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Food for people not for profit - International peasant struggle day

Tomorrow, 17 April, is international peasant struggle day. This day is for celebrating peasant and small farmer movements across the world, each one fighting for a food system that respects human rights rather than making them subservient to private profit. This day has been heralded by the international food sovereignty movement as a day to take action and raise awareness about the problems with, and alternatives to, a corporate-run and over-industrialised food system.

Currently, however, it is still food security that holds the main stage when it comes to national and international research and policy-making. The food security banner remains as the undertone to the IF campaign , the latest major joint NGO action on food, and has made its place onto most social science syllabuses and the agendas of countless policy centres.  


Harmful chemical fertilisers are key to food security - Photo credit: soil science

At the World Food Summit in 1996, food security was defined as "when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe...

Growing the food movement in south west England

On 10 February, WDM helped organise the first regional food sovereignty meeting in the south west. Food sovereignty advocates that the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that they believe have come to dominate the global food system. 

This was the first big meeting since the national gathering at OrganicLea on the outskirts of London last July, and it aimed to strengthen regional networks of the food sovereignty movement and make national planning more accessible to people outside of London.

The meeting attracted over 40 people from across the South West, which is testament to the vibrant community food networks alive in the region. There was a lot of energy to coordinate actions, public education materials and events in the South West, including a festival in the summer of 2014 (either in the South West or nationally). There was also an idea to start working on a regional food charter.

It was also agreed to plan an action for 17 April to tie in with the...

Time for a food revolution

A guest blog by Kate Griffin from Oxford WDM.

If the world produces enough food to feed everybody, how come hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat? Last night’s film screening made it clear that the problem is with food distribution rather than production.

Growing Change is a documentary about Venezuela’s food revolution with an inspiring message. Despite the rainy January weather, nearly 70 people came to the screening, which was organised by Oxford World Development Movement (WDM).

We learnt that Venezuela used to be a victim of its own success; after tapping into enormous oil wealth, it was no longer worth it economically for the country to grow its own food. Instead, it began heavy reliance on imports, an all-too-common phenomenon apparently known as the “Dutch disease”. It happens when countries see food supply in purely economic terms. But reliance on imports makes a country vulnerable to global food shocks.

Global free-market economics isn’t good for small producers either. Cocoa producers told stories of buyers holding off until supplies were piled up and money was low. Then the buyers could turn up and use their stronger position to negotiate a lower...

The Hunger Games

The UK government is yet again undermining grassroots poverty alleviation by channelling UK aid towards huge agribusiness. The Hunger Games, a report recently published by War on Want, criticises the Department for International Development (DfID) for working with the ‘who’s who’ of agrochemical and GM seed companies including Monsanto, Unilever and Syngenta.

In coalition with these companies, DfID is funding dodgy agricultural initiatives such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). This initiative in particular seeks to “trigger a uniquely African green revolution” by promoting networks of GM seed and agrochemical providers to small farmers.

The companies working beneath this banner, posing under a guise of African development, are seeking to extend their reach over emerging markets in countries like Malawi. Monsanto, a company that originally made its money from making chemical weapons but has now switched to agrochemicals, has openly declared its intention to control all of Malawi’s 30,000 tonne seed market. This transition, if it was allowed to happen, would decimate traditional seed markets, and lock local farmers further into a dependency on foreign inputs....

Swap sugar for solidarity

If you overdid it a bit on sweet treats over the festive period, you might have decided to go easy on them for a while. But campaigners in Cambodia are calling for more decisive action as land grabbing for industrial sugarcane plantations has been robbing communities of their land, homes and livelihoods.

Two million hectares - 12 per cent of the country’s landmass – have now been granted to private companies for industrial agriculture, with sugarcane one of the leading crops. At least 75,000 hectares of land have granted to private companies for industrial sugarcane production, with over 12,000 people estimated to have been affected by human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by the companies involved.

When the companies involved have arrived, local people’s homes and harvests have been burned down. The majority of people affected have land-based livelihoods, so the loss of land has pushed families into poverty, leaving them unable to afford school costs or hospital births for their children. The land that has...

