Inter-National Food Sovereignty Movements
In response to neoliberal globalization a large diverse network of Inter-National Food Sovereignty Movements has emerged:
Diverse peasant, fisherfolk, indigenous and pastoralist associations have risen up to enact and demand food sovereignty: ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’. Food sovereignty calls for the food system, currently dominated by large corporations and international trade organizations, to be placed under the control of small- scale producers, gatherers and consumers. It also calls for modes of production that neither despoil nor enclose land from which rural peoples live. In developing the idea of food sovereignty, diverse activists have created, from different and potentially conflicting worldviews and interests, a convergent politics aimed at autonomy, democratic control, and social and ecological justice.
From an initial ‘social base in the peasantry of the Global South and the small-scale, family farm sector of the Global North’, food sovereignty has spread far and wide , informing and being informed by activists around the world including indigenous, pastoralist, fisherfolk and environmental movements, the World March of Women, and consumer and migrant agricultural worker movements in the United States and in Europe. Food sovereignty is now entering mainstream discourse, offering a rival to the common sense according to which mass production and industrial agriculture is key to feeding the world.
... The growth of the food sovereignty movement, the convergence of feminist, environmentalist, peasant, pastoralist, indigenous and fisherfolk movements on food sovereignty, and food sovereignty’s challenge to and transformation of global discourses suggests that activists are forming a counter-hegemonic movement, challenging and providing an alternative to a common sense of mass production and trade. Whilst the hegemony of a market-based, agro-industry dominated food system remains, a rival is emerging.[1]
La Vía Campesina
"La Via Campesina is a transnational movement that represents the grievances and demands of farmers from around the world whose lives have been disrupted by globalization. This movement and the 200 million small-scale farmers around the world it has mobilized are a powerful demonstration of the fact that not everyone feels that they have been served well by economic globalization."[2]
La Vía Campesina, a network of 182 peasant organizations that now brings together over 200 million peasants across 81 countries and five continents, has been at the centre of the emergence of food sovereignty. As a network that was transnational from its inception, La Vía Campesina brings together movements that are inspired by a range of practices and ideological perspectives: liberation theology and education, indigenous modes of conflict resolution, deep ecology, feminist praxis, agrarian Marxism, anarchist organizing principles, and more liberal approaches to reform and advocacy, to name a few. Despite this diversity, La Vía Campesina has overcome the fragmentation so common amongst social movements.[3]
Despite La Vía Campesina being arguably the largest social movement in the world discussions about the organization is rarely if ever mentioned in textbooks or talked about by mainstream corporate media:
"One of the reasons textbooks fail to include discussions of La Vía Campesina — and other social movements, for that matter — is because the publishers presume that change comes from the top. Textbooks teach students to look to Great Individuals, governments, corporations, multilateral organizations, the United Nations. According to the official stories offered in textbooks, power flows downhill, from the commanding heights. Another source of La Vía Campesina’s invisibility is textbooks’ core narrative — that humanity is in the midst of a pageant of progress, powered by science, technology, and capitalism. Peasants, by contrast, represent backwardness, pockets of ancient history waiting around in the countryside for the beneficent arrival of the modern world."[4]
Dr. Vandana Shiva founded Navdanya in 1987 when she
... heard the coprorations spell out their vision of total control over life through genetic engineering and patents on life and seeds... Navdanya was formed to protect our seed diversity and farmers' rights to save, breed, and exchange seed freely. For me, life-forms, plants, and seeds are all evolving, self-organized, sovereign beings. They have intrinsic worth, value, and standing. Owning life by claiming it to be a corporate invention is ethically and legally wrong. Patents on seeds are legally wrong, becasue seeds are not an invention. Patents on seeds are ethically wrong, because seeds are life-forms-- they are kin members of our Earth Family.[5]
Since its inception Navdanya has helped establish more than one hundred community seed banks in local Indian communities to help "reclaim seed diversity and seed as a commons."
