The international
peasant’s movement La Via Campesina will take part in People’s Expo in
Milan, at the Fabbrica del Vapore, from the 3rd to the 5th
of June 2015. The People’s Expo is the international forum of the civil
society and farmers’ movements organised to defend the principles of
Food Sovereignty and Environmental Justice, to fight against the
commodification of the right to food promoted by Expo 2015 and to state
aloud, once again, that it is the peasant agriculture that feeds the
world, not the multinationals or the agribusiness.
La Via Campesina denounces the Milan Expo as a
great "world showcase" that deliberately chose to hide one of the
largest ongoing world conflict: hunger, land and energy grabbing at a
global level.
From the 1st of May to the 31st of October 31
2015, Milan is hosting the Universal Exposition with the theme ‘Feeding
the Planet, Energy for Life’. Expo 2015 has been described by the
organizers as ‘the biggest event ever organized on Food and Nutrition
[with intent to] give a concrete answer to a vital need: being able to
guarantee healthy, safe and sufficient food for everyone, while
respecting the Planet and its equilibrium’.
However, Expo 2015 is sponsored and financed by
some of the most important multinationals of food and agriculture, such
as McDonald’s and Coca Cola. According to Andrea Ferrantes of La Via
Campesina Europe: ‘Expo 2015 is hiding behind a green-washed façade
that doesn’t show us the violent face of the corporate interests which
are controlling the whole food chain, grabbing the land , controlling
seeds and patenting life. The narrative of Expo 2015 does not speak of
the stories of farmers and peasants starving because they being expulsed
from their land, of the indigenous people expulsed from their
territories, of the fishermen and fisherwomen who are being denied
access to the seas in which they have always fished, of the nomadic
pastoralists forced to live a sedentary life or of the consumers forced
to eat junk food’.
Expo Milano 2015 is not a neutral event, as some
would have liked us to believe. On the contrary, it is an event
promoting the industrialisation of agriculture and the financialisation
of agricultural markets. Agribusiness concentrates food production and
distribution in the hands of the few big companies, regardless of the
producers and consumers’ needs.
Expo 2015 goes in the opposite direction from the
path on which food producers and citizens march together, claiming their
right to food sovereignty through agroecological models of production
and consumption.
To propose real alternatives to the
agro-industrial model supported by Expo 2015 and to give voice to those
who cannot tell their own story in its “showcase”, a delegation of Via
Campesina farmers from around the world will be present at the People’s
Expo in Milan, along with other international networks and many
non-profit Italian associations that defend peoples’ rights.
from here
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