ROME, Nov 16, 2009 (IPS) - World farmers are not part of the official delegations at the Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) food summit on food security that opened here Monday. But
they came anyhow to express their views, since, they say, it is their communities
that are most impacted by the food crisis.
Small-scale producers from the Amazonian rainforest, from Africa, the Pacific
islands and the Himalayas gathered in Rome for the Peoples’ Food
Sovereignty Forum (Nov. 13-17), held in parallel to the FAO meetings, to
discuss the serious effects of the crisis in their communities.
Small farmers and other small food producers number more than 1.5 billion
in the world, the civil society forum estimates. "They produce more than 75
percent of the world’s food needs through peasant agriculture and small scale
livestock production, and with artisanal fishing," organisers say.
According to the FAO, the number of hungry people rose this year to 1.02
billion people, as a result of the global economic crisis, high food and fuel
prices, drought and conflict.
"The amount of hungry people announced by the FAO includes, for the vast
majority, those who produce food," Antonio Onorati, of the International Civil
Society Planning Committee (IPC), told IPS. "And this represents the most
incredible aspect of hunger."
Indigenous knowledge and practices have the potential to improve local and
global food security, farmers’ organisations say, but they still struggle to be
recognised.
Key issues on the table of farmers’ and peasants’ organisations these days
basically concern who decided food and agricultural policies; where these
decisions were taken; who controls food producing resources; how food is
produced; and how to help people who do not have direct access to food,
namely the urban poor.
Outcomes of their work will be presented at the FAO summit Wednesday.
Farmers’ issues are not so distant from those the FAO and participant
governments will be discussing. What is different is their perspective. "Those
whom the World Trade Organisation (WTO), The World Bank (WB) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) consider as victims are in fact the real
protagonists, they are able to produce enough food for themselves, if they
are allowed to," Onorati said.
Among the causes of food insecurity for indigenous communities, farmers
point to the loss of land, territories and resources, and the non-recognition
and violation of their indigenous rights.
According to Renée Vellvé of the global Ngo GRAIN, access and right to land
should be given priority. "The land-grabbing trend that is going on right now
is where countries that have money, but depend on the outside for the food -
like Saudi Arabia, Korea and others - are going to Africa and Asia to get
farmlands to produce their own food outside," she told IPS.
"Investment companies are trying to do the same just to make money, so you
see governments and industries coming in and throwing farmers off their
lands, especially where they don’t have secure titles; this affects women first,
especially in Africa."
Nettie Weibe of La Via Campesina agrees that returning lands to the small-
scale farmers is critical. "It is so obvious - but it has been forgotten - that
food production is absolutely necessary to food security, and that it is
farmers who produce food and put it into the market," she told IPS.
"But we are now so increasingly distant from our food, particularly in
developed countries, that the farmer part of it has been forgotten, and in fact
it has been erased by a corporate, industrial production."
According to Weibe, local agriculture and local markets can even cool the
planet. "Real genuine agrarian reform, which has been put on hold for
decades, would do far more for the climate that any deal that could result
from the upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen," she said.
Vellvé said farmers’ organisations no longer believe in codes of conduct,
guidelines and principles that are being discussed at the FAO. "The problem
is how far they will push that, and how the governments feel about it."
So beyond economic resources, what small producers ask for is a change in
the decision process that has an impact on their lives. "This can only happen
if the local community have a role in the decision process, and if they get
access and control over the local productive resources," Onorati said.
FAO’s director Jacques Diouf - who embarked on a 24 hour hunger strike
over the weekend in solidarity with the world’s hungry - asked rich countries
to increase the amount they give each year in agricultural aid from 7.9 billion
dollars to 44 billion.
But the draft declaration that will most probably be adopted includes only a
commitment to "substantially increase the share of official development
assistance (ODA) devoted to agriculture and food security based on country-
led requests."
"If healthy countries do not increase investment in agriculture as requested by
the FAO, this initiative will lack the concrete tools to effectively fight hunger,"
Sergio Marelli, president of the civil society advisory group to the summit,
told IPS.
"We know that in the last phases of negotiations, even the reference to 2025
as the deadline for the eradication of hunger has disappeared from the final
declaration," he said.
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