The production of food through the 'globalized agriculture', pesticides, biotechnology and genetic engineering should not lead us soon to solving the problem of hunger? The reality is very different.
In the last twenty years the number of hungry people in the world, rather than decreasing it grew. The concentration of land ownership has increased and with it advanced the consequent impoverishment of the peasantry. The land desertification has progressed unabated, and the ecological balance of the planet on which depends the life of our species has suffered severe blows. Today, in the wake of the protest to the construction of another world, from Seattle to Prague, from Genoa to Florence, workers, youth, women and farmers from different corners of the world are fighting against everything and with the struggle to assert the right to a life in which every human being is free from hunger and poverty.
Let us look at some specific examples. In Kenya and India, conversion of agricultural production for export only caused a deterioration of living conditions.
"... According to the data relating to the years '95-'97 Kenya, with over 77% of the population engaged in agriculture with agro-food exports accounting for more than half of the total exports, with an agricultural sector that produces one-third of gross domestic product, has more than 40% of its population undernourished. "the most radical reforms (in the process of liberalization of the economy of the country and extraversion) were taken in the early 90s .." says Hezron Nyangito , Nairobi. these the most remarkable consequences: food exports have increased in the past decade to a "linear rate of 19 million dollars per year," the import of food products (almost 90% of all agricultural imports of the country) have followed a strong upward trend for the period 1985-94 has progressed at a linear rate of 27 million dollars a year, and that percentage was in 1995-98 nearly 50% higher than the level reached in the period 1990-94. Kenya exports coffee, tea, vegetables and flowers: it is not difficult to see how these products are competing head-to-eat food products inside ..... "
".... India is, from this point of view, a good example of a vicious spiral of urban poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition and rural poverty rural. If the contribution of agriculture to GDP was 55% in 1950 and is only 25% at the end of the 90s (Manoj Panda and A. Ganesh-Kumar, Mumbai) today the "70% of rural households and 8% of urban households living in agricultural work."
India has followed all the colors of the agricultural revolution: the "green" productivism, the "white" for the production of milk, the "yellow" for the development of the oil from the seed, very recently. Although India has declared a revolt within development policy, the neo-liberal policies in the agricultural field already prepared in the early 90s led to a doubling of agricultural exports in the period 1996-98, with a remarkable presence of grains representing nearly 45% of all agricultural exports.
Food imports, but "increased by 168% in 1995-98 compared to 1990-94." The impact of these figures on poverty can be summarized as follows: in the 80s tended to decrease poverty in the '90s - thanks to vigorous liberalization policies - has had a visible trend growth .... (1)
THE PRODUCTION OF FOOD AND 'THE RISE, SO FAR AS THE FAME
In Europe and the U.S., the silos are full, cold rooms are full of immense quantities of meat and butter, it produces "too much" wheat and "too much" milk, cows must be slaughtered and sent to the fruit pulp, but in the rest of the planet is chronic under-nutrition and growing. The science and technology applied to agriculture and animal husbandry make huge strides, but for the immense South of the world this means only impoverishment, malnutrition and increasing food dependency. Never before has there has been a crime of such magnitude that the face of such real (and even more potential) abundance four-fifths of humanity are forced back into abject poverty. They reason the rural masses Latin America, Asia and Africa with their struggles when they say that hunger is not generated by a shortage of agricultural products or the scarcity of land and existing means, but by their distribution and their use.
Centuries of continuous and growing colonial and neo-colonial robbery led to the concentration of all the productive resources (food and otherwise) in the hands of U.S. and European multinationals. Capitalist globalization, daughter and heir legitimate right of these processes, accelerates, extends, deepens and intensifies at levels completely unknown before. Every year millions of rural workers are forcibly uprooted, dispossessed and expelled from their plots and thrown into the hell of slums or forced to emigrate here in the West where you are waiting for racism, more exploitation and oppression of the other.
