Below is a statement from our global partner, La Via Campesina. La Via Campesina (LVC) is an international movement comprised of more than 200 million small farmers and producers across 70-plus countries. LVC defends peasant agriculture for food sovereignty as...
During the Engaged Donors for Global Equity (EDGE) conference in Berkeley, Grassroots International facilitated a discussion about the history and vision of social movement struggles for trade justice. Activists and thought leaders from Mexico, the US and the Philippines – including Grassroots’ allies and grantees – shared the first-hand damages of Free Trade Agreements versus the dignity of Trade Justice.
We co-organized the workshop with our allies at International Development Exchange (IDEX). Participants included:
Being a farmer is hard. This is true no matter what policies exist. The work itself is difficult, and making money from farming requires many, many factors to line up just right. Get too much rain, too dry a season, too many bugs and the crop can be destroyed. Prices might be higher, but there’s just not that much to sell. Even a big harvest when everything goes well doesn’t guarantee success. A bumper crop means that there are a whole lot of tomatoes, corn, peaches, or eggplants at the market, so prices go down.
In January 1994, the Zapatistas - autonomous indigenous communities who organized themselves in a system of liberated zones within Chiapas, Mexico – emerged out of the jungles with a clear and unified voice in opposition to the system of neoliberalism being imposed upon their lives through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A trade deal between Canada, the US, and Mexico, NAFTA instituted a set of regulations that made it easier for transnational corporations to make profits across borders, no matter what the costs or consequences to people and the environment. As a result, thousands of workers in the US lost their jobs as companies moved their operations to Mexico where the costs of production were cheaper.
Launched in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) completed the Bretton Woods trio with the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in promoting neoliberalism and corporate globalization. The WTO was particularly special in its power to legally enforce and penalize countries, taking away the policy space of governments, and on several occasions, forcing them to change their national laws in order to implement global free trade rules.
For some, October 12th is commemorated as the day that Christopher Columbus "discovered" the Americas. For many more, it marked the beginning of over 500 years of foreign domination, cultural destruction and systematic exploitation. Over the last 15 years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has perpetuated that tragic history.
Join with other justice-minded people to use this October 12th to push for the renegotiation and replacement of NAFTA and forge a new history based on mutual respect, human rights, and dignity.
The Global Week of Action on Trade is a collaborative worldwide action between different communities, to protest the damaging impact of "free" trade, while highlighting alternatives to NAFTA, CAFTA, other free trade agreements and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
It is being organized in conjunction with the Global Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and Her Peoples, launched at the IV Hemispheric Summit of Indigenous People in Puno, Peru, last May.
"We ratify the organization of the Minga (traditional indigenous collective communal organization) of the Global Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and Her Peoples against the commercialization of life (including land, forests, water, seas, agro-fuels, ex
The G20 meetings in London are drawing a lot of attention in the media and around the world. Typically, much of the mainstream media attention is focused either on the pomp sideshow (the Queen and Michelle Obama's hug) or the small portion of the protestors that broke windows and equipment in the RBS offices (which bolsters mainstream media's emphasis on sensationalism and their ability to dismiss genuine global protest against the destructive policies of governments and multilateral institutions).
The world's most powerful "leaders" meet today in Washington to debate what is to be done about the global financial crisis - a crisis they themselves were instrumental in causing. It is their blind devotion to a consistently failed ideology, outright greed, and a slavish willingness to be accountable only to their corporate backers (on the part of almost all that are gathering), and an ambition to get a seat at the table in the country club (on the part of the G-20 minus 7) that has created this toxic mix that we are all being forced to swallow.
The world's most powerful "leaders" meet today in Washington to debate what is to be done about the global financial crisis - a crisis they themselves were instrumental in causing. It is their blind devotion to a consistently failed ideology, outright greed, and a slavish willingness to be accountable only to their corporate backers (on the part of almost all that are gathering), and an ambition to get a seat at the table in the country club (on the part of the G-20 minus 7) that has created this toxic mix that we are all being forced to swallow.
Grassroots International ally and grantee, the National Family Farm Coalition (a member of Grassroots' partner the Via Campesina), celebrated the demise of the recent Doha Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Grassroots supports the NFFC's and Via's demand for the WTO to "get out of agriculture" as this is imperative to realizing food sovereignty. The disastrous neoliberal trade policies pursued by the WTO benefit the "industrial agricultural complex" while harming family farmers, peasants and farm workers worldwide.
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 for 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 has until recently been met with mostly deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already
"Burning food today so as to serve the mobility of the rich countries is a crime against humanity" said Jean Ziegler, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food criticizing the growing push for using food crops as fuel crops and diverting land use from food cultivation to fuel cultivation. In the face of the growing global crisis that he said could lead to "widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale" United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convened a global task force to respond, and called for closing the $755 million funding gap in the UN's World Food Programme.
Biofuels can be effective disguises. They disguise the unseemly profiteering of agribusinesses that earn millions from corn- and sugarcane-based ethanol. They disguise the power-grabbing of governments that use biofuels as political pawns. And they disguise the suffering of land and people in the Global South whenever they are touted as "safe green technologies."
A new report from the Oakland Institute and Terra de Direitos lifts these disguises and documents how sugarcane grown for ethanol in Brazil has become the country's international bargaining chip, yet has also mobilized millions of Brazilians--and people throughout Latin America--against the growth of monocultures for export as fuel.
The Via Campesina, a global movement of family farmers, agricultural workers, landless, fisherfolk and indigenous peoples, brought their message of food sovereignty to Pascal Lamy, Director General of the World Trade Organization. The very fact that Lamy agreed to meet with them demonstrates that their members have hugely affected the outcome of the WTO negotiations. Among social movements, including labor and environmental circles, there is a growing sentiment that the global food system should serve the needs of the producers, workers and communities most connected to it.
While the Via Campesina is making global leaders hear this message of food sovereignty, Grassroots International is bringing this message, in conjunction with the National Family Farm Coalition, to the U.S. where movement building for rights to land, water, food and seeds are sorely needed. Today, we are lifted by this new global political opportunity.
In this piece written July 26, 2006, Dr. Shiva points out that while there is certainly cause to celebrate the collapse of the WTO's Doha Round, the underlying logic of free (as opposed to fair) trade and its harmful effects on the world's impoverished majority are alive and well in bilateral agreements between the U.S. and individual Third World countries; and that multinational corporations in fact don't need the WTO and multilateral free trade agreements and rules as they can get much of what they want in bilateral deals. Citing the case of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, Dr. Shiva shows that even formal bilateral trade agreements are in and of themselves not required and that ostensibly scientific cooperation and knowledge sharing frameworks can advance the agenda of multinational corporations and their political backers.
The WTO "compromise" being pushed by the industrialized countries and the WTO director would have dealt a double-whammy to Third World countries --devastating their agricultural and industrial sectors in one blow. As Carin Smaller of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy notes, "The current system hasn't worked for U.S. farmers or West African farmers. It has failed workers in Europe as well as those in Bangladesh."
La Via Campesina (a Grassroots International partner and grantee) jointly released a press statement with major Via allies, including Marche mondiale des femmes, Friends of the Earth, and World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers after the World Trade Organization (WTO) announced the collapse of the Doha Round of global trade talks.
In spite of the WTO's announcement of new compromises and "progress" on the agreement on agriculture (which would deepen the damage done to agricultural systems, food sovereignty and rural economies around the world by years of neo-liberal policies), many observers doubt that negotiators will be able to meet the deadlines and goals of the proposed deal.
