Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

Civil Society Calls for Agroecology not GMOs at FAO Meeting in KL

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Following is the final statement made by civil society organisations at the recent FAO meeting in Kuala Lumpur:

FAO Regional Conference on Agricultural Biotechnologies in Sustainable Food Systems and Nutrition in Asia-Pacific

13 September 2017

Civil Society Statement

 If we see biotech as part of a small farmer's 'toolbox', then we must ask what it is we are 'fixing':

  • Ensuring resilience in the face of climate change
  • Ensuring smallholders’ livelihoods are maintained & promoted
  • Ensuring everyone has access to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced in ethical and ecologically sound ways, and their right to democratically determine their own food and agriculture systems.

The focus of our discussion here was proposed to be on “sustainable” “food systems” for “small farmers” not “high yield” to generate “more money” from “small pieces of land.” And yet the meeting has presented many solutions that are still in the lab, and products with very initial results. The current supply of food already exceeds demand but there are serious issues around good governance and equitable distribution of food. Merely securing a high yield of a few select crops does not solve the problem of hunger nor secure livelihoods for smallholders, and leads to high levels of post-harvest spoilage and food waste.

There has been a lot of discussion about what we mean by biotechnology, and yet the majority of the focus of the conference has been on GMO products. It is malicious and deceptive to refer to GM crops as "biotech crops".

Those technologies that manipulate DNA artificially increase corporate control over seeds, diminish rich, diverse diets of local communities, promote monoculture, increase biosafety risks to health and environment, and need high investment and complicated regulatory frameworks which many countries lack. We ask those from the private sector who are calling for international acceptance of their products once approved in one country whether they are prepared to accept global liability for their products once disseminated?

We’d like to remind the group that 80% of the world’s food is produced by small farmers and farmer autonomy is critical to maintaining current and future food security and food sovereignty for everyone. We reject solutions that increase the cost of production for farmers due to the high cost of inputs from transnational corporations. We respect farmers as true in-situ innovators and not as passive consumers of the ‘biotech toolbox’.

All present should keep in mind the FAO Policy on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples which includes Indigenous rights to:

  • Self-determination;
  • Free, Prior and Informed Consent;
  • Participation and collaboration;
  • Rights over land and other resources; and
  • Gender equality.

Governments and scientists must take a holistic view of addressing the negative consequences of industrialised agriculture and avoid a ‘bandaids on cancer’ approach when it is imperative to address the causes.

Rather than being distracted by the shiny technocratic solutions of the GMO industry, FAO should continue its important work on promoting farmers’ access to native and locally adapted seeds and breeds, markets and value chains, and on promoting agroecology as the best way to feed the world and face the challenges of climate change.

 

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

La Via Campesina

FIMARC

Mouvement International de la Jeunesse Agricola et Rural Catholique (MIJARC)

Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP)

Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group)

Assembly of the Poor, Thailand

Thai Poor Act (TPA)

Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA)

SEACON

 

 

 

Viva La Via Campesina! Long live the peasants’ way!

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This was one of the oft-repeated refrains of the VIIth International Conference of La Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers who gathered in the Basque region of Spain for a week in July, which called for more peasants – people of the land – in places like Europe, the US, and even Australia, where we have so profoundly lost our connection and care for the land and its inhabitants.

Over a stimulating five days of talking, listening, singing, dancing, and marching in the streets, some 600 peasant farmers from across the globe came together in solidarity to ‘globalise our struggles and localise our hope’.

We heard the devastating consequences of land grabbing in all corners of the globe, with farmers forced off the land and into low-paid farm worker positions with no tenure as transnational corporations buy up the land and turn it over to monocultures.

We wept at the human rights abuses in Honduras, South Korea, India, and Guatemala, where food sovereignty activists have been imprisoned and murdered for their efforts to fight for access to nutritious food and the right to grow it and sell it to their communities.

A strong position was put forward throughout the conference against the inclusion of agriculture in so-called ‘free trade agreements’, which privilege multinational corporations’ rights over the rights of peoples to feed themselves. And we continued our strong support for promoting peasant agroecology as the best means to feed the world.

Read the full Euskal Herria Declaration formulated at the conference by the people who are ‘feeding our peoples to grow a movement to change the world’!

Tammi Jonas, AFSA President

FFFU at La Via Campesina Regional Meeting

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As a young aspiring farmer and producer, I was delighted to represent Fair Food Farmers United (FFFU) at the La Via Campesina (LVC) South East Asia and East Asia Regional meeting. It was inspiring to meet with so many delegates from various farmer and peasant organizations through out the region and discuss something so close to my heart- food sovereignty. Over the course of the week, we devised a regional report to be taken to the VIIth International La Via Campesina Conference, which will be held in July this year.

