food

By Alberto Silva - La Via Campesina, July 6, 2023

By staff - La Via Campesina, June 28, 2023

Bagnolet | 28 June 2023: Instead of finding real answers to the environmental, social and democratic crises, the French government is choosing to imprison activists and ban movements critical of the extractivist agro-industrial model.

On 21 June, the French government announced the dissolution of the movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre, which campaigns against land and water grabbing and the destruction of ecosystems. That same week, dozens of activists were arrested by the anti-terrorist police, on the pretext that they had taken part in demonstrations against mega-basins, extractivist industries or agro-industry and its pollution. On June 28th, two peasant trade unionists from the Confédération Paysanne, Nicolas Girod and Benoît Jaunet, along with Julien LeGuet, spokesperson for the collective Bassines non merci, were arrested by the police for their involvement in organizing these collective gatherings as representatives of their respective organizations. They were released later in the day but received court summonses for the month of September. Such acts of repression against legitimate protests are unacceptable and unjust, creating a negative precedent and seeking to intimidate all defenders of fundamental rights. In this context it seems that the FNSEA, a French farmers’ union, has also been calling for the dissolution of La Confédération Paysanne.

We, La Via Campesina and European Coordination Via Campesina, stand together with our member organisation in France, La Confédération Paysanne. We firmly reject these threats and will act decisively in Europe and around the world to ensure that La Confédération Paysanne and its members can continue to defend peasant agriculture and its workers.

We express our support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre (the Uprisings of the Earth ). These tens of thousands of young people mobilising to ensure land and water are shared fairly, which is an expression of the acute sense of responsibility that young people have in the face of social inequalities and the destruction of ecosystems.

We call on the French Government to cease its violations of human rights, and in particular of the rights recognised in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Rural Workers (UNDROP), such as freedom of thought, opinion and expression, freedom of association and the right to participation.

We call on our member organisations and allied organisations to mobilise in support of the
Confédération Paysanne and social movements in France, in particular by sending letters to French embassies and the French government and by organising rallies in front of French embassies.

By staff - La Via Campesina, June 17, 2023

UN EXPERTS’ COMMUNIQUE: Will the rights of trade unions and social and environmental movements be respected by the French government?

On 15 June 2023, seven independent experts from the United Nations expressed their concernⁱ at allegations of excessive use of force during the recent demonstrations against pension reform and mega-water basin projects in France.

“Lack of restraint in the use of force against members of civil society who are peacefully demanding their participation in decision-making processes concerning their future, access to natural resources, protection of human rights, dignity and equality, would not only be anti-democratic, but deeply worrying for the rule of law”, the experts said.

The Confédération Paysanne and CETIM welcome this position and call on the French government to heed these warnings. The concerns expressed are in line with those we voiced in our submission to the UN experts on the occasion of the International Day of Peasant Struggles (17 April). Indeed, mega-basin projects are being carried out at the expense of the right to water of all peasants in the territories because they reinforce the problem of drought and the increasing scarcity of access to water. Peasant organizations and other sectors of civil society have mobilized to question these projects and demand respect for human and environmental rights, suffering unprecedented repression.

This communique from the UN experts has a very particular resonance, given that mobilizations are continuing around water and land issues in many areas, and at a time when the criminalization and repression of these mobilizations and of trade unions and social and environmental movements are still the order of the day.

Human rights issues, and more specifically the rights to water, food, freedom of expression and demonstration, cannot be scorned and repressed in this way. We cannot accept the threats to dissolve the Soulèvements de la Terre movement. In view of the above, we urge the French authorities to honour their international human rights commitments, as recalled by the UN experts.

The Confédération Paysanne is continuing its trade union action to obtain a moratorium on mega-basin projects and for the establishment of a dialogue on the management and sharing of water in France, a sine qua non for the respect of human rights.

By Alexandra Martinez - Prism, November 2, 2022

Farmworkers spent October picketing outside Hannaford Supermarket on Shelburne Road in South Burlington, Vermont, calling on the national grocery store chain to join the nonprofit, farmworker-driven Milk with Dignity program to end systemic human rights violations in the northeast dairy industry. The Vermont workers, organized with Migrant Justice, have been calling on Hannaford to join the program since 2019 with little success. The picket is just one of many actions farmworkers have leveraged to urge the company to improve its dairy sourcing practices.

“We’re calling up Hannaford to take action and to take responsibility for the rights of the dairy farm workers in their supply chain,” said Marino Chun, a farmworker and member of the Migrant Justice Farmworker Coordinating Committee, outside a Hannaford market in Shelburne, Vermont. According to Migrant Justice, Hannaford’s store brand of milk is produced in Vermont dairy farms where systemic human rights violations still occur. 

Inspired by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, Migrant Justice launched the Milk with Dignity program in 2017, with Ben & Jerry’s as the first company to commit to the program. To join the program, a company must commit to sourcing from farms that enroll in this worker-driven human rights program, which includes paying a premium to participating farms in exchange for the farm’s commitment to improving conditions to meet a worker-authored code of conduct. “Hannaford hasn’t joined yet, but we aren’t giving up and we’re gonna keep taking action until we get a positive response.”

