La Via Campesina

FoodConnect organised a full-day workshop with La Via Campesina on the subject of food sovereignty and farmer solidarity.

Farmer representatives participated from Japan South Korea Indonesia East Timor Canada and Tasmania and South Australia as well as Queensland.

Food sovereignty is about local food production and local food consumption.

Food security is about everyone having enough to eat.

Relations between producers and consumers are very important.

We need to think seriously about how we can further food sovereignty. Food generation produces $6 trillion/ year of wealth yet farmers worldwide struggle to survive. Countries lose control of their farmland and food-growing assets and profits are expropriated by international corporations while local farmers are impoverished and hunger is very widespread.

Food sovereignty is the only world food crisis. Distribution of food is the main problem where serious blockages occur.

La Via Campesina is a large international farmers movement whose vision is to replace and reform the destructive industrial agricultural model and replace it with food sovereignty. La Via Campesina is Spanish for The Farmers’ Way. Now in many countries it started in 1996. “We embrace diversity protect and honour differences move away from monocultures cherish biodiversity”

Begin by asking:

  • Why in a world where farmers produce enough food for more than 9 billion people are there one billion people starving?

  • Why are 60% of the world’s food producers women?

  • Why is $5billion worth of food tipped into landfill?

  • Why is life expectancy reduced because of an obesity epidemic?

  • Why are the world’s oceans emptying of fish?

  • Why are animals produced in conditions of appalling cruelty?

  • Why are farmers producing 4 times as much as they used to but making no more income?

  • Why are there high rates of suicide among farmers?

  • Why is farming so devalued that it is extremely difficult to make a living from the land regardless of whether you are a small or big farmer?

  • Why is food production controlled by a few corporations?

Economic metaphors that are shown not to work

  • Trickle-down theory

  • Rising tide lifts all boats

More appropriate metaphors

  • Cancerous growth

  • Violent dispossession of small farmers & landholders

Joel Catchlove coordinator of La Via Campesina in Adelaide talked about:

  • Declining rural communities

  • Lack of incentives for young people to carry on farming

  • Aging farmers

  • Regardless of how industrialized they were the farms still weren’t making money

  • Very little discussion in Australia about the Free Trade Agreement

  • A declaration was introduced to the South Australian Parliament about the future of food in South Australia.

Hannah Elvery from Friends of the Earth – Six Degrees spoke about the visit to the farmers of the Darling Downs to hear and see what is happening with CSG Coal Seam Gas mining in the rich black earth soils there and which also threaten the Great Artesian Basin aquifer.

Dr Vicki Uhlmann who coordinated the Brisbane part of the Save the Mary River campaign spoke about the Mary River farmland which is classified as Class A farming land and about 400 properties would have been inundated. She talked about the principles they had used in their campaign which they are now sharing through a book “Love Mary” and the Kandanga Information Centre. www.savethemaryriver.com

Bev Buckley from Mt Tamborine talked about ‘The Green Shed’ business model for local growers to sell their produce. It has been described by their auditor as ‘the most profitable non-profit organisation’ he has ever seen!

The Green Shed started with a problem of what to do with huge crops of cabbages and avocados grown on Mt Tamborine:

  • Useless to grow crops if you can’t sell them

  • It you send it to Brisbane Markets by law it all has to go through hideous poisons.

So Bev:

  • Invested $100

  • Hired a shed “The Green Shed”

  • Started a market that opens at 7am every Sunday

  • Now it has grown to a large number of growers on the mountain and is a huge success

  • All locally grown organic produce

  • Works on a basis of total trust no inventory control

  • A very successful business model

  • They now invest in the community with the profits

  • Started a community garden and had a scarecrow festival

  • Bev has her own ‘growing technique’ she runs training in

  • Training in organic farming has been running 7 years now

  • Organic farming course is now on the Internet available worldwide as a 12 month program

  • Over 300 farmers now trained in organic farming on Mt Tamborine.

  • Changed 50-60% of the Mt Tamborine farmers to be quite organic and sell locally

  • Supplier for FoodConnect in Brisbane

  • They have 5 websites. www.thegreenshed.com.au links to the 4 others as well.

Bev is now writing the story of what’s happening in Australia in organic farming. She has interviewed 25 organic farmers from all over Australia about their journey:

  • They all shifted from poisons to organic

  • They knew farming as they were doing it was not sustainable

  • They accepted their responsibility for past damage – they knew what they’d done what their families had done. They admitted: “I destroyed by my farming methods.”

  • They have the most amazing dedication to education self-education not paid. Over a period of years they’ve learned what they needed to do to change. Some went overseas to study. They’ve been through the most amazing learning.

  • They cut fertiliser costs in half and increased the productivity

  • All worked on their own

  • No government help

  • About 7/25 weren’t farmers before. They were horticulturists motor mechanic cook banker exporter-importer brand new into farming yet incredibly successful. With a different perspective they saw that the old ways don’t work

  • Developed their own market system some FoodConnect suppliers. Exporting manufacturing in order to make it a successful business.