Happy World Food Sovereignty Day?

This week, ahead of World Food Day, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Concern Worldwide launched the 2012 Global Hunger Index (GHI). The index is there to categorise countries in relation to the number of undernourished people that live within them in an attempt to make their governments more accountable, guide international agencies to the key areas of the world and to track the trends of world hunger over time.

The countries that trail at the bottom of this report are Burundi, Eritrea and Haiti, whilst another 45 have a situation which is either serious or alarming. The index highlights the scale of what is still to be done in terms of world hunger as well as underlining Concern’s key policy directions that the developing world need to consider to work towards what they call ‘sustainable food security’. The report largely blames the prevalence of severe and extreme hunger on a mixture of poor policies, food price volatility, energy and water availability, land grabbing, biofuel production, increased urbanisation and a changing climate. 

Indian farmer with grain

The...

Victory for land reform campaigners

On 3 October, 60,000 people from India’s poor and tribal communities embarked on Jan Satyagraha (“March for Justice”), a 350 km month-long march from Gwalior in the north of the country to the national capital Dehli to press their demands for their rights to land, forest, water and natural resources for food supply. Last week, on 11 October, in response to the protest the government decided to introduce significant land reform policy change and in light of this victory the march was called off.

Jan Satyagraha participants listen attentively to the announcement of the expected agreement. Agra, Oct. 10th, 2012. (photo : Barbara Schnetzler)

Ekta Parishad, a Ghandi-inspired land reform movement, organised the march, which was one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in the country, aiming to highlight the struggles of millions of poor and landless farmers. According to Ekta Parishad approximately 400 million people could be lifted out of poverty if they had access to land and resources. This organisation has two principle demands: firstly the enactment of a Land Reform Act enshrining the right to shelter and secondly a new land reform policy.

...

Marching for Good Food in Brussels

Yesterday I joined farmers, food producers, beekeepers, foodies and campaigners from right across Europe, along with a couple of fellow WDM group members, on the final day of the Good Food March in Brussels. It was a cold sunny day as hundreds of people, some of whom had been part of delegations traveling to Brussels on bikes and tractors from different corners or Europe over the preceding weeks, gathered in the city centre. We then headed off, a tractor leading the way, to deliver a photo petition to representatives from the European Commission, the Committee of the Regions and the European Parliament.

GFM UK delegation with banner

A tour of these venerable (though dull-sounding) European institutions on a Wednesday morning may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the vibrant mix of people passionate about good food and farming made up for that. The purpose of the march was to highlight our demands for a more sustainable food and farming system that could be delivered through the current...

Delivering demands

What do you want to see change to deliver a better food system? That’s what European citizens were asked recently – and the results have been impressive.

With the issues raised including fair prices for farmers, action to tackle food speculation and an end to food waste, and key decisions due to be taken by European decision-makers in the coming weeks, we wanted to make sure these demands didn’t go unheard.

GFM projection

We joined up with the organisers of the Good Food March, a pan-European initiative calling for a better European food system, to deliver some of the hundreds of images submitted by people across Europe onto the walls of the European parliament and the surrounding buildings. The results certainly turned a few heads in the city centre this evening, and will hopefully provide a talking point for those in the Brussels bubble as the...

The London Food Revolution

Earlier today I saw ‘Best Before’, a new short documentary film which explores and explains the impact of rising food prices on the local economy and community. The film uses several London-based case studies to fully illustrate just how unsustainable our food system is.

Over the past 20 years food prices in the UK have risen by 26%, far greater than inflation. Surely this is good news for the food producers who really need the money, right? Wrong. Whilst market prices have increased, the returns for producers in the global south have diminished. UK supermarket giants satisfy shareholders’ demands for constant growth by squeezing the price that food producers receive.

Furthermore, deregulation of trade in the 1980s, pursued actively by Thatcher and Reagan, meant supermarkets, and thus UK consumers, became increasingly reliant on imported food, which now makes up 42% of our market. As a consequence, we are now more dependent on the use of unsustainable resources, especially oil, to produce, package and transport food. The finite...

