Fourth in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an LVC translator.
Baramee Chaiyarat is responsible for organizing the seven networks that make up Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and his background as the son of a subsistence farmer and a teacher made him well-suited to this work.
The Assembly of the Poor represents villagers affected by either dam construction or forestry policy, the landless, alternative agriculturalists, small scale fisher folk, slum dwellers and injured workers. They're a non-partisan organization that's deeply suspicious of all the country's political parties. At one point, they were all separate, and Chaiyarat said they all "felt tired and out of energy" after many years of unsuccessful work. He doesn't even know who first thought of bringing them all together, and that it took several years of face to face forums before everyone trusted each other enough to establish the AoP, which organizes mass mobilizations in the capital and community-backed lending circles.
Chaiyarat said he and his colleagues "came to let the world know that the solutions being proposed at Bella Center are false solutions. We feel the real way to solve the problem is through the principle of food security," he said, and supporting small scale farmers who work in harmony with nature.
One proposal that particularly concerns Chaiyarat is the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)standard, which is said to be close to a final deal. He said that without adequate protections for indigenous peoples, "it will be one of the most vicious sorts of programs around," allowing the government an additional pretext to drive villagers out of their ancestral lands.
A massacre of indigenous protesters in Peru last weekend has resulted in the temporary roll-back of development laws that were passed without proper consultation under international law. They were part of a package of laws issued to comply with a free trade agreement with the US. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the overseas impacts of free trade laws that we routinely hear nothing about.
Peaceful protesters were attacked by police, who killed at least 22 of them, according to their latest count--police claimed just nine. Twenty-three police were killed in return. Democracy Now!reported on the massacre on Tuesday (excerpts on the flip), and Al Jazeera filed this report:
More about the massacre itself, and the legislative response on the flip.
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