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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] WorldFoodNews
  • Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 12:55:51 -0600



The following is a sample of the kind of posting that subscribers to
WorldFoodNews receive several times a month. If you would like to subscribe
to this e-mail information service focusing on global food security issues,
please write to foodnews@ca.inter.net

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Editors' note: This guide was contributed to FoodWorldNews by Peter Mann of
World Hunger Year, who can be reached at peter@worldhungeryear.org

HOW TO GET INFORMED ON GLOBAL STRUGGLES
Peter Mann

Global struggles are taking place around access to water and land, around
seeds, sustainable agriculture and fisheries. Sometimes these struggles seem
far removed from our everyday concerns. Often they are also happening where
we live, in our own neighborhoods and regions. We can get informed on these
struggles by learning about them through the Internet and bringing our
personal knowledge and commitment to the struggle, once our eyes are opened.
The issues described in the following summaries will be treated in depth in
future WHY Speaks articles.

HUNGER AND THE RIGHT TO FOOD

Despite efforts around the world, the number of undernourished people is
growing. The latest estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) show that 840 million people were undernourished in 1998-2000 - 11
million in the industrialized countries, 30 million in countries in
transition and 799 million in the developing world. Literally millions of
people, including 6 million children under the age of five, die each year as
the result of hunger. In the vast majority of cases, the cause is not overt
famine but "covert famine" - chronic hunger and malnutrition that stunts
development, saps strength and cripples immune systems. (FAO, The State of
Food Insecurity in the World, 2002:
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y7352E/Y7352E00.HTM
An important tool in the fight against hunger is the growing awareness of
food as a human right. The human right to be free from hunger has a long
history, connecting FDR's "Freedom from Want", the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other commitments of
the world community. What is new today is the worldwide movement to
implement the right to food, to pressure governments to live up to their
commitments to reduce hunger, and to change policies on agriculture, trade,
and social welfare that increase hunger. To this end, the United Nations has
appointed a Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Food: see
www.righttofood.org . Civil society action is led by the FoodFirst
Information and Action Network (FIAN): see www.fian.org . FIAN works in 19
countries, and plans to open a secretariat in Washington, DC since hungry
Americans also lack the right to food.

WATER

Food security activists in North America are engaged in the global struggle
around access to water. One billion people lack safe water to drink, and two
billion lack sanitation. Without water, crops and livestock fail and
communities suffer hunger and disease. As world population increases in a
water-scarce world, we will have to grow more food with less water, using
new and more efficient technologies such as drip irrigation. Traditional
rural economies, such as The Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems in Nepal, are
leading the way in the South, while the explosion of organic farming in
North America and Europe is promoting new models of water conservation. The
struggle for water as a common good and a human right, both in the North and
South, challenges the growing privatization and corporate control of water
resources.
Ask yourself the following questions. How have you experienced the water
crisis, as described above? Are your own region or city "water-secure", and
are they likely to remain so? How could you use your purchasing power to
support ways of growing food that conserve rather than waste water? Do you
believe that water is a human right and a common good, or can you go along
with it becoming a private commodity controlled by corporations for profit?
If it is a human right and a common good, what is needed to safeguard this
right, especially for the poor, and how can you get involved?
Resources for Information and Activism:
The Blue Planet Project at www.canadians.org/blueplanet . Maude Barlow's
writings on the water crisis, including Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop
Corporate Theft of the World's Water, with Tony Clarke (New Press, 2002.)
Robert Svadlenka's four-part series on Water at WHY's website:
www.worldhungeryear.org/why_speaks/why_speaks_toc.asp - including
connections to numerous websites on the water crisis.

LAND

Land reform - agrarian reform - is a key to building food self-reliance and
preventing the rural poor from being marginalized by globalization. Social
movements within civil society differ radically, however, on the way to
achieve effective land reform. At one extreme, the World Bank's "market-led
land reform" policies are rejected by many peasant organizations as a way to
transfer communal lands out of reach of poor people. The alternative is seen
as "Land For Those Who Work It, Not Just For Those Who Can Buy It"
(FoodFirst News & Views, Spring 2002: www.foodfirst.org and
www.foodfirst.org/prgs/global/trade/worldbankseminar.html
Landless movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America are creating land
reform "from below." The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil is a
radical movement to expropriate unused land for millions of landless
peasants: for information, see www.mstbrazil.org .
As a model of land reform policies that aim to transform institutions in a
non-violent way, the Rural Development Institute (RDI) based in Seattle
works with governments and peasant farmer organizations to negotiate
legislation to provide land to millions of landless in China, Vietnam,
Russia, and other countries: reports of success, and ways to get involved,
are given in www.rdiland.org .
LAND (Land Alliances for National Development) is a Partnership Initiative
to Empower the Rural Poor organized by The Popular Coalition to Eradicate
Hunger and Poverty, (now known as The Land Coalition) (
www.ifad.org/popularcoalition ) as part of the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD). This initiative received strong support from governments
and UN agencies at the WSSD, and you can follow the progress of this
initiative on the Popular Coalition's website, given above.
North American food security activists can get behind these and many other
international land reform initiatives by contacting these organizations and
websites, but there are land reform needs at home, also. Rural communities,
devastated by an agricultural system that favors large farms over small,
need rebuilding in North America. New farmers require access to land,
farmland is being swallowed up by urban sprawl, and land trusts need
increased support.
Resources to learn more about these needs and to volunteer, are available at
Rural Coalition: http://www.ruralco.org/html2/employment.html