Campaigners issue warning on Cameron’s ‘hunger summit’

On Sunday, David Cameron will attempt to capitalise on the international presence in London for the Olympics to convene a ‘hunger summit’ – but campaigners have warned that the prime minister’s big business approach ‘risks entrenching the root causes of hunger’.

Political and business leaders and humanitarian groups at the summit are expected to announce a new target to reduce child malnutrition by the next Olympic Games in Rio in 2016. Former England football captain David Beckham has presented a letter to David Cameron urging him to tackle deprivation of essential nutrients early in a child’s life, which causes stunted growth.

The World Development Movement’s food campaigner Amy Horton said today:

“It’s great that David Cameron is using the Olympics to focus attention on the need to reverse the rising incidence of child malnutrition. But by promoting the role of big business in developing countries’ food markets, his approach risks entrenching the root causes of hunger.  

“Increasing the power of multinational companies over the world’s food is not going to improve child nutrition. Instead of corporate land grabs, we need local control over the resources on which food production depends. We need governments to be able to regulate international...

Food sovereignty in Venezuela

Arriving in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the first thing you notice is the extensive swathes of mountainside covered with poorly built, crowded, ad-hoc homes – known locally as the barrios. Caracas’ shanty-town barrios were built in response to the influx of migrants from the countryside during the twentieth century. As Venezuela struck oil in the 1920s, it became easier and cheaper to use oil money to import foodstuffs and so many small farmers lost their livelihoods and poured into the capital in search of work. Years of agricultural neglect followed leaving Venezuela dangerously reliant on multinationals for their food supply and distribution.

Over the last 12 years, the socialist government of Hugo Chavez has been attempting to rebuild Venezuela’s agricultural sector and has included the radical concept of food sovereignty into the country's new constitution. Food sovereignty is a concept that originates in the global south and presents a positive alternative to our broken global food system which is dominated by the multinational food companies who grow food in a way that is unsustainable, leads to hunger and damages the environment. Food sovereignty is...

A new movement is born: food sovereignty in the UK

Today 2,500 dairy farmers descended on Westminster to express their outrage at cuts in milk prices paid by the processing companies. Six companies control 93 per cent of UK dairy processing, giving them huge power. Farms are crashing out of business in a “market place that does not work and is not fair,” said the NFU’s deputy president. “I have never seen such frustration… Enough is enough.” 


The mood could not have been more different from another gathering of food producers that took place this week – the first for the UK food sovereignty movement. “I am so incredibly fired up! It really was the best activist gathering I've ever been involved in, with some concrete results, lots of like minded thinking, and loads of energy,” said one farmer from a Dorset co-op.

I joined over 100 growers, co-operative workers, researchers, campaigners and activists to help build the food sovereignty movement here in the UK. (Click here to see a word cloud showing some of the...

What is food sovereignty?

Participants arrive at the camp built specially for the Food Sovereignty Forum in 2007, in Selingue, Mali (Photo: Donkeycart)

 

Food sovereignty is about the right of peoples to define their own food systems. 

Advocates of food sovereignty puts the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations that they believe have come to dominate the global food system. This movement is advocated by a number of farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, women, rural youth and environmental organizations.

The 6 pillars of food sovereignty:

  1. Focuses on food for people: The right to food which is healthy and culturally appropriate is the basic legal demand underpinning food sovereignty. Guaranteeing it requires policies which support diversified food production in each region and country. Food is not simply another commodity to be traded or speculated on for profit.
  2. Values food providers: Many smallholder farmers suffer violence, marginalisation and...

How to grow our way out of economic crisis

10 per cent of Europeans are unemployed. To solve the crisis we need to grow… food. The idea of becoming a farmer may not seem very appealing. Isn’t the countryside scattered with producers struggling to eke out a living from supermarket prices that barely cover the cost of production? Driving tractors across vast monotonous landscapes or herding cows into industrial milking sheds? Don’t young people up sticks and head for the city, part of a great wave of migration around the world? 

Oil has taken their jobs. Diverse farming, which needs many skilled workers, has largely given way (in the global north) to giant monocultures powered by fossil fuel-hungry machinery and fertilisers. But with climate change almost at a tipping point and so many millions out of work, it’s clear that this is unsustainable.