The large estates - in perfect harmony and alliance with corporate interests - is alive and well more than ever and farmers are increasingly subdued by the needs of the "great powers" of the world and transformed gradually into precarissimi farm workers. The production of food, like any other type of production is totally aimed to the needs of profit and market of corporate agribusiness and international finance. Need the inevitable corollary which is formed by the collapse caused the prices of agricultural products in the southern hemisphere, the low remuneration of labor of the rural population, the gradual desertification of entire regions and other "delights" of the genre.
The needs of profit and the market have already been felt, even by us in the West. Mad cow disease, dioxin chickens, steaks hormones, genetically modified vegetables and fruits at high risk of harm: the tables and supermarkets are increasingly being invaded by "junk foods" of all kinds. While the exponentially increasing use of herbicides and new chemicals causes more serious damage to the health of those who are involved with food production.
Lower production costs and increase profits caring about the health of man: this is the only commandment that even in the field of food production, knows the capital. Even in the food industry is becoming increasingly clear that science and technology (starting with the biogenetic) folded in the domain of profit, instead of being powerful agents to lift humanity from the need, on the contrary become factors of deterioration and overall deterioration life of the species.
Indian scientist Vandana Shiva writes committed to supporting the struggles of the peasants:
"Multinational companies are creating poverty by diverting the hard earned cash of peasants and farmers to the seed industry and pesticides. The new seeds, in addition to being expensive are also ecologically vulnerable to diseases and pests, leading to more crop losses and increased use of chemicals.
These technologies are murderers, undesirable and unnecessary. The bombing of the multinational agriculture and 'based on false claims and pseudo science. The violent technologies of genetic engineering and toxic pesticides, and the promotion of this dishonest and criminal poverty, creating capital and technologies are not sustainable, and they are also leading to the death of our farmers and the destruction of our ecological security and food. These technologies are primitive, crude and obsolete efficient in destruction, not in production. Agricultural technologies of the future must work for people, not corporations, have to work with nature, not against it. If farmers and agriculture want to have a future, then it must be organic. It 'the planet, it' the poor people can afford the losses, inefficiency, deception, violence, pollution and chemicals and genetic engineering. "
AND INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS?
Even farmers and ranchers Europeans are increasingly affected and forced to deal with the diktat that big capital emanates through its institutions "Community" and you always see reduced to simple and totally subordinate appendages of multinationals. As shown by the same struggles of milk producers in the past few years. And this same struggle is not critical if the door maybe in the absurdity of a system that for "reasons of market" requires the destruction of milk in front of hundreds of millions of human beings that milk does not have even a drop?
Huge public funding (the U.S. plans to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in "aid" to agriculture in the next decade) to its large agro-food industry, protectionism and dumping: the domain of a handful of global food company over the entire humanity is accompanied, promoted and protected by the apparatus bureaucratic Western military, and where you do not get with the "economic measures" is ready to intervene by force. The millions and millions of human beings murdered each year from hunger are the other side, the other side of the same war that the West is waging against the people of God in the name of profit and market and god who dare to resist the robbery of each resource and their raw material.
If the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are identified as the main causes of the growing misery in which they are driven entire continents, FAO - by movements and by those who want to beat against the current state of affairs - is seen as something "different" as a body with which to dialogue and which is genuinely push for his "official duties" and contribute to this street food to alleviate the suffering of mankind.
But trust in FAO to fight hunger is like trusting the UN to stop the wars. Like the latter, it has stood for at least supported the attacks West, so in the same way the action of the FAO, in all these years, not only has proven "ineffective", but in the long run, has favored 'weakening of agricultural production in the southern hemisphere to the benefit of several multinational companies.
FAO is therefore not an institution "alternative", but simply a part of the same system that dominates the world and the center of which lies in the boardrooms of multinational Western agribusiness.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS BORN FROM THE MOVEMENTS OF STRUGGLE FOR LAND SOUTH OF THE WORLD
"All peoples shall be provided with food and water shortages." When the peasant movements in the global South are claiming "food sovereignty" and the subtraction of agriculture to the rules of the WTO and world trade, in other words they formulate precisely this "elementary" and sacred need.
