RIGHTS-DEVELOPMENT: A Day of Global Farmers’ Struggle

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 16 2001 (IPS) - Demonstrators around the world will protest on Tuesday, International Day of Farmers’ Struggle, against current global trade rules and the production of genetically modified seeds, and will pay tribute to the victims of a massacre in rural Brazil.

The global event is coordinated by ‘Vía Campesina,’ a movement founded in 1993 that unites more than 80 peasant-farmer organisations, landless rural workers and indigenous peoples from all regions of the world.

April 17 has become a sort of “May Day,” or International Labour Day, for rural workers everywhere because it was on this date in 1996 that police assassinated 19 people as they participated in a march for agrarian reform in Eldorado de Carajás, in northern Brazil.

Also on that day, 69 other marchers recieved gunshot injuries. Thirteen 13 of the dead were killed with hatchets and scythes after having their hands tied, reports the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST – landless workers’ movement), which organised the march five years ago. Not one of the police officers responsible for the killings has been brought to justice.

The massacre triggered national and international outrage, and led the Second International Via Campesina Conference, held just days later in Mexico, to declare April 17 as International Day of Struggle for Land and against Repression.

The MST announced several events for Tuesday throughout Brazil to protest the impunity of the criminals and “neoliberal globalisation,” which the group says imposes a worldwide agricultural model that benefits transnational corporations to the detriment of production by rural communities.

It also calls for “true agrarian reform,” with a broader distribution of land and subsidised farm credits. Marches in the regional capitals, protests outside national government buildings and encampments in public plazas are all on the docket for Tuesday.

Takeovers of government offices and occupations of unproductive farmland have not been ruled out, reflecting the MST’s traditional means of pressing for a broader and deeper agrarian reform than the one being executed by the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

In European countries, including Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, the demonstrations announced mainly involve protests against transgenic organisms and have been organised to show solidarity with the rural workers and indigenous communities of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, who suffer harsh police repression, according to activists.

In Canada and the United States, as in other countries of North and South America, an additional target of the protests is the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which is to stretch from Canada to Chile. The Western Hemisphere’s presidents are to sign the framework agreement for the FTAA at the Summit of the Americas, in Quebec City, Canada, Apr 20-22.

Peasant-farmers and other rural workers are planning to demonstrate in countries throughout Latin America, from the Dominican Republic, where a conference of several farming organisations is underway, to Uruguay, where actions are planned at 19 different sites.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, protesters are to focus on the Ministry of Agriculture and the headquarters of the transnational firm Monsanto, denouncing the government’s agricultural policy and the corporation’s use of genetically modified seeds to favour private monopolies.

Vía Campesina’s battle against transgenic products seeks not only to prevent risks to the environment and human health, but also the monopolisation of seed varieties, says Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the top leaders of the Brazilian MST.

The intense investment in biotechnology seeks to put control over the seed trade in the hands of a half-dozen big corporations – like Monsanto, Aventis, and Novartis -, and this represents a threat to agriculture around the world, warned Stédile.

Vía Campesina proposes that seeds should be declared heritage of humanity, accessible to all in order to ensure farmers of “their right to produce,” in the words of Rafael Alegría, a rural leader from Honduras and one of this global organisation’s coordinators.

At the World Social Forum, which drew delegates from social movements, non-governmental organisations, and leftist intellectuals and politicians to Porto Alegre, Brazil, last January, Vía Campesina also announced its decision to boycott all agricultural products that are imported at subsidised prices.

The objective is not only to fight unfair competition through “dumping,” but also to change the rules of international agricultural trade, based on “food sovereignty,” that is, the right of all countries or peoples to adopt their own policies to insure their food supplies.

Food, essential to life, cannot be treated as just any merchandise, say the activists. Its production must, above all, satisfy the nutritional needs of the local population, and not be destined for export in order to pay off a foreign debt that has already been paid several times over, argue Vía Campesina leaders.

Only excess production, which should not be stimulated because it depresses prices, should go to export, and then only through bilateral treaties.

For this reason, the world’s small farmers and rural workers reject the World Trade Organisation, and want rules for “equitable trade” – subject to human rights and international conventions – to organise trade in agricultural food products.