented attack on small-scale agriculture and food sovereignty, that will deeply worsen the current food crisis unless we take stronger action.
David Andrews from Food & Water Watch talked about how a similar grab is going on for water, 70% of which is used for agriculture. Corporations are expanding out of traditional extractive industries to take control over water resources around the world, such as in the glaciers of Chile. According to Andrews, Koffi Annan has been facilitating the entry of the private sector into the water grab directly through his tenure at the head of the UN. In the end, we are talking up just a few firms that will control water. Along with food sovereingty, we should have water sovereignty.
German Bedoya of CNA, a member of Via Campesina in Colombia, described how the increasing control of biodiversity by corporations is destroying the cycle of life and tearing up the social fabric in Latin America. Seed companies are taking monopoly control of biodiversity particularly through intellectual property rights like patents. Governments are setting up biodiversity protection zones and corridors, but this is only to facilitate biopiracy. Yet farmers, Afro-descendents and indigenous peoples are the only ones who should control, guard and take care the world's biodiversity because it is we who have looked after it and cultivated it over generations.
In an inspiring presentation, Ralava Beoboarimisa spoke about how he other people from Madagascar formed an association, called the Collectif de défense des terres malgaches, after they found out, through the Financial Times, that their government had signed a deal for a long-term lease of 1.4 million hectares of land to the Korean company Daewoo Logistics, which wanted to use the land to produce maize and palm oil for export to Korea. People in Madagascar immediately saw this as a new form of colonisation of their country, and protests sprung up, including the launch of a petition by the Collectif calling for the annulation of the agreement and the revision of laws allowing foreign investors to take over lands in the country. Outrage about the deal merged with overall political dissatisfaction with the ruling party, and soon after the government was overthrown. Despite this victory the Collectif and others in Madagascar remain extremely vigilant about the situation
In the open sharing, there were very strong points made.
Henry Saragih, the international coordinator of Via Campesina said that landgrabbing is not a new issue. Rather, it is a « new era of colonisation ». And a lot of it is South-South. Our governments are making laws to criminalise our struggles for our land. And because of globalisation, capital has become international. This means we must internationalise the struggle.
Faustino Torrez of Nicaragua stressed that agrarian reform is a question that concerns everyone and that a lot of ladgrabbing is being spurned by the race to produce agrofuels. The fundamental issue is to stop the expansion of corproate agribusinesswhich is displacing local food production.
Participants also spoke about how official responses to natural disasters, like the tsunami in Asia and hurricane Katrina in the US, are pushing out coastal communities and fisherfolk. Landgrabbing is also a specific problem for people in war zones. Confiscation of Palestinian farmlands has been rampant through land enclosures for security and military zones and the cutting of lands needed by sheep farmers, to the extent that 40 % of localities don't have regular access to water and Palestine is increasingly dependence on food imports from Israel.
Desai Laljibhai Gafurbhai, a pastoralist from Gujarat, shared that « the » burning issue for pastoralsits is land grabbing, whether in Africa or Asia. "We need a people's politics and a people's voice to stop this landgrabbing," he cried. Others stressed how through all of this resource grabbing TNCs causing enormous harm, especially to women.
Olegario Carillo Meza of Mexico called this overall grab for biodivesity, land, fish and water resources a "pandemic" beause it is erradicating humanity and our capacities to survive. The group agreed unaninously that we have to deepen the discussions, coordinate more actively and internationalise this struggle. It must be given urgency.
See also the final declaration of the CSO forum here