Subsidising land grabs in Europe 

At a gathering of activists and food producers from across Europe yesterday, I heard about how some growers and community initiatives are realising an alternative, based on the principles of food sovereignty. But small-scale farmers said they face an uneven policy field. 80 per cent of the payments under Europe’s common agriculture policy (CAP) go to just 20 per cent of farmers. Smallholders are entitled to a...

International day of action on the twin food and climate crises

Today activists in South Africa are mobilising around the Durban summit to challenge industrial agriculture, which is at the heart of both the food and climate crises. They have called an international day of action for food sovereignty to cool down the earth.

“Industrial agriculture and production is responsible for global warming, hunger, land dispossession, massive displacements of farmers, rural workers and indigenous communities across the continent.”
They point out that Africa and other countries of the global south will be hit hardest by climate change, not least through its impacts on agriculture, which provides livelihoods for so many. A radical overhaul is needed. In South Africa, for example, only 5 per cent of agricultural land has been transferred to black people in 17 years of democracy, and millions in rural and urban areas suffer from food and nutritional insecurity. Women tend to get the worst deal.

An alliance that includes the quarter-billion movement of small-scale producers, La Via Campesina and a number of African groups is today protesting false solutions promoted by the powerful inside the climate summit. This is grassroots resistance to land grabs. It’s also about halting a new green revolution that would put control over resources in...

Occupations and food justice – from Brazil to the UK

Highlights from a recent event in Manchester featuring leading Brazilian and Sri Lankan activists for land redistribution and food justice. And what next for food sovereignty in the UK?

MST march

Delwek Matheus is no stranger to occupations. As one of the coordinators of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil (MST), he has been on the frontline of efforts to redistribute land in one of the world’s most unequal countries. Over the last three decades, the MST has helped organise half a million people to claim land.

A key tactic has been peaceful, mass occupations of uncultivated land – which under the Brazilian constitution can be redistributed.The MST has also occupied the state-controlled Banco de Brasil, challenging its support for industrial, export-led agriculture rather than local food production. Delwek visited the London occupation by the stock exchange during his visit and said it was part of a global movement showing “a new vision of how society can be organised” in relation to finance, resisting the drive to turn essential natural resources into commodities:

Today’s problem of food speculation is...

Urban farming and rural workers' rights: food sovereignty in action in the US

Dan Iles, WDM's south-west mobiliser, interviews Christina Schiavoni of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance.

On day four of the European forum on food sovereignty, I met Christina from the US. I was very interested to find out about what sort of actions are happening over in the US as well the aftermath of the Wall Street Reform Act passed recently to limit financial speculation on food. In this interview she talks about the urban and rural movements for food sovereignty across the US, including dairy producers, supermarket workers and anti-food speculation protests.

US food sovereignty delegate

What does food sovereignty mean to you?

To me it means the right of people to define their own agricultural policies, rather than those policies being defined by the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF, or multinational corporations.

Can you give me some examples of local initiatives that are involved with enacting food sovereignty in the US?

These are local manifestations of food sovereignty, because I really think that...

'Food sovereignty means self reliance and self respect'

Dan Iles, food activist and WDM’s south-west mobiliser interviews Indian activist S. Kannaiyan at the Nyeleni forum to build a food sovereignty movement in Europe.

At Nyeleni 2011 there is such a diversity of delegates from across Europe and indeed the world. In the first of a series of interviews, I am trying to give the international perspective on food sovereignty.

I spoke to one of a few non-European delegates that were able to make it over to the conference, S. Kannaiyan from Tamil Nadu, south India. There are also delegates from Mali, Canada, Nigeria, the US, Mozambique and Azerbaijan. I wanted to give you an idea of why this delegate is so passionate about food sovereignty, what the challenges are in his country and what is being done locally to combat these challenges.

Portrait of S. Kannaiyan, Indian activistWhat does food sovereignty mean to you?

Food sovereignty means to me the self respect which comes from self reliance in food production and distribution. Local food production and distribution rather than food produced in...

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