SEEDS

Seeds have been described as the patrimony of all humanity: without seeds
there is no agriculture, no food, and no life. A global struggle is taking
place to control seeds, and thereby control the food system.
On the one hand, in traditional farming systems peasant farmers have been
custodians of the planet's genetic wealth. Seeds were cherished as critical
elements in the great chain of being, to be exchanged as a free gift of
nature. Local cultivators and plant breeders throughout the world thereby
preserved the diversity of thousands of locally cultivated plants,
expressing indigenous knowledge generated over centuries.
By contrast, corporations in the global North treat seeds as a pure
commodity, to be protected by patents and intellectual property rights. They
have pirated seeds from the centers of biodiversity in the global South
through "biopiracy." They risk contaminating these biodiversity centers by
introducing into them genetically modified or "transgenic" seeds. They now
threaten the free exchange of seeds through developing varieties that die
and cannot be replanted again ("terminator technologies.")
Many local groups, supported by movements of civil society, are working
together to preserve their indigenous seeds and to share them with others.
These local seed saving and seed sharing efforts provide a means by which
farmers can preserve traditional varieties, escape dependence on
agribusiness corporations, and increase food security.

Resources:

For Model to Model Dialogues on Seed Saving, highlighting North American and
International Profiles and providing practical information on protecting and
exchanging seeds, see World Hunger Year's Reinvesting in America program at
its website: www.worldhungeryear.org/ria/ria_seeds.asp .
Case studies of local communities in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and
Indonesia defending agro-biodiversity against Genetically Modified Organisms
and agribusiness are profiled in Friends of the Earth International's
"Fertile Resistance in Agrobiodiversity" (August, 2002)- www.foei.org .

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

In North America, social movements are springing up around sustainable
agriculture - rural coalitions, organic farming, urban agriculture, and
others. All these have their international counterparts or linkages. IFOAM
(The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements) at
www.ifoam.org provides links to the expanding organic farming movement in
more than 100 countries. For information on how to get involved in U.S.
consumer issues around organic food, see www.organicconsumers.org . Our
everyday choices of where to shop, what to eat, and how to support local
farms make a difference in the struggle for sustainable agriculture- that is
farming that produces healthy food, keeps farmers on the land, preserves the
environment, and treats farm animals humanely.
Agro-ecology is another form of sustainable agriculture, relying on
indigenous farming knowledge and selected low-input modern technologies.
Agro-ecology seeks to reach the world's rural poor and peasant farmers whose
farming systems are small-scale, complex and diverse. Information on
agro-ecology and food sovereignty worldwide is available through the
websites of FoodFirst www.foodfirst.org , the Third World Network.
www.twn.org , and the Via Campesina, www.viacampesina.org
Practical information for sustainable agriculture practices in the U.S. can
be found at the SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education)
website: www.sare.org and at the ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for
Rural Areas) website www.attra.ncat.org .
North American Urban Agriculture Initiatives are described in the Community
Food Security Coalition's Guide to Urban Agriculture - see
www.foodsecurity.org/urbanag.html . For more information on urban farming
initiatives worldwide, see www.cityfarmer.org , and the Resource Center on
Urban Agriculture and Forestry (RUAF) - www.ruaf.org .

FISHERIES

Fisher peoples represent another social movement where millions of
livelihoods and businesses are threatened by the spread of commercial and
multinational aquaculture corporations. Fishing communities from Vancouver
to Newfoundland, and from Alaska to Boston, have witnessed the destruction
of fisheries through industrialized overfishing and the rise of commercial
fish farms. Consumers can fight back through what they buy and what they
eat. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) provides
excellent information on ways to get involved - see www.iatp.org/fish . The
World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) provides food security activists with
links to fishing communities worldwide: see www.wffp.org .


Peter Mann is international coordinator for WHY (World Hunger Year) and
editor of WHY Speaks.




  • [Livingontheland] WorldFoodNews, Tradingpost, 08/11/2003

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