By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Dec 10 2003 (IPS)

Farmers and peasant groups around the world are pressing the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ as a challenge to the World Trade Organisation’s agriculture policies, which they say push millions of small farmers off their land and lead to food insecurity.

Described by the international farmers network Via Campesina as “the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; (and) to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade”, food sovereignty, its proponents say, is the only way to alleviate poverty and achieve sustainable development in the developing world.

The People’s Food Sovereignty network, a coalition of non-governmental organisations and movements from the North and South, released a Food and Agriculture statement on its website demanding that “governments remove agriculture and food from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and establish an alternative international framework for the sustainable production and trade of food and agriculture”.

“Millions of peasants in the third world have been actively working to develop food sovereignty as a movement for the past five to 10 years,” said Dr. Raj Patel, a policy analyst at the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in a telephone interview.

A new report released by Food First claims that food security – the goal championed by multilateral agencies to ensure that people have enough to eat each day – does nothing to secure productive land for rural farmers or stable prices for their crops.

“Food security says that every child, woman, and man must have the certainty of having enough to eat each day, but it says nothing about where that food comes from or how it is produced,” said Dr. Peter Rosset, author of the Food First report, in a statement.

NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, was created in 1992 and includes the United States, Canada and Mexico. The FTAA, a much larger version of NAFTA, is set to be launched in 2005, but has come under intense criticism by farmers, trade unions and activists from North and South America who fear the deal will entrench neo-liberal trade policies harmful to developing countries.

The World Bank, which is highly influential in shaping food and agriculture policy and projects in developing countries, identifies on its website three dimensions of food security as food availability, affordability, and stability of access. The Bank says that free trade is essential to food security because it makes the most efficient use of world resources.

Patel disagrees with this interpretation, and says that free trade as espoused by the World Bank does not exist because of subsidies, disguised taxes, and hidden environmental and social costs.

“There is no such thing as free trade,” he said, “The World Bank can have all the theories they want, but the evidence shows that poor people are not helped by liberalising trade.”

Via Campesina says that by prioritising international trade over local food production, the WTO’s free trade agenda increases the dependence of developing countries on cheap imports of subsidised grains from the North, causing hundreds of millions of farmers to abandon traditional agricultural practices.

Patel, an expert in rural development, explained that U.S. corn is sold below the cost of production due to massive government subsidies, and that exporting it to Mexico devastates peasant farmers who cannot compete with the artificially low prices. He said that subsidising and dumping corn in Mexico is “almost like targeting the impoverished farmers”.

“It’s bitter and cruel to say free trade is enhancing food security,” he added.

According to Patel, there are three areas of Chiapas, Mexico where peasants are demanding food sovereignty as a democratic process to allow them to define and control the local food system, and to protect their land and livelihoods from foreign agribusinesses and the vagaries of the global marketplace.

Via Campesina is pressuring the United Nations Human Rights Commission to recognise the right of peasants to produce food as a fundamental human right, and is using the power of the Internet to challenge entrenched positions in trade negotiations.

Patel said that agriculture should be removed from WTO negotiations because the millions of farmers who are most affected are not represented. He claims that even though organisations like Via Campesina appear at WTO negotiations, they are not given a true voice in the proceedings, which are exclusively the domain of governments and corporate lobbyists.

“Until there is genuine democracy and transparency in trade, agriculture should be left out of negotiations,” he said.

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