Here are the words of Rafael Alegria of Via Campesina on land reform during a radio interview in May 2002:
".... Our strategy for the fight in the first place is the unity, the unity and ubiquity. Starting from the local to get to the regional, the national, the continental and the world. Bring forth our demands through popular mobilization. with which we claim the land, seeds, technology and the right market. to achieve these objectives, we build strategic alliances with other social movements. It 'important to bring together the strengths of NGOs, farmers, churches, technicians and scientists to propose a new model international economic to replace neoliberalism, because it is definitely in crisis. E 'in crisis because it is an unfair and exclusionary model. We urgently need an alternative model that is more just, more egalitarian and more participatory. which takes into account the right to life throughout the world. summary, this is the strategy of Via Campesina. Via Campesina calls on national governments and the international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the world Trade Organization, the FAO and the UN , which will take responsibility for agrarian reform. And the responsibility of access to land for the majority of the peasants. With the current policies of the World Bank on the land market will not be able to resolve the problems and agrarian conflicts in the world. We need to promote the processes of agrarian reform in favor of the peasants. We did a lot of work, and today we have a greater consensus on the part of national governments. But we have the fear of being condemned by the international financial institutions, who do not accept our proposals. Via Campesina carries out a global campaign for agrarian reform. ... "(3)
Of course, the penetration and the spread of corporate rule and the "strict rules" of international markets have destroyed the original structure of the economic and productive agricultural land expropriated and the same "know" the original manufacturer, have devastated entire regions and brought levels in chronic hunger and mass never seen before.
After more than five centuries of colonialism and imperialism that have truly bled entire continents and unified global scale the entire production cycle, the response to the disaster so huge it can no longer be that of a "throwback" in which each country shall "individually "to himself. To do away who today continue to have more and more, and who today has not only remain with their poverty.
THE LIBERAL MARKET INCREASE THE MISERY
Among those who rightly want to oppose the shameful "imbalances" produced by existing commercial relationships, it is widely thought that by practicing and experiencing a different type from the bottom of the market - "fair" - you can build an embankment devastating to the dominance of multinational . Often this "practice" is also seen as a possible tool for bringing the peoples of the North to those in the southern hemisphere and to help them in battle. It must, however, reiterate that given the modest size of the market, this activity is useful as more education to the masses of the first world, that the real solution to the economic problems of the Third World. The same argument, we think, is true of the numerous campaigns against multinational agribusinesses useful to understand the problems, almost never to fix them.
Still Onorati NGO Crossroads:
"..... And 'all too obvious that the highly concentrated structure of the management of multinational agro-alimentari/chimico/farmaceutico (not just the developed north), but extremely dislocated in space and time of their agro-food production, with the' easier access to rich markets does nothing but get stronger and then continue the process of destruction and dislocation of agricultural production and family farming. our decades of experience in support peasant agriculture, we confirmed that the chimera wealthy markets, including "fair and solidarity ", a strong work process vampirization of local agricultural systems leaving them at the mercy of politicians that food prices continue to have on the global market, leaving them unable to even turn on a strategy of survival by producing for self-consumption ...." (1)
We need to break the media embargo that stifles the struggles of the masses of the southern hemisphere and, on the contrary, promote the "contact" between the workers and peoples is necessary, urgent and indispensable. To this end, it is right to denounce and useful in every way as the rules imposed by the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are not only destructive to the mass of small producers in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also prove to be harmful for "consumers' rich hemisphere.
E 'useful to denounce the commercial speculation of multinationals which means that the cocoa is taken by the Brazilian farmer at no cost and then sold for their weight in gold. But at the same time it is essential to know that no real answer can come from a hypothetical and impossible "other business". The markets are in fact always by their nature unfair instruments of robbery in the hands of those who have huge masses of capital and military force. What could never be fair exchange between the small farmer and the Andean Fruit Company?
FARMERS OF THE WORLD UNITE
The only real food sovereignty capable of ensuring to all peoples food and water can pass only through the organization and unification of the struggles that have objectives that aim to change the roots of the current international order and to reorganize the entire global agricultural production directing it not to profit, but to the full satisfaction of the needs of the entire human species.
