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via campesina
World's Peasant Farmers Unveil 'Anti-Imperialist Manifesto' in Defense of Nature
"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time."
Jun 02, 2021
As experts and research continue to make the case for overhauling humanity's destructive relationship with nature, La Via Campesina--a global movement of peasants, farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous individuals, migrants, and agricultural workers--echoed that message on Wednesday.
"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms--not greed and profit--guide the actions of nations and peoples."
--Manifesto
The movement, which was founded nearly three decades ago and is made up of scores of groups in over 80 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas that collectively represent millions of people, released an "Anti-Imperialist Manifesto in Defense of the Environment" ahead of global actions planned for Saturday.
"Putting a stop to capitalist barbarism is the central task of our time," the manifesto declares. "We need to put an end to the domination of capital over life in order to create a world that is just, egalitarian, and vibrant, so that we all can live well and in peace."
Backed by scientific findings on the climate and biodiversity crises, the movement takes aim at "the destructive power of the current stage of capitalism," highlighting how "the unrestrained extraction and exploitation of natural resources for profit by the large corporations, and the logic of the capitalist system, have depleted our planet."
As the manifesto explains, "we are experiencing the worst environmental crisis in the history of humanity," and that it will only get worse absent global intervention:
Climate change is already affecting people's lives all across the world, and this is not the only consequence of the environmental crisis. The world's water is contaminated by plastics and pesticides and the springs are drying up. We are also seeing dramatic rates of extinction of the planet's biodiversity as well as large scale biopiracy--where commercial interests patent naturally occurring biochemical or genetic material imposing limits on how they can be used even in their naturally occurring environments. The soil is being degraded by deforestation and monocropping, and large regions are being completely destroyed by large-scale mining.
"The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest manifestation of this environmental and systemic crisis," the manifesto notes.
Since the ongoing coronavirus outbreak started, public health experts and world leaders have repeatedly called for developing, in the words of famed conservationist Jane Goodall, "a new mindset for our survival" to prevent future pandemics.
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However, human exploitation of nature continues, despite the pandemic's significant death toll and economic fallout, and the clear threats of business as usual.
The manifesto--published in English, Spanish, and French--slams imperialists of the Global North, including and especially the United States, for continuing to "attack peripheral countries looking to privatize common goods that the people, the real owners of natural resources, used to take care of in each country."
"It is important also to highlight the nefarious role that military activities play in the destruction of the planet," the manifesto says. "In addition to carrying our constant attacks on the lives of the people themselves, the USA military, with its allies, is one of the biggest contaminators in the world, though its toxic legacy of depleted uranium, and its use of oil, fuel for airplanes, pesticides, and defoliants like Agent Orange and lead."
The movement also blasts transnational companies for advancing a planet-wrecking agricultural model based on monocrops and pesticide use and, more broadly, for increasing "their capacity to exploit common goods, pushing forward in mining projects, deforestation, and the private appropriation of water among other things."
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"Some corporations, instead of combating the causes of planetary destruction, focus on green capitalism, converting natural resources into commodities and new areas for market speculation, like carbon credits, environmental preservation credits, and other false solutions that will not resolve the social and ecological needs of the people," the movement points out.
"This path will inevitably lead to the destruction of humanity and of nature as we know it," the manifesto says. "It is a project of death, domination, and destruction."
"The solution is in the rebuilding of the relationship between human beings and nature, where life, collective well-being, and ecological rhythms--not greed and profit--guide the actions of nations and peoples," it asserts.
According to La Via Campesina, "It is a solution focused on agroecological production of food; the democratization of the access to land through agrarian reform; the protection and care of common goods such as water, biodiversity and land; and the transition to an energy model that responds to the real needs of the working class with social and environmental justice, overcoming patriarchy and racism."
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People across the globe are planning actions for June 5, World Environment Day, to demand the protection of Mother Earth and the "full implementation" of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), La Via Campesina said Wednesday in a statement about the upcoming #InDefenseOfThePlanet actions.
"We must also urgently unite against the forthcoming corporate-led U.N. Food [Systems] Summit," the statement noted, "as it promotes false solutions which will not only worsen the current climate and environmental crisis but will also constitute a serious attack to our rights as peasants, Indigenous communities, women, migrants, and rural communities."
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Justice for Berta: Honduran Women Activists Launch Land Rights Campaign
Women are banding together in Honduras and around the world to demand #LandRightsNow.
Sep 21, 2016
"The very investigations conducted by the Public Prosecutor's office have confirmed the direct involvement of the DESA Company in the assassination of my daughter... it is not possible that their license for [natural resource] exploitation remains active. We demand that the National Congress cancel the license!"
So declared Austraberta Flores, courageous mother of slain activist Berta Caceres, at the public launch of the campaign "Defensoras de la Madre Tierra" (Women Defenders of Mother Earth) on September 6, 2016 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
The Defensoras Campaign spotlights the historic role women have played and are playing today in demanding fulfillment of their right to life, food, and land, and in defense of their territories. Supported by Oxfam, UN Women and the international NGO human rights group in Honduras, the Campaign brings together 28 member organizations representing women, Afro-Honduran (Garifuna) and indigenous peoples, civil society organizations and small farmer associations. These include the Fraternal Organization of Afro-Hondurans (OFRANEH), Via Campesina Honduras, the Council for the Integral Development of Women Farmers (CODIMCA), the Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (ASONOG), and Center for the Studies of Honduran Women (CEM-H). Caceres' family is also actively involved.
