Celebrating International Workers Day! Plus, Rural VT stands with La Via Campesina International in its call to action in response to the upcoming WTO ministerial meetings!
April 17th was the International Day of Peasant Struggles, and May 1st is International Workers Day - in many parts of the world it is known as Labor Day. This International Workers Day, we can share our solidarity, celebration, and commitment to human rights, dignity, and deep structural change with our local and global communities: from our local farm workers and Migrant Justice, to our international peasants in La Via Campesina, who are entering their 4th decade of organized collective struggle!
Migrant Justice has been organizing for two years to get Hannaford’s to commit to the Milk With Dignity program. On May 1st, May Day, which is International Workers’ Day, there will be more than 30 actions at Hannaford’s stores around the northeast region. See more information at their website and in this Email Blast. Farmworkers in VT face particular challenges with accessing and / or affording healthcare, housing, childcare and other essential services - and many face the constant threat of deportation. Milk with Dignity promises better standards of living and work for farmworkers as well as a better financial return for farmers.
Throughout April, La Via Campesina is calling upon its members and allies to plant native and indigenous trees in their farm, neighborhood, backyard or garden – as a symbol of our collective existence, persistence and resistance. They are calling for mobilization at the June World Trade Organization ministerial meetings in Geneva. We share our solidarity with this message from La Via Campesina on its 30th anniversary:
“The world is in a difficult place at the moment. The food crisis continues to deepen while hunger and social injustices worsen each day, further aggravated by a COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, conflicts, wars, and financial speculations. It highlights the absolute failure of the transnational capital and agribusiness system enabled by free trade agreements and industrialized monoculture soaked in toxic agro-inputs. This industrial system displaces peasants and degrades the environment and productive resources while supplying our countries with expensive, imported and unhealthy foods. Rising global food prices and costs of farm inputs push peasant communities everywhere deeper into hunger, poverty and debt.
We, La Via Campesina – the peasants, indigenous peoples, rural populations, agricultural workers, and youth in urban and rural areas, propose and promote Food Sovereignty as a solution to build the national productive capacity. Food Sovereignty is a principle rooted in the peasant and family farm sector through supportive public policies, guaranteed prices, credits, and other support forms—including direct marketing between producers and consumers and genuine agrarian reform.”
Full statement from La Via Campesina…
Call for mobilizations in the face of the WTO ministerial meeting - June 2022 in Geneva, Switzerland
Since the creation of the WTO in 1995, La Via Campesina has been denouncing the neoliberal and free trade policies that are destroying the peasantry and destabilizing local food systems worldwide. From Seattle (1999) to Cancun (2003), from Hong Kong (2005) to Buenos Aires (2017), we have been fighting against the imposition of a free trade order in the service of big business and billionaires. On the 10th of September 2003, while protesting outside the WTO ministerial in Cancun, Mexico, peasant from KPL -South Korea Mr. Lee Kyung-Hae sacrificed his life by stabbing himself. That tragic incident exposed the destructive effects of WTO and its trade liberalization efforts on the lives of millions of peasants globally.
Our mobilizations have made it possible to block the free trade negotiations. After our big mobilization in Hongkong 2005, the Doha Development Agenda which started in 2001 has been in limbo and there are no new major WTO agreements ever been adopted, especially in agriculture. However, The WTO was established based on the Marrakesh agreement in 1994; it still forces countries to open their markets to multinational companies and prevents the implementation of ambitious public policies in favor of peasants’ economy. In addition, bilateral and regional free trade agreements have multiplied.
Neoliberal policies and the imposition of free trade have greatly weakened peasantry around the world. They push countries to give priority to export crops and to depend on imports to feed their populations. They increase the grabbing of resources by multinationals, to the detriment of peasants and local communities. They contribute to the exacerbation of climate crisis by fostering monoculture plantations, deforestations, overexploitation of soils and water and dwindling our biodiversity.
Today, with the pandemic of COVID-19, with the extreme events linked to global warming and with the war in Ukraine and other places, it is clear that making people's food security dependent on international trade and TNCs is criminal. This must stop. The WTO must get out of agriculture. Food sovereignty must be the basis of agricultural and food policies in each country and at the international level.
In June 2022, the WTO ministerial meeting will meet in Geneva. The WTO is struggling to seek relevance again in a world battered by inequality, hunger, extreme poverty, wars and a once-in-a-century pandemic. La Via Campesina calls on civil society to mobilize to denounce this criminal organization and defend people’s food sovereignty. We have reiterated in our International Day of Action against WTO and Free Trade Agreements that for us– the global peasant movement of peasants, indigenous people, farmworkers, migrants, fishers and pastoralists – the only permanent solution that we have historically advocated for is that WTO and FTAs stay out of any agricultural discussions. Food cannot be subjected to the whims and fancies of a free market where only those who can afford it can eat it.
The UN Human Rights Council will also meet at the end of June in Geneva. This will be an opportunity for peasant movements from all over the world to affirm that the alternative must be based on peasants' rights and to demand procedures for the implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Rural Workers (UNDROP).
End WTO! Food Sovereignty and Peasants' Rights now!