Njari, Tanzania, 2006. A meeting held by the Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union

As the year 2008 comes to a close, the world must cope with a recent assertion made by the Food and Agriculture Organization that “one billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history…”

This shameful scenario was presented in the December 28th issue of The Independent: “The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced….the growth in hunger is not occurring, as in the past, because of shortage of food – but because people cannot afford to buy it even when it is plentiful.”

Theories abound as to why the world is in this predicament and what should be done to regain control of the global food economy. Meantime, consumers in developed countries are learning more about the sometimes vast and unsustainable supply chains that bring them their food, and are questioning the enormous resources consumed to maintain this system.    One movement, which gained national attention in the US with the publication of Michael Pollan’s bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, focuses on changing our eating patterns to be less global.  ”Locavores” recommend turning to urban gardens, supporting farmers’ markets, and even keeping a few chickens in the back yard.  In short:  Buy Local.

But growing one’s own food, buying local and adhering to 100-mile food diets only offer partial solutions to the growing food crisis. As valid and important as these strategies are, we must also pursue other paths if we are going to restore balance to the food system and exonerate ourselves from such an unforgiveable crime as having allowed one billion people to go hungry.

If the primary problem is not a food shortage, but rather the gap between what food costs and what hungry people can afford to pay, then we must analyze the economic and political institutional failures which have created this situation. We need to redraft our trade agreements to keep workers in sustainable jobs in the U.S. and farmers productive on their fields in the Global South. For small farmers in this country, as well as consumers, one way forward is to organize now to radically change the next Farm Bill.  It’s great to see these movements gathering momentum to make dramatic changes in our agriculture and trade policies.

Where does Fair Trade Fit In?

But through all the news and the commentary about the food crisis, the problems and solutions, where is the mention of Fair Trade?  Why is the voice of Fair Trade so absent within the food sovereignty movement?

It’s as if Fair Trade has fallen off the social justice map. Is Fair Trade just a fad – a naive notion that “all a consumer has to do” is “look for the seal” and the world will be a better place? Can it really be that the achievements gained and lessons learned through Fair Trade have nothing to offer the current discourse about local farmers, sustainable agriculture, and the food crisis?

The Fair Trade movement has helped millions of farmers worldwide, assisted farmer organizations, and educated consumers in the North about the injustices of our trade system. After all, it was developed in response to the huge systemic injustices facing producers in the Global South. Small farmers simply can’t compete with large landowners, plantations, and family estates. The landowners have all the connections to the same oligarchies that acquired wealth and power by enslaving generations of farmers after appropriating their land. Many of these same landowners now run the countries, make the laws, own the banks, run the exporting companies, and pocket the profits.

Fair Trade was very successful in raising awareness of this situation. Alternative traders and other activists found innovative and creative ways to “introduce” producers and consumers to each other, to build bridges between cultures. The movement educated consumers, inspired many to learn, engage and take action. Fair Trade offers market access, credit and fairer prices to millions of farmers, enabling peasant farmers to become co-operative business owners with increasing political and economic power.

Of course, if Fair Trade is barely mentioned amongst those concerned with food security and food sovereignty, try searching through the conversations about Fair Trade within the movement itself. Inspired? I don’t mean to offend, but the dialogue can get tiring. “Fair Trade,” “Whole Trade,” “Direct Trade”,  “Beyond Fair Trade” — does the Fair Trade movement have nothing more to offer consumers and activists than rivalries between roasters; who makes more trips to source; who knows their farmer partners better?

Fair Trade must join in discussions about our industrial food system, the plight facing small farmers in the US, and the governmental policies that created the industrialized food economy in which we all are forced to participate.  We need a rich debate within the movement about these larger issues that affect small farmers and consumers.

Bringing it All Together

Some of us are thirsting for a deeper level of conversation. Personally, I want to see Fair Trade raised alongside the “buy local” and agriculture and trade policy reform strategies. Gains have been achieved and lessons learned. Why isn’t the Fair Trade movement influencing – and being influenced by – the food sovereignty movement?

