Hungry Farmers Urge Local Control over Food
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WASHINGTON, Jun 13 (OneWorld) - As food prices and hunger continue to rise worldwide, small farmers in Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico are suggesting solutions quite different than the free trade policies endorsed at a recent UN food summit in Rome.
Ensuring "food sovereignty" and locally sustainable forms of agriculture, they say, would strengthen local communities and help stem the global food crisis. Both Guatemala's National Peasant and Indigenous Coordination and Brazil's Small Producers Movement have "put forth food sovereignty as a solution to the crisis: the right of communities to produce food for local markets and for consumers to have access to local healthy food," reported Grassroots International, an organization that supports community-led sustainable development projects. Following the Rome Food Summit, at which world leaders defended economic policies that favor industrial agriculture, agro-fuels, and genetically modified organisms, the Guatemalan and Brazilian farmers' groups called for alternative solutions to the food crisis. Namely, they emphasized the importance of protecting "the land, water, and seeds rights of communities necessary to grow food... [to] guarantee a dignified future to peasants and indigenous people," continued Saulo Arujo, from Grassroots International. Otherwise, the farmers said, the poor in their communities would remain at the mercy of the large corporations that dominate agricultural production now and are largely responsible for the spiraling price of staple foods across the planet. Read more from Grassroots international about alternatives to corporate-driven agricultural policies. In Tlaxcala, Mexico, farmers have already taken steps toward food sovereignty by increasing crop yields and using natural techniques rather than industrial pesticides. One program, Campesino a Campesino, "introduced new farming methods that increased [farmers'] productivity from 600 kilos per hectare to 8,000-14,000 kilos per hectare," says Meredith Barges, who traveled to rural Mexico to learn about alternative farming methods. In the 1970s the residents of Tlaxcala found themselves "unable to provide for [their] own needs" because the Green Revolution of the 1940s-1960s forced local residents to find work outside of the community, writes Barges. The Green Revolution is the common term for the period of time when large-scale farming machinery and industrial pesticides were introduced to increase crop yields in developing countries around the world. According to the Tlaxcala farmers, new high-yield, single-crop fields pushed small farmers out of their communities and off of their farms. The use of industrial pesticides "[produced] foods at the expense of biodiversity and the ecosystem, which we now know our living planet needs in order thrive." The result was extermination of many plants and animals and increased inequality between industrial and small scale farmers, writes Barges. By the 1970s community organizers had realized they had "to get a handle on their food production and food sovereignty." Now residents of Tlaxcala "use a variety of innovative techniques to create a life-giving equilibrium among animals, soil, and water in their fields plant[ing] fruit trees along their crop fields in order to give living animals (insects included) something else to eat besides just valuable cash crops," concludes Barges. Read Meredith Barges' account of the Green Revolution and sustainable farming in Mexico. |
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