Creating Food Sovereignty for Small-Scale Farmers

by: BorderJumpers

Fri Jul 09, 2010 at 10:10

Name: Raj Patel

Affiliation: Visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for African Studies, Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

Location: San Francisco

Bio: Raj Patel has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing.

Can you please explain the concept of food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?

Food sovereignty is about communities', states' and unions' rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you're actually not making a policy demand, you're just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that's a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They've always been imposed.

That's why La Via Campesina, the organization that really invented the term, says that one of the visions behind food sovereignty is that food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women. That may sound something not at all to do with food, but of course, if we're serious about people being able to make choices about how their food comes to them and what the food system looks like, then the physical and the structural violence to which women are exposed in the home, in the economy and in society, all need to be tackled. Otherwise we will continue with a situation in which 60 percent of the people going hungry today are women or girls. So food sovereignty, to boil it down, is really about power - who has it in the food system, and how to redistribute it so that those who have concentrated it, have it taken away from them.

In terms of specific policies, what Via Campesina are calling for is for agriculture to be removed from the World Trade Organization, which is a way again in which local countries' sovereignty is already been given away. They also call for large corporations to be booted out of agriculture. There's strong opposition to Monsanto for example, and the way that they've been behaving in many developing countries, and many Via Campesina members are campaigning against Monsanto in their home countries.

Will another Green Revolution or more food subsidies help reduce hunger?

To answer the question, let's look at Malawi. It's the poster child for what a new green revolution in Africa might look like, with widespread subsidies of inorganic fertilizer for farmers. When I went there, late last year, what you found was long lines at the gasoline pump, because all Malawi's foreign exchange had been spent on importing this fossil fuel-based fertilizer. The country had bankrupted itself in order that it might be a showcase for the new green revolution in Africa. And of course, there are alternatives right there in Malawi, driven by farmers - invariably by women who are innovating around sustainable systems like poly-culture - growing lots of crops simultaneously together, building soil fertility for the long run.

What this shows is that there are some basic incompatibilities between varieties of ways of addressing agrarian problems in Africa. Some organizations, Worldwatch included, adopt a 'big tent' approach, in which solutions that keep the status quo but improve it marginally sit alongside far more radical approaches. Ultimately, you can't promote genetically modified monoculture or techniques that make large-scale commercial farming less destructive at the same time as wanting something like food sovereignty, which calls for much more of a deeper structural rethink of the way the food system operates. Food sovereignty is about democracy in our food system so that everyone gets to eat - industrial agriculture involves a food system run by technocrats for profit. At the end of the day, you can have one or the other -not both.

How does global agricultural policy affect small-scale farmers across the world?

In general the policies foisted on developing countries through organizations like the World Bank is that large scale agriculture is the way to go: that small farmers are a relic of the past. They are of purely cultural significance but economically, socially, and agriculturally, they stand in the way of development. So the policies that are essentially designed to increase farm size and kick off rural populations to the cities are ones that you see in pretty much every country around the world. And yet of course, it is the poor in rural communities that are being forced to bear the brunt of these policies and these are the communities that are least able to afford it. And again - you can never say it too often - it is on women's shoulders that the bulk of the pain of moving from agrarian society to a so-called modern industrial society one, falls.

"The Empire Strikes Back"--Washington DC, April 2000

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Nov 29, 2009 at 15:00

Washington, D.C. The A-16 demonstrations against the World Bank/IMF on April 16 and 17, 2000 saw a dramatic escalation in state repression of fundamental constitutional rights. There was a coordinated preemptive plan to stifle and disrupt constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly, which included a wide range of acts that were individually illegal, unconstitutional and/or actionable on civil law, including an illegal raid on the Convergence Center, the headquarters for groups involved in the protests, and the confiscation of property that prevented its use in the demonstrations.   On July 27, the ACLU, National Lawyers Guild and Partnership for Civil Justice filed a lawsuit covering all these activities on behalf of organizations and individuals involved in the protests, including Fifty Years is Enough, the International Action Center, and the Mobilization for Global Justice. The suit contained 10 counts: One count for the conspiracy to disrupt First Amendment rights, one count for the raid on the Convergence Center, four for mass false arrest (First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, false arrest, false imprisonment), one for the exclusion ("No Constitution") zone, and three for excess force (First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, assault and battery). The lawsuit charges that the conspiracy to disrupt First Amendment rights included "intimidation, harassment, dissemination of false information portraying plaintiffs as violent, street closures, confiscation of political materials, preemptive mass false arrests and seizures, and unnecessary lengthy detention of arrestees in inhumane conditions." This included Stopping & frisking individual protesters without reasonable suspicion or consent. Searched demonstration organizers or their vehicles without probable cause or consent Making pretextual visits to demonstration organizers' places of residence. Stopping demonstration organizers on the street, showing them photos taken of them, naming their associates, and otherwise making government surveillance known to them. Massing large numbers of uniformed and non-uniformed officers near the Convergence Center and other places where activists met, and subjecting them to surveillance. Infiltrating demonstrators' organizations and informal groups with agents posing as political activists. Flying and hovering government helicopters at low altitudes over the Convergence Center and the residences and property of protesters. Causing George Washington University to ban overnight guests in its dormitories during the period of the protests and prohibiting demonstrators from using GWU facilities promised to them. Causing the American University to cancel an assembly and panel, including Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who was scheduled to speak on globalization, the World  Bank and the IMF. Causing the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to (1) close Metro Stations demonstrators were expected to use, and (2) prohibit passengers from carrying political banners and signs, which is customarily allowed. All these actions were taken before a single demonstrator appeared on the streets (though some continued afterwards), and they represented a chilling intrusion into the private lives of activists, and into the normal functioning of civil society.