Fair Traders need to get back into the ring or we will lose the advances the movement has made. It’s time to tone down the marketing rhetoric and return to the educational goals of our mission; find new ways to talk with consumers – and each other – about our work and why we’re doing it. Most importantly, we need to continue creating innovative new strategies, and joining others, to fix the huge injustices in our food system and large scale destruction of the planet.

I also think that “locavores”, who talk about the need to support small farmers, community development and sustainable agriculture, should consider expanding their lens to include mention of small farmers in the Global South. As long as consumers continue to drink coffee and tea, and eat chocolate and other foods not grown in our country, let’s remember that the struggles of these small farmers are as challenging and as critical as those in the U.S. And while small farmers participating in Fair Trade are not in our own backyards, they are trying to maintain, and strengthen their own local communities. Their food security depends on their ability to remain organized in co-operatives; to receive the higher, “fairer” prices they deserve; and ultimately, on the agriculture and trade policies we enact here in Washington.

By the same token, when we talk about the role agri-business has played in dictating agriculture, economic, and trade policies, it would be powerful to highlight alternatives. If the large-scale mechanized farming favored by agribusiness – with its reliance on fossil fuel, pesticides, genetically modified organisms, government subsidies, and factory farms – is the problem, which businesses within the food system are offering solutions?

Certainly small farmers are central to our vision of a greener and more just food system.  But it is important also to recognize the significance of the food co-operatives, locally-owned natural food markets, independent restaurants and cafes, which shine as visible examples of those who are building an alternative day after day. 

Why is there so little mention of these independent and co-operative businesses in food security circles?   Many alternative trade organizations, and worker-owned co-operatives are demonstrating that businesses can have a social mission; reasonable profits can be made and shared more equitably amongst workers and farmers; business can be conducted through strong relationships based on mutuality, transparency and integrity; and of course that healthy food can be produced sustainably.

These organizations – producing, manufacturing, distributing and selling us our food – are walking the walk. They are demonstrating through action that alternatives do exist. Positive models are out there. And the more we can highlight, replicate and create additional independent, local and co-operative businesses, the more success we will have building the type of food system that the food sovereignty movement and all the locavores, fair trade and agriculture policy activists are promoting: a food system based on the principles of solidarity, sustainability and co-operation.

Our movements for a greener and more just food system could benefit by engaging more with each other. Ultimately, the more we challenge, learn from, influence and highlight the contributions each movement is making, the stronger and more successful we will be in our ultimate goal of fixing a broken food system. Let’s unite, deepen and strengthen our movements. With the threat of one billion people facing hunger and food security in 2009, it’s a change we can’t afford not to make.

Yesterday, they sent a letter, and the Call to Action, to President-elect Barack Obama asking him to take immediate action.  (You can still add your and/or your organization’s name to this growing list.)

Equal Exchange and a number of our food co-operative and Interfaith partners have endorsed this call. We believe that it’s past time to get our food system working for small farmers, consumers, and the environment. Changing government policies is imperative. Equally critical are efforts to support progressive businesses that are trying to change the food system by constructing an alternative economic model, based on solidarity principles. At Equal Exchange, we are continually challenging ourselves to learn about the food system, questioning what got us to this point, calling for appropriate policy changes, and taking concrete steps to support local farmers, farmer co-operatives, and businesses that live their values and are constructing alternative economic models that work for people. We encourage all of you to do the same – other models are possible!

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 Press Release – December 15, 2008

Experts advise that economic reform must include sound farm and food policy, an expansion of fair trade, and the creation of a solidarity economy which puts “people before profit in the U.S. and around the world.”

As food banks scramble to respond to a dramatic increase in demand this holiday season, while unemployment surges and farmers face plummeting crop prices, a broad sector of groups are calling on the incoming Obama administration to put hunger and the global food crisis front and center on its list of top priorities.