Farmer Suicide
Because of overwhelming debt around 30 Indian farmers kill themselves everyday. In 2020 more than 10,000 farmers committed suicide.[6] Dr. Vandana Shiva speaks on the crisis of farmer suicide:
"Lee Kyung Hae martyred himself while wearing a sign reading "WTO kills farmers" at the Cancun WTO ministerial to attract attention to one of the worst genocides of our times -- the genocide of small farmers through the rules of globalization... Thirty thousand farmers have been killed by globalization policies in India over a decade. According to India's National Crime Burea, 16,000 farmers in India committed suicide during 2004. During one six-month span in 2004, there were 1,860 suicides by farmers in the state of Andhra Pradesh alone."[7]
This crisis has its roots in the introduction of the so called green-revolution and the subsequent results which created a "rural society dominated by a class of powerful notables under whom live a class of smallholders, microfund farmers or sharecroppers, while a proletariat of agricultural workers depends on the goodwill of the owners who employ them and of whom they are often creditors for life." [8]
India
In the Indian State, Rajasthan, in the Baran District, two of the most prominenet tribes: Saharia and Bheels began creating seed banks, with the help of an NGO 'CECOEDECON,' and were primarly run by women. The Women returned to Indigenous methods of seed storage and curing- including locally available resources like neem leaves, wood of Bamboo, and ash. The impacts of this seed bank are obvious:
Control over the time of sowing and dramatic increase in crop area owing to availability of good quality seeds has been one of the major impacts of seedbanks. Before the establishment of the seed bank, only 15 out of 20 farmers could sow in the command area. Presently, all the farmers are able to because farmers are now assured they would get seed. Timely availability of seeds has increased the area under cropping and thereby the production and income. The banks also serve as an insurance against drought. Even during times of drought, the farmers are assured of seeds to sow, which was not the case earlier... ... Currently all farmers in the village use the seeds from the bank. Individual farmers created their own wheat seed banks after seeing the community rice bank leading to even greater seed security for the village. Seeing the success of the SHG seed bank in Shahpur, four seed banks were started by groups of two to three farmers in the village. There is also a significant increase in animal fodder.[9]
Tumaini Women Kenya
https://www.tumainiwomenkenya.org/
West Africa
Agriculture generates more than 30% of the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employs more than 60% of the active population. Despite the majority of the population working in agriculture the region is facing a nutritional crisis, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 Pandemic and the war in Ukraine.[10] With around 391 million inhabitants, the region represents 5.06% of the world’s population and more than 6% of the world’s undernourished people.
"This situation is amplified by the degradation of natural resources (e.g., water, agricultural land, vegetation) at the regional level, aggravated by climate change. With more than 20% of land already degraded in most countries of the region, soil degradation, mainly expressed in the form of erosion, is one of the root causes of the stagnation or decline in agricultural productivity. This situation is rooted in agricultural land clearance, heavy rains, mechanical tillage, which leads to the destruction of the environmental functions of the soil, the reduction of biodiversity and ever-increasing use of herbicides, fertilizers, and pesticides in order to increase or maintain yields until the total collapse of the soil system and the production base. In addition to these factors, there is the problem of large-scale land grabbing driven by agribusiness, which negatively influences the food situation"[11]
Deep agroecology is an alternative framework for transitioning away from agrochemicals and false promises of a second green revolution towards a more comprehensive reformation of not just agricultural methods, but society at large:
... In the West African context, while a second Green Revolution was launched following the first one, whose results were disappointing, deep agroecology is opposed to the agro-industrial model promoted by the Green Revolution and stands out as an alternative agricultural model that results in a radical critique of agrochemicals. Questioning the entire food system rather than agricultural practices, deep agroecology represents an opportunity to analyze in a common framework the concerns of farmers and consumers in a generational and intergenerational social equity dynamic.[12]
Slow Food
EKhenana Commune
The EKhenana Commune was established in 2018 after nearby residents faced evictions from their rented lodgings. Lindokuhle Mnguni, the once elected leader of the eKhenana settlement describes the aspirations of the commune, "As young people with historical poverty attached to our names, we need to start promoting the concept of developing practical pathways that... challenge the... corporate-controlled food system based on capitalism and tackle food inequality at its roots... This will enable many South Africans who are affected by poverty with limited access to information and healthy choices to develop customised alternatives that could change our relationship with food sovereignty and sustainability."[13] Mnguni was assassinated on March 8th, 2022. A press release regarding the matter was released by the commune stating:
Ayanda Ngila, a leader in the eKhenana Commune, a brave, brilliant and committed young man, a visionary leader, a shining inspiration, was murdered at eKhenana just before 3 this afternoon. Four men entered the commune from the river side, where the communal garden is, and started shooting at Ayanda as he was working on the irrigation pipping.