  • Now starting to teach in their own areas

  • Extraordinary journey to find a system that will work and be profitable

  • Mostly small farmers.

Nettie Wiebe Canadian dairy farmer and co-founder of La Via Campesina talked about how it started. Farmers very dissatisfied with the effects of GATT asked the question: “Let’s just look critically at how this is working for farmers”.

They found that no matter whether on half a hectare in Indonesia or 2000 hectares in Saskatchewan it was pretty much the same story:

  • Farmers needed to speak for themselves and have a global voice

  • What is being produced who is producing it who makes money what is eaten who eats is all decided by trans-national corporations

Q. How do you get on with Monsanto?

A. We have a very contentious relationship with Monsanto.

Q. What sort of challenge did you face focusing on international farming issues when there are so many national farming issues?

A. This had to be faced over and over. Some of the main decisions affecting farmers are:

  • The price you get

  • The input prices

  • What you grow

These things are all being decided around global corporate tables. It is now more and more obvious that a lot of what is happening in our food system is being controlled elsewhere. That’s what food sovereignty is about. We need to take food ownership back home.

Q. What are the steps we should take to establish La Via Campesina in Australia?

A. It is important that farmers have their own voice and delineate what’s important to them separately from experts and agribusiness who are unconcerned about farm families soils water. It is essential to decouple farmers from people who don’t want their interests given voice.

  • We need to ensure the land remains productive for all the people of the world

  • Be proud of being people of the land peasants (Peasants = people of the land)

  • Take back our position as those who care for the land and on whom the environment that feeds us depends

  • Take back control of seed of agriculture land-grabbing and displacement of people.

Q. What are key campaigns of La Via Campesina?

A. Key campaigns are:

  • Promoting food sovereignty (a whole nexus of issues around growing food for people growing food locally growing food skills)

  • Bio-contamination of GM has to be stopped

  • Violence against women represents a terrible injustice but also a terrible disruption to food production and must be campaigned against (militarisation of the countryside in many lands has been terribly disruptive)

It’s amazing what influence you can have in your own little domain in your own little comfort zone. It’s the Gandhi Principle. Dropping stones into the pond of your sphere of influence. Get back into your human heart.

The realisation of abundance is crucial how much the earth gives us. The story was told of a tiny spinach seed growing to a very large plant.

Arsenio Hasatil from East Timor gave the most extraordinarily spine-tingling Alerta! This is a sort of song sort of passionate call to revolution. It was recorded so hopefully is available.

Irma Yanny from Indonesia said of La Via Campesina that the movement is autonomous diverse and multicultural. There are 9 regions with regional meetings once a year and each region has 2 international coordinators who can be male and female or both female but not both male.

Ayumi from Japan spoke about being a young farmer. She said: This is not just my story. I believe it is also your story. What is the hardest work I do in the farm?

  • It is to see my village disappearing to the cities

  • Older people who are working really hard but not receiving enough money to keep the farm

  • No-one for very old farmers to hand their farms and skills on to

  • Extinction of the culture

  • 60% of Japan’s food comes from abroad.

  • Farmers do not make any profit. It is the same story everywhere.

Arsenio Hasatil from East Timor talked about community farming local knowledge (from grandparents) local food exhibitions and defending biodiversity.

A World Café addressed the focusing question:

How do we build solidarity around a food sovereignty movement in Australia?

  • Adopt-a-farmer for schools

  • Locate-a-local-farmer

  • Create contacts with farmers

  • Slow food and know where your food was produced

  • We all eat but consumers are very detached from farmers

  • Food security issues such as water land and seed security

  • Rural land sales should be reviewed by Foreign Investment Review Board

  • Talk to CWA Country Women’s Association

  • Many have been thinking globally and are only just beginning to think how their local story fits into global concerns

  • There is not a truly representative group for small farmers in Australia. Farmer’ groups tend to be elite agribusiness.

  • Take over as the middle man/ woman (The Green Shed FoodConnect a mobile abattoir)

  • Tap into crises affecting farmers such as the CSG mining

  • Have an internship program to work on farms

  • Food sovereignty has to apply to the elderly too – there is so much knowledge elderly farmers have that is being lost

  • The enormity of the challenges that appear to be facing us

  • Put stories on the Internet

  • Work with faith-based groups around food equality rights to access food food security

  • Locally-living economies

  • WWOOFing programs for retired people to help on farms

  • Lobby for small businesses and farmers at Federal Government level against international trade restrictions on locals / WTO and Free Trade agreements

A number of national governments are now legislating for food sovereignty in their constitution or laws

  • The Mayor of San Francisco has insisted that:

    • all food in hospitals prisons schools be sourced locally

    • composting is mandatory.

Once communities are self-sufficient THEN they can trade between communities. Look after your local community / economy first.

17 April: International Day for Peasant Struggle

10 September: International Day of Struggle Against the World Trade Organisation