In today’s open letter to President-elect Obama, faith-based, environmental, agricultural, and hunger organizations outlined a “Call to Action on the World Food Crisis,” that includes specific recommendations for policy shifts and U.S. global leadership. The authors of the Call to Action call themselves the “US Working Group on the Food Crisis.”
“The global food crisis ceded headlines to the financial crisis this fall,” noted Bill Ayres, Executive Director of World Hunger Year. “But the problem has not gone away. In fact, the fragile economy in the U.S. and around the world has only made hunger more widespread.”
According to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks U.S. food insecurity, 36.2 million people, including 12.4 million children, were food insecure in 2007, even before the economic recession. The most recent global figures from the Food & Agriculture Organization estimate 963 million hungry people, a situation that the Working Group calls “morally reprehensible” and a potential driver of political unrest and instability.

As a candidate, President-elect Obama pledged to end childhood hunger in the U.S. by 2015, and publicly recognized the deep flaws in the current global food system and the need for reform. “We want to give him some tools to reach these goals,” continued Ayres. “Addressing the food crisis well is not only more urgent in light of the economic downtown – it can be an important part of the solution.”

The working group lays out specific recommendations for national policies that would:

• Stabilize and guarantee fair prices for farmers and consumers globally;
  
• Rebalance power in the food system;
  
• Make agriculture environmentally sustainable;
  
• Respect, protect and fulfill human rights of farmworkers and other food system workers; and
  
• Guarantee the right to food.
  

In promoting these solutions, the Working Group points to recent findings by international experts under the UN-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

The IAASTD results, which were accepted and approved by 58 governments around the world (but not fully by the U.S.), emphasize the importance of supporting multifunctional, small-scale agricultural production to effectively address both hunger and environmental sustainability in the long term.

“We are at a critical crossroads in rethinking the structure of our food and farming systems worldwide,” says Dr. Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist for Pesticide Action Network and one of the authors of the IAASTD report. “We believe President-elect Obama can and must play a key role in moving us toward a future where sustainable agriculture supports vibrant rural communities, respects the dignity of workers, and delivers safe and healthy food for all.”

“NAFTA, the WTO and other free trade agreements have pushed countries to become too dependent on highly speculative and volatile global markets for their food security,” said Ben Burkett, Mississippi farmer and President of the National Family Farm Coalition. “We need to reorient our farm policy away from a primary focus on exports and corporate profits and toward support for family farmers and food self-sufficiency.”

Dennis Olson from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy added, “There is now a global consensus that agricultural trade deregulation has played a large role in the food crisis. With regard to trade, we need to stop treating food like TV sets. Countries need the policy flexibility to stabilize agriculture markets and support their own production of healthy food – and that includes the U.S.”

Click here to read the Call to Action and to add your name.

Click here to read the letter sent to Barack Obama.

For more information, contact:
Kathy Ozer, Executive Director, National Family Farm Coalition, 202-543-5675; kozer@nffc.net or

Christina Schiavoni, WHY (World Hunger Year), 212-629-6259; christina@whyhunger.org.

Those of us who have been working with small-scale farmers in the Global South know that being part of the Fair Trade system has often been the only assurance many farmers have keeping them from joining the ranks of migrants forced to leave their communities – and countries -in search of better economic conditions. U.S. economic and “free trade” policies have caused job losses here and abroad and have contributed to rising food costs in Mexico and Central America. In this country, agricultural policies which favor agribusiness over family farmers have also forced many small and medium-scale farmers to abandon their farms in search of other ways to make a living.

In the meantime, everyone suffers. (Well, maybe not everyone… Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)  had record profits this year. ) The price of food has escalated dramatically, food riots across the globe have occurred with increasing intensity, and one billion people world-wide face hunger and food insecurity. If food shortages and rising prices, together with climate change and its impact, have not highlighted the seriousness of the current situation, perhaps the financial meltdown we’re experiencing (and its causes) will force us to demand change.

So while we may not be hearing anything about small farmers, sustainable agriculture, and our food system from our elected – and soon to be elected – officials, a group of food, farm, labor, and justice organizations from across the US have joined together and decided that it’s time to call on our leaders to
address the roots of the problem. This ad-hoc group of non-governmental organizations, the U.S.Working Group on the Food Crisis, has put forth a Call to Action. The following is from their website:

The US Working Group on the Food Crisis is an ad hoc group of organizations from around the US, representing various sectors of the food system, including anti-hunger, family farm, community food security, environmental, international aid, labor, food justice, consumer, and other groups. We do not view the food crisis as an unexpected, sudden emergency of the last year, but as the inevitable consequence of the development of a long list of misguided agricultural and food policies over the last 30 years.

