Today we must recognize that the life
of peoples – and the very future of peasant communities - is in radical confrontation
with systems which aim only to control the greatest amount of riches, relations,
people, common goods and any profitable activities through the development of laws,
dispositions, policies, programs, projects and cashpayments. Agroindustry is a
representation of this – the production of crops (not just foodstuffs) through increasingly
sophisticated (not necessarily more efficient) methods on large land areas aimed at harvesting
large volumes and maximum profit at any cost.
This industrial logic perpetrates
extreme violence against natural scale processes and vital cycles and promotes so called
“vertical integration” - the crazed race to add economic value to foodstuffs through the
addition of more and more processing and privatisations systems (landgrabbing,
certified seeds, the sterilization and fertilisation of soils by agrochemicals, agricultural
mechanisation, transport, cleaning, processing, packaging, storage, and again transport)
before food is finally made available to the public through supermarkets and restaurant
chains.
As we already know, this sum of
processes contributes to the extreme warming whichis part of the climate crisis (around
50% greenhouse gases come from the combined process of “vertical integration”).
This system also contributes to the subjugation of people trapped - through one form or
another – in this transnational and globalized food system. A system which does not
feed communities or neighbourhoods but instead looks for their labour to do the
most damaging aspects of the chain – while the futures of farmers are robbed by
industrial agricultural systems which reduces their creative, dignified and enormously
careful stewardship of the land to semi-slavery.
For these reasons, to produce our own
food independently of the so-called global
food system is something profoundly
political and subversive.
It is undeniable that there is direct
relationship between the loss of lands on one hand and the advance of megamining projects,
oil and natural gas extraction, and monoculture agriculture on the other. As
outlined in the editorial, an enormous amount of research remains to be done in order to
uncover the true extent of the extractivist projects and the fragmentation,
dismantling and loss of indigenous and peasant held territories and lands. As a minimum we
can say that in Mexico alone 26% of the national territory is in the hands of
mining concessions, and in Colombia the figure is 40%. Mining in Colombia goes hand in
hand with rights abuses; “80% of the violations of human rights which have occurred
over the last 10 years occured in mining-energy regions, and 87% of all displaced
peoples from this period originated in these areas”.
If we run through country by country –
a study which should be undertaken in a systematic way – we would encounter
similar situations, including the extreme case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
where percentages of lands handed over no longer serve as a measure, but the
number of dead in conflicts over minerals, diamonds, coltan and gold: more than 7
million have died violently in the last 15 years.
Conflicts over water are also
recurrent. In Africa for example, one in three people suffer from scarcity of water and
climate change is worsening the situation. The development in Africa of highly
sophisticated indigenous water management systems could help to alleviate this crisis,
but these same systems are those being destroyed by land grabbing – in the midst of
claims that water in Africa is abundant, underused and is ready to be utilised for
agro-export agriculture.
Of course, this is not only a
phenomenon in Africa.
Beyond the causes, which go from the
monoculture fields of the industrial agricultural system to the most severe and
polluting forms of extractivism, passing oil wells, electricity generation centres,
biosphere reserves, REDD projects, megatourism, real estate developments, motorway
routes, mega-dams, multi-modal corridors, narcotraffiking and cultivations, the
reality is that there is a real attack underway against our territorial memory, our
memory of place – the lands which are our vital surroundings, our common
environment we need to recreate and transform our existence: the spaces we give meaning
to with our shared wisdom and knowledge,with our common history.
To provoke scarcity and economic
dependence, the international and multilateral transnational systems have promoted the
disabling of the capacity of communities to feed themselves, or provide healthcare
education and other needs. The effect of this imposed precarity is the expulsion of
populations and the jeopardising of their futures.
For these reasons Food Sovereignty
remains deeply pertinent and a source of profound hope as a tool to rebuild
autonomy and the defence of our territories, as it represents a living manifestation of
our memories. The production of food from the smallest community level upwards is a
vital proposal – and examples exist that show it is possible to reverse the damage
that has been done.
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