Good evening.

Thank you for coming and participating in this event. Thanks to everyone that has facilitated bringing me here to talk about agriculture. If there is one thing that I would like to stress tonight it is that you don't always need money to change something in the world. If you have the will you can do it. The best way to help people is with your experience, your courage and with your good work.

I am the President of an association of women in the region of Kayes, Mali. There are 4,000 women in the association and they are small-scale family farmers. I am also the President of the women's association for the national coordination of peasants' associations in Mali. I am a member of the coordinating committee of a group of West African family farmers. I am on the International Coordinating Committee of La Via Campesina.

All the different organizations that I am a part of are at different levels. At the base-level, the grassroots level, it is really important that people are able to live in a way that respects the values that they have, that they are able to live with dignity from their agricultural production.

In each country there are policies and there are politics that are very important. One of the things that we have come to recognize is that even though we are small, poor family farmers, we have rights.

Mali, as a country, has it own policies and politics. Mali is apart of a sub-region, the region of West Africa, which is apart of the ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West Africa. The region of west Africa, also has its distinct policies and politics. West Africa is apart of the world, and the world also has a political landscape.

We are faced with a problem, and that problem is the same problem that all family farmers are faced with today: large-scale farmers are trying to take over. Where I come from, we are born farmers. Our entire life, our entire livelihood, and our entire economy depend upon agriculture.

Small-scale agriculture in Mali is confronted with a lot of problems right now. One of those problems is drought. Another is urbanization, which is moving small-scale farmers out of their traditional lands. Another problem is the lack of credit for small-scale farmers and land rights.

Another problem is the politics and the policies of the sub-region of West Africa. If we don't come together and speak up for ourselves, we will be taken advantage of and we will disappear.

We have embraced the concept of Food Sovereignty. Food Sovereignty gives us the right to live in dignity and to respect our values. It gives us the right to produce our own food and consume our own food; it gives us the right to choose what we want to eat.

If a country adopts food sovereignty, a country can protect its own markets. With common tariffs for export, it means that the U.S. can apply the same tariff to Mali as to Nigerian farmers when it exports. In the U.S. the agricultural market in the U.S. is subsidized and because of that they are able to invade the international market and destroy it. The country of Mali is able to gain a little income from the production of cotton. The cotton in Mali is the best quality of cotton on the international market. But its price is three times less expensive than the price of cotton in the U.S.

Thai rice sold in Mali costs two times less than Malian rice. We, together, in CNOP came together and approached the government of Mali to say that we are not in agreement with these kinds of tariffs that are destructive to our own agriculture. We are putting in place a program to decide what our agriculture will be. We came up with a policy that was actually passed by the Malian government that puts forward a list of demands of how we want agriculture to be. It puts forward our vision of what we want agriculture to be. We've advanced a little bit, but now there are the steps of implementing it.

I am going to talk a little now about the role of rural women in Mali. Women represent more than 60 percent of the population in Mali. Eighty percent of the family food production is produced by women. With all of the domestic work that women do--raising the children and all of those other things like the lack of access to land, credit and education and training--there needs to be special attention given to women. Agriculture in general is marginalized; factor women into the agriculture equation, women are marginalized in agriculture and are overworked.

In my region, we are near the Senegal River. Previously, the rain came 3-4 months per year. In the 8 months when it wasn't gardening, we did small-level gardening next to the river. The Manatali dam on the Senegal River has a large impact during those 8 months on the gardening alongside the river. The farmers have no idea when the authorities are going to open the flood gates and so all your seeds and sprouts can be washed away after one month of gardening. It results in a complete loss of revenue. Those who can afford mechanized pumps also have to pay for water on top of that. I tell you this situation as a way of showing all of you the difficulties that we face. This is a political landscape in which we were not asked for our input from the government or for the views of the Malian farmers.

Because of these difficulties we are organizing an international forum on Food Sovereignty in Mali, to share our vision of agriculture and food. We will use it to create alliances and to advance the interests of small-scale farmers.

I came here to learn. When I came to the U.S. last February, it was the first time that I learned that American farmers had problems too. The impression that we have in Mali is that everything is rosy in the U.S. I welcome questions from all of you and I thank you.