We believe that we will not resolve the problems exposed by this food crisis by applying more of the same policies and thinking that caused the crisis in the first place. Nothing less than a wholesale change in the worldwide food system will allow us to address these problems sustainably and equitably.

Please join us. Sign the Call to Action to demand that the new US administration take rapid steps to address the food crisis through fundamental changes to the federal government’s food, agricultural, labor and international aid policies. And don’t stop there. Read our backgrounder document, talking points, and suggestions on how to take action in your own community.

Equal Exchange supports the efforts of this Working Group and has signed on to the Call for Action. We encourage you all to do the same, as well as to take additional actions. It really is high time.

Among those present at yesterday’s meeting was a group of small farmers who belong to the Federation of Southern Co-operatives, one of Equal Exchange’s partners in our Domestic Fair Trade program. Several of them got up and expressed outrage at the $500 billion* bailout of financial institutions being proposed this weekend by the Bush administration. Where are the subsidies or any support for small farmers who are responsible for growing the food we eat?

We talked about the recent Farm Bill and how most of the subsidies and other support went to agri-business. I couldn’t help thinking about the wave of recent articles criticizing the Fair Trade system for offering a minimum price to small farmers as an affront to the “free market”. As John Lewis, a dedicated life-long civil rights activist who was present at the meeting stated: “Small farmers are always last. And they should be first to receive some of this support. But, instead the corporations are getting it, most of whom don’t even need it.”

* by now everyone knows the bailout went up to $700 billion….

For now however, I’d like to just introduce you to some of the concepts being discussed in the Food Sovereignty movement…

A few months ago, I came across a very well-written and powerful article published by Food First, entitled, “Small farms as a planetary ecological asset: Five key reasons why we should support the revitalization of small farms in the Global South”, by Miguel A. Altieri, President of the Sociedad Cientifica LatinoAmericana de Agroecologia and Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley. If you had any doubts about why small farmers are essential to our planet and our food system, and why we believe it is critical to support them, this article should answer any lingering questions.

I encourage you all to follow the link to his full article. Initially, I thought I might just try to summarize Altieri’s main points for those of you who might not have time to read the full article. To be perfectly honest, however, Altieri is so articulate and his points so well-made, I found it impossible to condense. So instead, and I hope he will forgive me, I’ve simply extracted many of his arguments verbatim.

Altieri identifies “…five reasons why it’s in the interest of Northern consumers to support the cause and struggle of small farmers in the South.” The following are excerpts taken directly from his article:

1. Small farmers are key for the world’s food security

   While 91% of the planet’s 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land are increasingly being devoted to agro-export crops, biofuels and transgenic soybean to feed cars and cattle, millions of small farmers in the Global South still produce the majority of staple crops needed to feed the planet’s rural and urban populations… Small increases in yields on these small farms that produce most of the world’s staple crops will have far more impact on food availability at the local and regional levels, than the doubtful increases predicted for distant and corporate-controlled large monocultures managed with such high tech solutions as genetically modified seeds.

2. Small farms are more productive and resource conserving than large-scale monocultures
   

   Although the conventional wisdom is that small family farms are backward and unproductive, research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop…. Not only do small to medium sized farms exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, but do so with much lower negative impact on the environment. Small farms are ‘multi-functional’ – more productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic development than do large farms. Communities surrounded by many small farms have healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated, large mechanized farms. Small farmers also take better care of natural resources, including reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity.

   The inverse relationship between farm size and output can be attributed to the more efficient use of land, water, biodiversity and other agricultural resources by small farmers. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with small-scale farmers. Building strong rural economies in the Global South based on productive small-scale farming will allow the people of the South to remain with their families and will help to stem the tide of migration. And as population continues to grow and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small farm structure may become central to feeding the planet, especially when large-scale agriculture devotes itself to feeding car tanks.

