Afp, Rome, The Daily Star, 02 June 2008

 

Dozens of farmers’ groups kicked off a forum in Rome yesterday to coincide with the UN food agency’s summit on food security with an impassioned plea for an overhaul of world agricultural policies.

“We have empty plates and we have empty policies,” said Paul Nicholson of La Via Campesina, an international farmers’ movement.

“Let us protect and defend a farming system that feeds the world and cools the planet,” he said at an open-air news conference held across the street from the Rome headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The FAO is holding a summit from Tuesday to Thursday at which world leaders will discuss food security as runaway prices have sparked riots across the world.

“On the eve of the High-Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome, farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and non-governmental organisations have declared a People’s State of Emergency,” forum organisers said in a statement.

“Free trade policies have seriously damaged the food system over time, leading to the food crisis that we’re facing today,” said Maryam Rahmanian of Iran’s Centre for Sustainable Development.

Alvaro Santin, representing the Movement of Landless Brazilians, said: “We reject the call of the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation for further liberalisation of international trade.

“These very policies have flooded our countries with cheap food, undermined our food sovereignty and devastated our ability to produce food for ourselves.”

Rahmanian, who is on the forum’s steering committee, told AFP: “The UN doesn’t have anything new to say. It’s obscene that the food crisis is being used to push stronger on policies” promoting large-scale agriculture, biofuels and the use of GMOs and pesticides.

She said that peasants’ groups and NGOs had had a working relationship with the FAO since the 1996 World Food Summit here, but that the groups had become increasingly “marginalised.”

“The FAO as an institution in itself is the only forum that could potentially be democratic,” she said, noting that each member state has an equal vote.