The campaign also highlights women activists like Berta who have been killed and current activists who are continuing the fight to protect their lands and livelihoods such as Miriam Miranda of OFRANEH who is leading the fight to protect her people's collectively owned land on Honduras' northern coast. It also aims to expose the risks that all Hondurans are facing from uncontrolled exploration and exploitation of the country's national resources.
Since the 2009 coup d'etat in Honduras seven years ago, the Honduran government has fast-tracked license granting to national and international companies for natural resource extraction. Today, there are almost 800 active licenses with 537 conceded for mining exploitation and 252 for energy projects, such as the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project owned by the company DESA, linked to the murder of Berta Caceres. Many of these projects are located on lands belonging to indigenous and Garifuna communities and cultivated by small farmers, leading to often violent conflicts in Honduras and many other parts of the world.
The Honduran women who have come together in the Defensoras Campaign are demanding that the DESA license for the Agua Zarca project be cancelled. Last week, hundreds of women from across the country gathered in a hotel near the legislative assembly to launch the campaign during which Berta's mother introduced a symbolic petition to the Honduran legislative assembly demanding the cancellation of the DESA's license for the Agua Zarca project. That afternoon, the leaders of the main opposition parties announced that they will heed Berta's mother's call to cancel the license for the Agua Zarca project and formally introduce a bill to Congress. This is extremely heartening news for campaign organizers in Honduras and we're hopeful the bill can garner the votes needed to ensure passage. They are sure to keep up the pressure!
The organizations that have come together under the banner of Defensoras de la Madre Tierra are also demanding passage of a law to implement the International Labour Organization's Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO 169). The Convention requires that indigenous peoples be consulted to seek their free, prior and informed consent for any projects that may affect the lands they customarily own, occupy or otherwise use. Although the Convention was ratified by Honduras 1995, and thus is recognized by the country as international law, no secondary legislation has been enacted to guarantee its implementation. Passage of such a law, as the Defensoras demand, would constitute a critical step toward upholding indigenous peoples' rights, and reducing conflicts that arise when their territories are appropriated and their human rights violated.
This exciting and innovative campaign, honoring women environmental activists and fighting for justice, is part of a Global Call to Action - #LandRightsNow - to secure all indigenous and community land rights everywhere. Securing these rights is vital to eradicating hunger and poverty; protecting the environment and fighting climate change; and building a world of justice where human rights are protected for all. For more information visit landrightsnow.org.
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Venezuela's Food Revolution Has Fought Off Big Agribusiness and Promoted Agroecology
Jan 11, 2016
Just days before the progressive National Assembly of Venezuela was dissolved, deputies passed a law which lays the foundation for a truly democratic food system. The country has not only banned genetically modified seeds, but set up democratic structures to ensure that seeds cannot be privatized and indigenous knowledge cannot be sold off to corporations. President Maduro signed the proposal into law before New Year, when a new anti-Maduro Assembly was sworn in.
Since Hugo Chavez's day, Venezuela has always held out against agribusiness, including GM, famously halting 500,000 acres of Monsanto corn in 2004 . In fact, Chavez's formal strategy for the country talked about creating an "an eco-socialist model of production based on a harmonic relationship between humans and nature." The aim, explicitly, was food sovereignty - democratic control of food production.
"Ultimately Venezuela realizes, the only way to make the vision of food sovereignty a reality, is economic democracy."
But that didn't stop agribusiness trying to get a foothold in the country. A war is being waged by big agribusiness, which is trying to monopolize the very means of life - seeds - right across the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, even Europe. agribusiness is lobbying for new stronger intellectual property laws so they can more easily take traditional knowledge and resources and patent them, profiting from monopoly rights.
Agribusiness has been lobbying law-makers under the pretence that GM seeds will end food shortages the country is currently experiencing. But Venezuela's strong peasant movement, part of the international peasant network La Via Campesina, fought back. They defeated a 2013 bill that would have provided a 'back door' to GM and initiating a two year democratic process, involving deputies, campaigners, peasants and indigenous groups, to forge a genuinely progressive seed law.
The result is the law passed before Christmas. It promotes agroecological production methods - that's a form of farming that works with nature and avoids chemicals, pesticides and monocultures. It aims to make the county independent of international food markets. It outlaws the privatization of seeds and promotes instead small and medium scale farming and biodiversity. Article 8 "promotes, in a spirit of solidarity, the free exchange of seed and opposes the conversion of seed into intellectual or patented property or any other form of privatization."
Venezuela's step is hugely impressive, first because of the food shortages the country is undergoing - a result of deep dependency on the international market and destabilization efforts coming from inside and outside the country. One commentator points out "Venezuelans are not being fooled by promises of a quick fix to increase food production." Food sovereignty can produce far more than more intensive methods of farming, especially over the long-term.
But second it is impressive because it extends decision-making deep down into Venezuelan society. Ordinary citizens have an ongoing role to play in regulating seeds. In an attempt to decentralize power, a Popular Council has been established, which will join officials and politicians in setting long-term food policy. Ultimately Venezuela realizes, the only way to make the vision of food sovereignty a reality, is economic democracy.
To all those countries fighting off agribusiness, Venezuela has lit a beacon of hope.
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