3. Small traditional and biodiverse farms are models of sustainability
   

   Despite the onslaught of industrial farming, the persistence of thousands of hectares under traditional agricultural management documents a successful indigenous agricultural strategy of adaptability and resiliency. These microcosms of traditional agriculture that have stood the test of time, and that can still be found almost untouched since 4 thousand years in the Andes, MesoAmerica, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, offer promising models of sustainability as they promote biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals, and sustain year-round yields even under marginal environmental conditions. The local knowledge accumulated during millennia and the forms of agriculture and agrobiodiversity that this wisdom has nurtured, comprise a Neolithic legacy embedded with ecological and cultural resources of fundamental value for the future of humankind.

   Recent research suggests that many small farmers cope and even prepare for climate change, minimizing crop failure through increased use of drought tolerant local varieties, water harvesting, mixed cropping, opportunistic weeding, agroforestry and a series of other traditional techniques. Surveys conducted in hillsides after Hurricane Mitch in Central America showed that farmers using sustainable practices such as “mucuna” cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry suffered less “damage” than their conventional neighbors. The study spanning 360 communities and 24 departments in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala showed that diversified plots had 20% to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture, less erosion, and experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbors.

   This demonstrates that a re-evaluation of indigenous technology can serve as a key source of information on adaptive capacity and resilient capabilities exhibited by small farms – features of strategic importance for world farmers to cope with climatic change. In addition, indigenous technologies often reflect a worldview and an understanding of our relationship to the natural world that is more realistic and more sustainable than those of our Western European heritage.

4. Small farms represent a sanctuary of GMO-free agrobiodiversity
   

   … In a worldwide survey of crop varietal diversity on farms involving 27 crops, scientists found that considerable crop genetic diversity continues to be maintained on farms in the form of traditional crop varieties, especially of major staple crops. In most cases, farmers maintain diversity as an insurance to meet future environmental change or social and economic needs. Many researchers have concluded that this varietal richness enhances productivity and reduces yield variability. For example, studies by plant pathologists provide evidence that mixing of crop species and or varieties can delay the onset of disease by reducing the spread of disease carrying spores, and by modifying environmental conditions so that they are less favorable to the spread of certain pathogens….

   Maintaining pools of genetic diversity, geographically isolated from any possibility of cross fertilization or genetic pollution from uniform transgenic crops will create “islands” of intact germplasm which will act as extant safeguards against potential ecological failure derived from the second green revolution increasingly being imposed with programs such as the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA in Africa. These genetic sanctuary islands will serve as the only source of GMO-free seeds that will be needed to repopulate the organic farms in the North inevitably contaminated by the advance of transgenic agriculture. The small farmers and indigenous communities of the Global South, with the help of scientists and NGOs, can continue to create and guard biological and genetic diversity that has enriched the food culture of the whole planet.

5. Small farms cool the climate
   

   While industrial agriculture contributes directly to climate change through no less than one third of total emissions of the major greenhouse gases – Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), small, biodiverse organic farms have the opposite effect by sequestering more carbon in soils. Small farmers usually treat their soils with organic compost materials that absorb and sequester carbon better than soils that are farmed with conventional fertilizers. Researchers have suggested that the conversion of 10,000 small- to medium-sized farms to organic production would store carbon in the soil equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road.

   Further climate amelioration contributions by small farms accrue from the fact that most use significantly less fossil fuel in comparison to conventional agriculture mainly due to a reduction of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, relying instead on organic manures, legume-based rotations, and diversity schemes to enhance beneficial insects…”

Altieri concludes: “Consumers of the North can play a major role by supporting these more equitable markets which do not perpetuate the colonial model of “agriculture of the poor for the rich,” but rather a model that promotes small biodiverse farms as the basis for strong rural economies in the Global South. Such economies will not only provide sustainable production of healthy, agroecologically-produced, accessible food for all, but will allow indigenous peoples and small farmers to continue their millennial work of building and conserving the agricultural and natural biodiversity on which we all depend now and even more so in the future.”