Migrant Justice also helps to educate workers on their rights in the program, and a third-party auditor—the Milk with Dignity Standards Council (MDSC)—monitors farms’ compliance. Labor conditions for many dairy farm workers are often dangerous and even life-threatening. In 2014, there were 49 reported fatalities in dairy cattle and milk production; one worker was mauled by a two-year-old bull or dairy cow while herding 40-50 other cows into a holding pen, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. In the same year, a survey of nearly 200 Vermont dairy workers revealed the average laborer works 60-80 hours per week, and 40% of farmworkers are paid less than the state minimum wage. Dairy workers also reported having no days off, routinely working seven hours or more without a break to eat, having their pay illegally withheld, not getting eight consecutive hours off per day to sleep, and living in overcrowded housing with inadequate heat.

By staff - La Via Campesina, September 6, 2022

After more than two years, the COVID-19 pandemic is still a reality in our daily lives. More people today still bear the brunt of the pandemic with health restrictions, limited access to markets, worsening hunger and poverty, inequality, and also repression to people’s fundamental rights. During this period, hundreds of millions of people have contracted COVID-19, and over six million people succumbed to death. For peasants and other people living in rural areas, the pandemic has shown the importance of local, peasants’ food systems that are feeding the people and preventing widespread hunger. It is time to transform. The rights of people, dignity, and solidarity, not profits, should be the foundation of the new society post-pandemic.

In similar notes, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, examines the emerging issues concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and the right to food. The report, entitled “The right to food and the coronavirus disease pandemic” (document A/77/177, available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian).

In this report, Fakhri summarizes the current situation of pandemic and framing the problem during pandemic times: especially the lack of concerted actions by governments all over the globe and the exacerbated situations done by corporations in putting profits first before humanity. The Special Rapporteur goes further showing the fragility of our general food systems in these pandemic times, highlighting that “[The pandemic] has underlined the value of sharing and solidarity, and the importance of the application of traditional, local knowledge in times of extreme hardship. Communities persevered when they were not exclusively dependent on food value chain operations for their food security. Resilient solutions included localized markets, public food reserves and associated public food distribution systems, mutual assistance and the sharing of food, as well as jut transition to agroecology [as a means for adapting to climate change].”

The report benefited from a series of regional consultations with civil society and inputs from Member States of the United Nations. Therefore it is worth to mention that just transition for workers was raised as one of the solutions for immediate response to the pandemic and the current food crisis, along with upholding land rights and genuine agrarian reform, curtailing corporate power, developing action plans on the right to food based on the principles of solidarity, self-sufficiency, and dignity, addressing debt crisis and financial needs, and ensuring that international trade law and policy create fair and stable markets.

The important report also makes good references to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), provisions from International Labour Organization (ILO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), also the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

By Olivia N. Guarna - Vermont Law & Graduate School Center for Agriculture & Food Systems and Farmworker Justice , September 2022

THE USE OF PESTICIDES IS UBIQUITOUS IN OUR FOOD SYSTEM. In the United States, approximately 1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied annually across sectors. Nearly 90 percent of conventional pesticides are applied in the agricultural sector. As a result, farmworkers are routinely exposed at unusually high rates to chemicals that pose substantial risk to human health and safety. These risks are exacerbated by insufficient worker training and frequent improper handling and application.

Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems released a report in 2021 entitled Essentially Unprotected, which contains a detailed overview of the landscape of pesticide laws at the federal and state level. As demonstrated in the report, there are still key gaps in existing law to sufficiently protect farmworkers. Given these significant gaps, it is particularly alarming that compliance with current protections appears woefully low. The failure to adequately enforce pesticide laws leaves farmworkers unprotected and at continued risk of injury and illness.

The system of pesticide law enforcement is complex and varies widely between states. This report seeks to explain some of the nuance reflected in the regulatory structure of enforcement while highlighting recommendations for consistency and improved health and safety outcomes. However, it is essential to note that poor compliance and enforcement are symptomatic of other issues, many of which plague farmworkers beyond pesticide exposure. For example, enforcement is considerably affected by workers underreporting exposure incidents and suspected violations due to fear of retaliation by their employers.

Many farmworkers are undocumented or on an H-2A guestworker visa and thus face fears of deportation or blacklisting if they speak out against employer abuse. Additionally, farmworkers often do not have access or resources to seek out medical attention after exposure. If they do, doctors may not be aware that their symptoms indicate pesticide poisoning or may not know how and to whom to report the incident. Even when doctors can draw the connection, not all states require that doctors notify health authorities or the state agency responsible for enforcement.e, enforcement is considerably affected by workers underreporting exposure incidents and suspected violations due to fear of retaliation by their employers.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - Capire, June 21, 2022

Free trade is an enemy of food sovereignty—this is what grassroots, peasant, and ecological movements strongly stated last week on the streets of Geneva, Switzerland. Between June 13^th and 16^th, 2022, government representatives met for a ministerial conference at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO’s decision-making spaces are responsible for formulating the free trade agenda around the globe and facilitating corporate agreements across several industries, including the food industry. This is why, concurrently with the official meeting, delegations of grassroots organizations promoted an intense mobilization, with spaces for discussion, press conferences, and a demonstration. La Via Campesina sees it as a moment to denounce: free trade fuels hunger.