The attack was led Khaya Ngubane, brother to Ntokozo Ngubane and son to NS Ngubane. This is the ANC group that has constantly borne false witness against our members, directed the police who to arrest and not to arrest, moved in and out of the office of the Chief Magistrate when our comrades appear in court, burnt homes, vandalised the infrastructure on the Commune and acted with total impunity against our members.
The Commune has come under relentlessly violent attack from the ANC, the police and the anti-land invasion unit. Its leaders have regularly been arrested on bogus charges, denied bail and detained in prison. Ayanda recently did six months in prison, was released when the charges were dropped and then sent back to prison on more bogus charges.[14]
The commune was inspired by the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST,) in Brazil, a Marxist inspired organization that emphasizes transformation of society through agriculture, cooperation and the protection of the environment.[15][16] In addition to working the land the organization has created education programs to teach its residents about food sovereignty. Mnguni explains the potential of expropriating land in urban settings as well:
“The life we are trying to adopt in eKhenana allows for an opportunity to discuss how land and the debate on land expropriation can be used in the urban context, to ensure that unused unproductive vacant land in cities can be expropriated for the provision of housing and other services for the urban poor. We are not land invaders or illegal occupants. We are committed to creating a sustainable place where even the poorest can prosper. We have made efforts to try mitigate the socioeconomic problems brought about by apartheid, and the consequence of a corrupt system meant to liberate us 26 years ago.”[17]
The Landworkers' Alliance
Sources
- ↑ Dunford, R. (2020). Converging on food sovereignty: transnational peasant activism, pluriversality and counter-hegemony. Globalizations, 1–15. doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.17224
- ↑ https://tcleadership.org/la-via-campesina/
- ↑ Dunford, R. (2020). Converging on food sovereignty: transnational peasant activism, pluriversality and counter-hegemony. Globalizations, 1–15. doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.17224
- ↑ https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/food-farming-and-justice-a-role-play-on-la-via-campesina/
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva,Who Really Feeds the World, page 80-81
- ↑ https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/17/opinions/india-farmer-suicide-agriculture-reform-kaur/index.html
- ↑ Dr.Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Page. 107
- ↑ Sociotechnical Context and Agroecological Transition for Smallholder Farms in Benin and Burkina Faso Parfait K. Tapsoba , Augustin K. N. Aoudji, Madeleine Kabore, Marie-Paule Kestemont, Christian Legay and Enoch G. Achigan-Dako
- ↑ http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Tribal%20women%20attain%20food%20sovereignty%20through%20seed%20banks.pdf
- ↑ https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/09/08/west-africa-food-insecurity-demands-climate-smart-response-amid-multiple-crises
- ↑ ↑ Tapsoba, P.K.; Aoudji, A.K.N.; Kabore, M.; Kestemont, M.-P.; Legay, C.; Achigan-Dako, E.G. Sociotechnical Context and Agroecological Transition for Smallholder Farms in Benin and Burkina Faso. Agronomy 2020, 10, 1447. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10091447
- ↑ Tapsoba, P.K.; Aoudji, A.K.N.; Kabore, M.; Kestemont, M.-P.; Legay, C.; Achigan-Dako, E.G. Sociotechnical Context and Agroecological Transition for Smallholder Farms in Benin and Burkina Faso. Agronomy 2020, 10, 1447. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10091447
- ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/ayanda-ngila-leader-ekhenana-commune-durban-south-africa-has-been-assassinated
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20171215043600/http://sdonline.org/51/the-mst-and-agrarian-reform-in-brazil/
- ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/
- ↑ https://www.newframe.com/ekhenana-residents-are-tilling-for-freedom/