What better way to support the food sovereignty movement advocated for by the Via Campesina, than if the hundreds of thousands of consumers in the North were to choose to support small farmers, whether by reducing our own footprints, partnering with them to protect natural resources, or lobbying for more equitable agriculture and trade policies. A strong consumer movement in the North linked to the largest small farmer organization in the Global South could have a huge impact on our food system and our planet. There’s little time to lose.

The severity of the current food crisis has shocked people all over the world and called into question the effectiveness of a free-market economy that allows so many to starve. The privatization of resources necessary to farm and the increasing price of farming supplies is forcing small farmers to abandon their work. Big agribusinesses are making huge profits as prices rise, but family farmers don’t benefit from the increased costs. Fertilizer, land, and water sources are bought up by big companies, and land formerly used to grow food is often switched to produce only corn and grain meant to make more lucrative ethanol, taking food out of the mouths of the hungry.

Though the victims of this broken economic system are many, female peasants have suffered enormous losses. Representing the majority of the working poor, women work on land they do not own, and live under a market system in which they cannot fully participate. Long denied the same level of access to the means of production as men, the rising costs of supplies now makes it nearly impossible for women to support themselves. When they can no longer afford to grow their own food, women are often compelled to take a job on a plantation, where they are favored because owners consider them easier to manipulate than men – they pay them lower wages and use them for tedious activities that require great attention and careful handling, though these tasks are often dangerous. The current economy has long assigned no real value to the labor of women, and despite their exclusion, its collapse is ironically their downfall as well.

Grassroots International believes that helping women gain autonomy is crucial to fixing some of the damage caused by the food crisis. Women, since they have long farmed the fields they cannot own, have retained the knowledge of how best to farm the land, in a way that they have been preserving for centuries. If one was to give these rural women better access to land, water, and the resources needed to effectively farm, they would be able to regain the ability to feed themselves and their families, breaking the cycle of hunger and dependency. Here at Grassroots International we are working hard to fight the destructive effects of the food crisis, and we believe that helping peasant women is essential not only just to improve their situation, but also to give communities the strength they need, through the skills of these strong women.

Blair Rapalyea, an intern from Smith College, worked with Grassroots International’s Latin America Program.

 
FAMILY FARMERS PRAISE INTRODUCTION OF TRADE BILL THAT HELPS ADDRESS GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS: U.S. and United Nations Continue to Promote Catastrophic Free Trade Agenda

Washington D.C., June 4, 2008

The National Family Farm Coalition today praised the introduction of the TRADE Act in the House and Senate which offers urgent and necessary reforms to our deeply flawed trade agreements. Much of the world is grappling with a growing global food crisis. Much of the crisis has been precipitated by free trade policies that have made developing countries reliant on imported food at the expense of domestic local production. Farmers from Haiti to Indonesia to Mexico have been driven off their land due to trade agreements that dismantled tariff protections and domestic state support for local farmers. This allowed U.S. agribusinesses to dump cheap commodities into overseas markets, forcing countries to be at the mercy of global markets for their food security instead of relying on local family farmers. With commodity prices now skyrocketing, governments are no longer able to provide food for their citizens.

The TRADE Act offers positive steps to help countries practice food sovereignty instead of “free trade.” Ben Burkett, President of the National Family Farm Coalition and a Mississippi farmer said, “We applaud the introduction of the TRADE act. The legislation is clear that fair trade begins with farmers being able to earn fair prices reflecting cost of production, fair treatment of farm labor, and limitations against unfair dumping practices. It allows for countries who are part of a trade agreement to establish strategic food and energy reserves, an important policy that must be reinstated to address the global food crisis.”

The TRADE Act comes at an opportune time to begin addressing the global food crisis, as world leaders gather this week in Rome at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization conference. NFFC is deeply disappointed that USDA Secretary Ed Schafer and U.N.  Secretary General Ban Ki Moon continue to advocate for more free trade policies and advancing the Doha Round as a solution to address high food prices. “It is outrageous for our leaders to continue their disastrous trade liberalization policies, ignoring that free trade has caused the instability threatening our food security. Family farmers around the world have been devastated by below-cost dumping from agribusinesses as a result of the WTO and free trade. Countries have surrendered their food sovereignty to the likes of Cargill and Wall Street,” said NFFC Vice-President Dena Hoff, who is at the UN FAO meeting as a civil society participant with Via Campesina.