 

La Via Campesina, which can be translated as the peasants’ way, is an international movement of peasants, small and medium-scale farmers, food producers, fisher folk, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and farm workers from around the world. It fights for agroecology as the means for addressing the myriad of economic, social and ecological problems in the food system. La Via Campesina fiercely opposes the dominating industrial, corporate, and transnational agricultural model, which is proving time and time again to undermine people and the land.

 

 

As a middle class, white woman, the cultural differences between myself and the other delegates at the meeting were clear. I’m involved in my partner’s family’s organic broadacre cropping and grazing farm- a scale and model of farming totally foreign to many of the delegates. However, despite these differences, I found common ground. The issues facing our neighbours in South East and East Asia are awfully similar to those experienced by many of our farmers and food producers here in Australia, particularly those of a smaller to medium scale.For example, we discussed the devastating impact of free trade agreements, foreign investment and land grabbing on the livelihoods of farmers and peasants. It is obvious that despite economic growth throughout Asia, community food systems are continuing to struggle.

As is happening in Australia, most delegates agreed that their country was experiencing an ageing farming population associated with youth migration from rural to urban areas. With labour shortages, many farming communities are relying on migrant workers, resulting in exploitation and social tensions.

Despite the significant role women play in food production, gender inequality is rife throughout the region. Women continue to be subject to violence and abuse, both domestically and on the front line of land grabbing conflicts.

Climate change obviously remains a major point of concern. In particular, the industrial climate change solutions being imposed on many farming communities are causing a lot of damage. ‘Climate smart agriculture’, including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) policies, has negatively impacted the livelihoods and autonomy of peasants and small-scale farmers. The prevalence of patented and GM seeds, often under the guise of ‘climate smart agriculture’, is also a major food sovereignty concern.

Looking forward, we agreed on the need for more grassroots education and training on agroecology through farmer to farmer knowledge sharing programs, field schools, exchanges and field trips. We call for more seed sharing initiatives and the preservation of indigenous knowledge and farming traditions. It is also clear that work needs to continue around empowering women and youth through education and training.

We see that farmer and food producer co-operatives have great potential in empowering communities. Additionally, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) models, value adding and other forms of direct marketing are important tools for improving peasant and farmer livelihoods. Farmers need more training around financial literacy, computer skills and appropriate technologies, and work needs to continue around agrarian reform to ensure farmers and peasants are entitled to land and local markets.

At the end of the week’s discussions, we evaluated the final draft of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants.  La Via Campesina has been officially working on this declaration since 2008, to respect, protect and fulfill the rights of peasants who make up almost half of the world’s population and are responsible for the majority of the world’s food production. Despite UN concerns, we agreed on the importance of using the term ‘peasant’ rather than ‘small-scale farmer’ because it is far more inclusive of anyone who has a direct and special relationship with the land and nature through the production of food. We also agreed that peasants need the ‘right’, not merely ‘access’, to land, seed and markets, because ‘access’ implies the continued influence or control of corporations and government, and a loss of autonomy.

Having attended the meetings, I’m so excited that Fair Food Farmers United is a part of the powerful movement that is La Via Campesina. Despite language and cultural barriers, it is telling that so many millions of peasants and farmers around the world can band together in the name of food sovereignty. I know there is a lot of work ahead for FFFU, AFSA and the food sovereignty movement in Australia more broadly, but, with a baby growing in my belly, I’m so proud to say I feel hopeful for the future.

By Courtney Young

April 17, a Day to Remember the Life and Death Struggle for Land

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April 17, a Day to Remember the Life and Death Struggle for Land

A day that brings millions of farmers and agricultural workers together in solidarity against corporate greed gains even starker relevance this week with the murders of rural workers Vilmar Bordim and Leomar Bhorbak in the state of Quedas do Iguaçu in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil.

Bordim and Bhorbak, members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), were living with their wives, children and 1,500 other families in an encampment on the Rio Dos Cobras estate on lands allocated, by law, to agrarian reform. Security guards of the Araupel logging company, previously exposed for falsifying land titles, ambushed the men, who were shot while retreating.

This follows the March assassination of human rights defender and environmental activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras. Cáceres was gunned down in her home despite being given ‘special protection’ by local authorities after receiving death threats for leading protests against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric scheme.

Unfortunately these names will join those of hundreds killed in resistance against corporate land and resource grabbing in this century alone.

