Neo-liberal Mad Cows and Food Sovereignty

By Lewis Machipisa

Eat local. Not all cows are British. Macdonald's is junk. - these are some of the slogans chanted by those fighting for food sovereignty in their communities.

'Food is local. Global food doesn't exist,' said Paul Nicholson of Vía Campesina, advocating for the rights of farmers to produce 'what they want and eat what they want.'

'You have rubbish food, Macdonald's, and these hamburger shops, but that doesn't feed the world. What feeds the world is local food, local agriculture, local farmers. So lets go local!' he said.

'The mad cows are not English mad cows. They are neo-liberal mad cows. We have to develop a sustainable agriculture,' said Nicholson. 'We must overcome the culture that says if the chickens are Brazilian then they are no good,' he added.

Not only is eating local food healthy, but it also makes economic sense. 'What developing world farmer can compete with a farmer in the developed countries who (are heavily subsidised and) can sell at below the cost of production?' asked Jean Pierre Rolland, a panellist at yesterday's conference on Food Sovereignty.

Those pushing for food sovereignty fear that liberalisation of the agricultural sector will leave them open to unfair competition and may even result in food 'dumping' by richer countries.

Back home in India, Thomas Kocherry has mobilised local fishers to stand up to foreign multinationals that are 'bent on depleting the fish stocks'.

Kocherry told TerraViva that the exhaustion of the marine fish stocks is due to the worldwide industrial fishing fleet of 25,000 vessels, which are creating hunger and nutrition-related problems for millions of people.

To save the fisheries, the coastal communities have developed a collective political action plan.

'Food sovereignty is only possible if the communities produce food for local consumption,' he said. 'That is only possible when the farmers and the fishing people who are dependent on these natural resources for their livelihood own and manage the property rights.'

'The threat is that we have monopolies like Monsanto and Cargill trying to grow food for profit. But they will not be sustainable. At the World Forum of Fisher Peoples we are struggling for aquatic reform. We are producing fish for local consumption, not for export. And that is the only way: owning and managing the water bodies' that produce the fish, explained Kocherry.

Owning resources is particularly important for the local farmers. As farmers in the developing world are increasingly unable to compete with cheap imports, there is growing fear that their land labour will become susceptible to joint ventures aimed at growing cash crops, such as tropical produce.

Dumping Food

This raises questions of food dumping - exporting farm goods at prices below production costs -, which would worsen the already pitiful plight of many of the world's small farmers.

Not only will dumping harm local economies, there is irradiated food, which is being distributed through food aid programmes. Irradiated foods have not been proven safe for human consumption and research suggests that they may cause genetic mutations, stillbirths, organ malfunction, nutritional deficiencies and other serious health problems in test animals, according to participants in the WSF conference.

'The United States is currently sending genetically modified foods that are unlabelled as such to developing countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua as humanitarian aid,' said Silvia Ribeira.

'It's a business for the United States to send its surplus as donations,' she added.

Citizen Rights, a group working for the protection of local farmers, says 'Food irradiation, combined with agricultural dumping, will prove a nightmare to sustainable development. An increased consolidation of the industrialised food supply will create a high level of dependence on import-export relationships, undermining food security and sovereignty, basic rights of access to food and to define domestic food and agriculture policies.'

'Food sovereignty is the right of people to protect and to determine what food we eat, who produces it and how we produce it,' said Vía Campesina's Nicholson. 'It is important now because under the free market regime we are losing the local agricultural network and we are losing under the impact of import of cheap foods.'

Cheap Imports and Hunger

'We are losing our capacity to produce food and this is one of the major causes of hunger. Seventy percent of world's hunger is found in the rural areas. It basically is the peasant farmer who is being destroyed by this very competitive economy. The main threat is coming from multinational s, which are very intensive and industrialised,' said Nicholson.

One in seven people is chronically hungry. Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger. Seventy percent are children. Despite these horrific statistics, the people's ability to feed themselves is being further threatened by transnational corporations which have begun to patent seeds, market them and control their distribution.

For more than 1.4 billion people who save their own seeds from harvest to harvest, the patenting of seeds poses a dangerous threat to their livelihood and their access to food. If things continue as they are, it will become illegal to use saved seeds without paying a fee.

And this has Nicholson deeply worried.

'We have to demand that the governments start protecting our own agriculture, our own food producing capacity. We have to develop sustainable agriculture which feeds local communities,' he said.