The National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), founded in 1986, provides a voice for grassroots groups on farm, food, trade and rural economic issues to ensure fair prices for family farmers, safe and healthy food, and vibrant, environmentally sound rural communities here and around the world. For further information about the organization, visit www.nffc.net.

Alexandra Strickner, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)
Rome, Italy, 3 June 2008

Watch the 3 minute video on http://wsftv.net

Farmer and civil society leaders carrying out a peaceful action today in Rome, Italy at the FAO Summit on the Food Crisis were forcefully removed from the premises. At around 1:30pm farmers and representatives of civil society organizations staged an action at the press room to deliver a message that millions of additional people are joining the ranks of the hungry as the corporations that control the global food system are making record profits.

The issues of corporate control and speculation, which are leading causes of recent spikes in food prices, are not being discussed by the government delegations and the international agencies meeting in Rome to debate solutions to the crisis.

“We are outraged that such fundamental aspects of the food crisis were nowhere on the agenda for the Summit,” says Paul Nicholson, member of the International Coordinating Committee of Via Campesina and one of the farmer leaders who was expelled from the Summit.The 10 people involved in the action carried posters contrasting the record profits of agribusiness corporations during the lastest reporting financial quarter of 2008 with the estimated 100 million people in the world who now, alongside 800 million or so others, are hungry because they cannot afford to eat.

Profits for Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, were up 108 percent, while Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands, the world’s largest food traders, registered profit increases of 86 and 42 per cent respectively. Profits for Mosaic, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, rose 1,134 percent.

The action was necessary to bring to the world’s attention that the main causes of the world food crisis are not being dealt with and that the world’s food producers– the farmers, fisherfolk, agricultural workers and indigenous people– have been shut out of the discussion. In previous high-level FAO events, civil society was given more space to express its views and to have a dialogue with the delegates. For this Summit, civil society was blocked from meaningful participation in the preparation and in the event itself.

“We are concerned that this Summit will only reinforce corporate control of the food system and lead to a further destruction of the way of life of indigenous peoples and their survival,” says Saul Vicente Vasquez of the International Indian Treaty Council and one of the supporters of the action. “It is time for indigenous people and other food producers to take charge of food policy.”Those involved in the action have been meeting with other civil society organizations at the Terra Preta* civil society forum, parallel to the FAO Summit.

A video of the action and the suppression of the action is available on http://wsftv.net. During the action, the security guards seized a banner reading: “Stop corporate control over food!”.

—-

Information about Terra Preta and a statement from the forum can be found
at www.foodsovereignty.org

The original article, translated by Peter Rosset, was originally published in Spanish in La Jornada:

May 9, 2008

The Time has Come for La Via Campesina and Food Sovereignty

Peter Rosset

Around the world it seems more and more that the time has come for La Via Campesina. The global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an alternative proposal for how to structure a country’s food system, called Food Sovereignty. It was clear at the World Forum on Food Sovereignty held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been gaining ground with other social movements, including those of indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade unions, and others. Though when it comes to governments and international agencies, it had until recently been met with mostly deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already led to food riots in diverse parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas, is making everybody sit up and take note of this issue.

But, what are the causes of the extreme food price hikes? There are both long term and short causes. Among the former, the cumulative effect of three decades of neoliberal budget-cutting, privatization and free trade agreements stands out. In most countries around the world, national food production capacity has been systematically dismantled and replaced by a growing capacity to produce agroexports, stimulated by enormous government subsidies to agribusiness, using taxpayer money.

It is peasants and families farmers who feed the peoples of the world, by and large. Large agribusiness producers in most any country have an export “vocation.” But policy decisiones have stripped the former of minimum price guarantees, parastatal marketing boards, credit, technical assistance, and above all, markets for their produce. Local and national food markets were first inundated with cheap imports, and now, when transnational corporations (TNCs) have captured the bulk of the market share, the prices of the food imports on which countries now depend have been drastically jacked up.