For the international farmers’ movement La Via Campesina April 17 is an occasion to recognise those who have died in these very struggles. On this day, in 1996, 19 other members of MST were killed in Eldorado do Carajas, Brazil, while fighting for land and justice.

Violence against protesters and human rights defenders is familiar to Brazilians and the MST is at the forefront of these conflicts. Between 1985 and 2006 nearly 1,500 land reform activists and peasant farmers, including children, were killed in rural conflicts. Only 8 per cent of cases have ever been brought to trial.

In a country of unrivalled inequality, those who live in the countryside are the most affected. One per cent of landowners control 45 per cent of farmland, a legacy of the large land grants or sesmarias to privileged Portugese families and the institutions of slavery in the colonial era.

In the mid-1990s MST started targeting large global corporations to protest their growing influence in the countryside. Recognising a new set of obstacles to land reform, particularly the green deserts of monoculture, the movement gained some powerful enemies with transnational reach and influence.

In drawing attention to the negative impacts of the industrialised food system on small-scale agriculture April 17 becomes more than a day to remember those who have died fighting for their right to land.

La Via Campesina’s central message is the importance of food sovereignty – the right of nations to decide their own agricultural production regimes, with priority to local production and consumption.

Their argument is that food is not a commodity that should be traded lightly and without regard for the livelihoods of those who produce it.

They attribute the crippling hunger of close to 1 billion people to the domination of the global food system by corporate agri-business and an unjust international trade regime that makes small-scale agriculture unprofitable and unsustainable.

 

AFSA Statement on International Day of Peasant and Farmer Struggle

As members of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), we recognise that the global industrial food system is rooted in structural injustice. We recognise the urgency and responsibility to confront the widespread influence of corporate agribusiness and transnational corporations, many of which are strongly supported by our governments. We reject this dominance by corporations that often comes with political support for repressive and anti-democratic regimes. Within Australia, we denounce the devastating policies that have led to the dispossession of land of the Indigenous people and the violation of the right to healthy and affordable food for the 1.2 million Australians who are food insecure. We work to build solidarity with these communities, and those who feed them through ethical and ecologically sound farming, in Australia and across the world.

Food sovereignty in Brazil: a fight for territory, a fight for democracy

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Food sovereignty in Brazil: a fight for territory, a fight for democracy 

By Alana Mann

 

While the political and social histories of Australia and Brazil defy comparison, the emergence of a ‘new politics of the rural’ is familiar to both countries. In particular, how protests are organised and operationalised – and the response from the state.

The nature of the rural question itself appears concerned less with agriculture or even livelihoods but more about the specific function of rural space and the type of development that should take place in it.

Last week the crackdown on Coal Seam Gas protests and the labelling of those who want to protect their land and livelihoods as ‘ eco-fascists’ by NSW Energy Minister Anthony Roberts enraged farmer-activists and their allies across Australia.

The criminalisation of protestors and human rights defenders is familiar to Brazilians but the stakes are somewhat higher. Between 1985 and 2006 nearly 1,500 land reform activists and peasant farmers, including children, were killed in rural conflicts. Only 8 per cent of cases were ever brought to trial.

The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) is at the forefront of these conflicts. Visiting the Pontal do Paranapanema region in São Paulo State in February this year I witnessed their struggle first hand.

Surrounded by a ‘green desert’ of sugar cane landless families waiting to be settled on a parcel of land shelter in roadside encampments, described as ‘rural favelas’ by an unsympathetic press.

In a country of unrivalled inequality, those who live in the countryside are the most affected. One per cent of landowners control 45 per cent of farmland, a legacy of the large land grants or sesmarias to privileged Portugese families and the institutions of slavery in the colonial era.

As an instrument to redistribute wealth, land reform is not a popular concept in contemporary democracies. Yet, ironically, MST made progress through religious networks, rural trade unions and civil society activism.

In the mid-1990s MST started targeting large global corporations to protest their growing influence in the countryside. Recognising a new set of obstacles to land reform, particularly the green deserts of monoculture.

Media framing of MST as ‘fundamentalists’, ‘terrorists’ and a ‘dangerous menace’ is a response to the growing role of the movement as a leading critic of neoliberal policies and its role as a voice for the rural and urban marginalised.

As in the case of the Lock the Gate Alliance here in Australia, social movements employ forms of public activism that are disruptive in an effort to influence elites through shows of commitment and force of numbers, with the additional goal of building support.

The demonisation of protest by governments and the media demonstrates just how successful such actions can be and to what lengths elites will go to in suppressing them.

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