In an international statement, La Via Campesina called states to exit the WTO and proposed the creation of a new framework that considers the peoples’ ways of living, based on food sovereignty. The organization also shared statements by peasant leaders. Jeongyeol Kim, from the Korean Women Peasant’s Association and an International Coordination Committee (ICC) member of La Via Campesina, pointed out that “it is time to keep agriculture out of all free trade agreements,” adding that “the pandemic, and the shock and disruptions induced by war have made it clear that we need a local and national food governance system based on people, not agribusinesses. A system that is built on principles of solidarity and cooperation rather than competition, coercion, and geopolitical agendas.”

La Via Campesina brought a diverse delegation to Geneva, with more than forty people coming from southern Africa, southern Asia, Europe, and the Americas. “We are speaking from outside this institution, which we do not want to recognize, because there is no possibility of intersection. The WTO must be dismantled and destroyed, it must disappear, because its origins have been damaging peasant, Indigenous, and fishing communities around the world,” said Perla Álvarez from Paraguay, and member of the Latin American Coordination of La Via Campesina (CLOC-LVC).

By AFSA, et. al. - GRAIN, February 2, 2022

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has bumbled into a controversy over whether peasants or agribusiness feed most of the world. Eight organisations with long experience working on food and farming issues have written to the Director General of the FAO sharply criticizing the UN agency for a 2021 report that is statistically confusing and contradicts FAO positions. The open letter calls upon FAO to examine its methodology, clarify itself and to reaffirm that peasants (including small farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers, and urban producers) not only provide more food with fewer resources but are the primary source of nourishment for at least 70% of the world population.

According to the letter’s signatories, the problematic study, “Lowder SK, et al.,(2021) “Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?”, World Development, 142., reverses a number of well-established positions held by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as well as many other multilateral organisations and civil society.

The study:

• Changes the definition of “Family Farmer” adopted by FAO and the UN Decade of the Family Farm by excluding artisanal fishers, pastoralists, urban food producers and other accepted categories. By extension it also excludes these food producers from the definition of “small farmer”.

• Arbitrarily defines a “small farm” as less than 2 ha contradicting FAO’s own decision in 2018 to reject a universal land area threshold for describing small farms in favour of more sensitive country-specific definitions founded on the relationship between different variables.

• Discounts or ignores recent FAO and other reports proving that peasant farms produce more food and more nutritious food per hectare than large farms.

• Without evidence, maintains that policymakers are wrongly focused on peasant production and should give greater attention to larger production units.

The signing organisations also strongly disagree with the study’s assumption that food production is a proxy for food consumption and that the commercial value of food in the marketplace can be equated to the nutritional value of the food consumed.

The paper is not only a clumsy departure from FAO’s previous research and positions, it also feeds into an agribusiness narrative anxious to play down the importance and effectiveness of peasant production in order to build support for their proprietary technologies, subsidies, and regulatory needs.

By Staff - La Via Campesina, August 5, 2021

UN Food Systems Pre-Summit falls short on climate, hunger crisis, COVID-19, and food systems transformation, say counter-mobilization participants, totalling almost 9,000 people.

3 August 2021. Rome, Italy. Between 25-28 July 2021, some 9,000 people gathered for a mostly virtual counter-mobilization to oppose the United Nations Food Systems (UNFSS) Pre-Summit. The alternative forum was hailed a huge success, as it drew together a wide variety of attendees and was able to catalyze and amplify a counter-narrative to the official proceedings. With critical articles and pieces published in major media outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera and Italian state TV Rai, and several thousands of #FoodSystems4People posts on social media seen by potentially 10 million users, the counter-mobilization succeeded in reaching a broad public with its vision for genuine transformation of unsustainable food systems.

The “People’s counter-mobilization to transform corporate food systems” kicked off with an 8-hour long global virtual rally. This massively-attended event featured messages from offline communities, declarations, artistic performances and live mobilizations by hundreds of individuals and organizations from all continents, representing smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolks, indigenous peoples, agricultural and food workers, landless peoples, women, youth, consumers, the urban food insecure, NGOs and academics.

The counter-mobilization provided a space for dialogue about the threats posed by increasingly corporate-controlled and globalized food systems, and the already existing viable solutions to overcome them. An opening declaration summarizing the demands of the People’s Autonomous Response to the UNFSS – a platform of 330 organizations who took part in the counter-mobilization – was officially released. This civil society group are urging that policy discussions and decisions be made in the UN Committee on World Food Security, the only multilateral space with established inclusivity and accountability.