Meanwhile the World Bank and the IMF have forced governments to sell off their public sector grain reserves. The result is that we now face one of the tightest margins in recent history between food reserves and demand, which generates both rising prices and greater market volatility. In other words, many countries no longer have either sufficient food reserves or sufficient productive capacity. They now depend on imports, whose prices are skyrocketing. Another long term cause of the crisis, though of lesser importance, has been changing patterns of food consumption in some parts of the world, like increased preference for meat and poultry products.

Among the short term causes of the crisis, by far the most important has been the relatively sudden entry of speculative financial capital into food markets. Hedge, index and risk funds have invested heavily in the futures markets for commodities like grains and other food products. With the collapse of the home mortgage market in the USA, their already desperate search for new avenues of investment led them to discover these markets for futures contracts. Attracted by high price volatility in any market, since they take their profits on both price rises and price drops, they bet like gamblers in a casino. Gambling, in this case, with the food of ordinary people. These funds have already injected an additional 70 billion dollars of extra investment into commodities, inflating a price bubble that has pushed the cost of basic foodstuffs beyond the reach of of the poor in country after country. And when the bubble inevitably bursts, it will wipe out millions of food producers throughout the world.

Another important short term factor is the agrofuel boom. Agrofuel crops compete for planting area with food crops and cattle pasture. In the Philippines, for example, the government has signed agreements that commit an area to be planted to agrofuels that is equivalent to fully half of the area planted to rice, the mainstay of the country’s diet. We really ought to label feeding automobiles instead of people as a crime against humanity.

The major global price increases in the costs of chemical inputs for conventional farming, as a direct result of the high price of petroleum, is also a major short term causal factor. Other factors of recent impact include droughts and other climate events in a number of regions, and a conspiracy involving the CIA to destabilize certain governments not well-liked by Washington. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, the private sector and the TNCs are working hard to export food items sorely needed by the local population, or otherwise prevent them from reaching market, as a way to delegitimize the leaders of those countries.

Faced with this global panorama, and all of its implications, there is really just one alternative proposal that is up to the challenge. Under the Food Sovereignty paradigm, social movements and a growing number of progressive and semi-progressive governments propose that we re-regulate the food commodity markets that were de-regulated under neoliberalism. And regulate them better than before they were deregulated, with genuine supply management, making it possible to set prices that are fair to both farmers and consumers alike.

That necessarily means a return to protection of the national food production of nations, both against the dumping of artificially cheap food that undercuts local farmers, and against the artificially expensive food imports that we face today. It means rebuilding the national grain reserves and parastatal marketing boards, in new and improved versions that actively include farmer organizations as owners and administrators of public reserves. That is a key step toward taking our food system back from the TNCs that hoard food stocks to drive prices up.

Countries urgently need to stimulate the recovery of their national food producing capacity, specifically that capacity located in the peasant and family farm sectors. That means public sector budgets, floor prices, credit and other forms of support, and genuine agrarian reform. Land reform is urgently needed in many countries to rebuild the peasant and family farm sectors, whose vocation is growing food for people, since the largest farms and agribusinesses seem to only produce for cars and for export. And many countries need to implement export controls, as a number of governments have done in recent days, to stop the forced exportation of food desperately needed by their own populations.

Finally, we must change dominant technological practices in farming, toward an agriculture based on agroecological principles, that is sustainable, and that is based on respect for and is in equilibrium with nature, local cultures, and traditional farming knowledge. It has been scientifically demonstrated that ecological farming systems can be more productive, can better resist drought and other manifestations of climate change, and are more economically sustainable because they use less fossil fuel. We can no longer afford the luxury of food whose price is linked to the price of petroleum, much less whose industrial monoculture production model — with pesticides and GMOs — damages the future productive capacity of our soils.

The time has truly arrived for La Via Campesina and for Food Sovereignty. There is no other real solution to feeding the world, and it is up to each and every one of us to join mobilizations to force the changes in national and international public policy that are so urgently needed.