Even Jose Bove answering the question about sharing a "new internationalism"
The share .. to the extent that what we have put in place and 'already a form of new international peasant. It 's the first time that this happens. Even today, more than 50% of humanity lives on agriculture. Collect the farmers around the world to a global project of agricultural production, against the multinationals, which allows people to live their own production and to feed their populations, and 'a way of placing on the agenda of a hypothesis different economic order, bringing with it new forms of exchange between people. It 's the same form of internationalism that you are putting in the trade union field on the ground and through the networks linking the social movements that fight against globalization. It 'an internationalism that is constructed in different ways, each subject from their own specific reality, but that it' can try to propose the common objectives of short but also long-term, in order to transform the world.
A reorganization of the entire society based on solidarity and cooperation among peoples and merchant who can and can put at the service of any discoveries of science and technology in the field of genetics and food which today, in the hands of capital take on the functions and characteristics increasingly destructive and antisocial.
The battles of the laborers and peasants against the Indian multinational agro-food and biotechnology, the movement of land tenure in Zimbabwe, the battles against the estate of the Sem Terra in Brazil, are examples that arise in practice the need and the need for a unification the objectives of peasant struggles and the rural world. When the Landless Brazilians come to explicitly launch the cry of "peasants of the world unite", it is because you always have a clear perception among the exploited and the oppressed of the campaigns that the various "local problems" can be addressed and resolved only in a broader perspective, the only unifying force in defense of common interests against a common enemy.
Let us look at the words of Joao Pedro Stedile interviewed by the magazine PUC:
"... The MST since its inception, has an internationalist vocation and Latin American. We have always maintained an exchange of experiences with other sister organizations of the countries of Latin America. Based on this we organized the CLOC, Latin American Coordination of Organizations Workers Campaign, which today brings together all the organizations of Latin America and is headquartered in Guatemala.
Then, starting in the mid-90s, with the expansion of this form of development of the international financial capitalism and neoliberal capitalism applied the same kind of exploitation of farmers around the world. Farmers in India, Japan, USA, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil face all the same exploiters, ie Monsanto, Cargill, Nestlé, etc..
And this has forced us therefore to increase the integration and exchange between international movements and peasant organizations. From this was born Via Campesina, the international peasant movements as an articulation of the whole world. It grows continuously and today belong to organizations of 87 countries, on all continents. Recently, in the last meeting, we had the accession of the Arab Union of Farmers, which brings together farmers' organizations from 16 countries, with 330 million peasants at the base.
In one sentence, Via Campesina represents the union and the internationalist unity to deal with the same fury of international capital in respect of agricultural workers from around the world ... "
Both the last conference of La Via Campesina in India in the recent World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, have been established four main areas of policy action, the further explains Joao Stedile:
"- To fight for food sovereignty. Every people has the right and the duty to apply national agricultural policies that ensure food necessary for their autonomy. Agricultural trade should not continue to be subordinated to the interests of big business and their needs for get high profit margins.'s why we are against the world Trade Organization. want to establish rules for agricultural trade is carried out through bilateral interchange of production exceeds domestic consumption. "
- Genetic resources, biodiversity and nature that we inherited must fulfill social functions for the benefit of all. The farmers should be the guardians of this dowry. It can not be allowed multinational companies - such as Adventis, Novartis, Monsanto, etc. - to manipulate and monopolize the right to use the seeds. For this reason, we have written in our flag "the seed heritage of humanity". In fact, humanity has played up to today because farmers produced foods with democratic standards. Transforming the seeds in the monopoly of a handful of companies constitutes not only a risk to public health, but also a threat to the survival of farmers and mankind.
- Rural poverty and social inequality can only be overcome through authentic and massive agrarian reform programs. The Earth is good for nature and must remain at the service of all humanity. Distribute the land is more than a policy to combat unemployment and rural exodus: it must be part of a policy guaranteeing democracy in the country.
- Enhancement of rural culture as a heritage of the community and society. "
As you can see the struggle of the laborers and poor peasants in the southern hemisphere for a real and radical agrarian reform, for better working conditions and political and trade union rights, should never be to collide "only" with governments and classes dominant and exploiting local, but especially with the great centers of economic and financial power behind and above them, and staying here in the West.
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