Unity for Land, Territory, and Dignity!

Taken directly from: Friends of the MST

(I added bold)

The rural social movements that gathered this week at the Unity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and ForestsUnity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and Forests in Brasilia released a joint statement representing a demonstration of the political unity of the peasants, small farmers, landless, indigenous and afro-descendants, along with environmentalists, human rights activists and students who also participated.

The meeting is a response to the challenges of our country to overcome inequality in land distribution, which remains unchanged since the '20s, but with economic, social, cultural and environmental risks as a result of the primary specialization of the economy.

The capitalist project underway in Brazil, represented in the countryside by agribusiness, aims to accumulate capital in the primary sector, serving the interests and the rule of foreign capital by means of the transnational corporations.

The offensive of this project causes the crushing and displacement of workers and peoples of the countryside and of the waters and forests. Furthermore, it prevents the implementation of agrarian reform, the recognition and demarcation of indigenous and afro-descendant territories.

On the other hand, it has negative social and environmental impacts, with increasing violence, violation of the territories of fishermen and forest peoples, the weakening of family and peasant agriculture, the subjection of workers and consumers to contaminated food and environmental degradation. The meeting demonstrates that a project is essential for life and work, for the production of healthy foods on a scale sufficient to meet the needs of society, which respects nature and creates dignity in the countryside.

For this reason it is necessary to carry out agrarian reform, defend our territorial sovereignty, ensure food sovereignty, develop agroecology, with the centrality of family and peasant agriculture and traditional forms of production and rural, indigenous and afro-descendant education as strategic tools for emancipation

You can read below the final declaration of the Unity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and Forests.      

For Land, Territory, and Dignity!

After centuries of oppression and resistance, "the oppressed and exploited peasant masses " in a demonstration of their political unity and building a national proposal, gathered at the "First National Congress of Farmers and Agricultural Workers on the character of the land reform ," in 1961, in Belo Horizonte. By that First Congress peoples of the rural areas, assuming a role as political subjects, highlighted the centrality of land as a space for living, production, and socio-cultural identity. 

This unity and political strength led the João Goulart government to incorporate land reform as a part of its basic reforms, opposing the interests of the elites and becoming one of the elements that led to the coup of 1964. The coup governments persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and assassinated the leaders but did not destroy the dream nor the peasant struggles for a piece of land.

After decades of resistance and denunciations of oppression, the mobilizations and social struggles created conditions for the resumption and broadening of peasant organizing, giving rise to a diversity of subjects and agendas. Together with the struggle for agrarian reform, the struggle for land and for territory began to establish individuals as landless, afro-descendants, extractivists, artisanal fishermen, coconut breakers, traditional communities, family farmers, peasants, rural workers and other peoples of the countryside, the waters, and the forests. In this process of formation of political subjects, women and youth asserted themselves in the struggle against patriarchal culture, for visibility and equality of rights and dignity in the countryside.

In another demonstration of coalition building and political unity, we men and women of all ages, meet 51 years later, in Brasilia, at the National Unity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, the , Waters, and Forests, with the centrality of the class struggle around the world, currently expressed in the struggle for Agrarian Reform, Land, Territory, and Dignity.

We are building unity in response to the challenges of inequality in the distribution of land. As in the ‘60s, this inequality remains unchanged, deepening the economic, social, cultural and environmental risks as a result of the primary specialization of the economy.

The first decade of the 21st century reveals a project in which the conservative modernization of agriculture, initiated by the military, interrupted in the nineties, has been revived and resumed as primary expansion project for the external sector in the last twelve years, under the name of agribusiness, which represents our common enemy.

This project, in its essence, produces inequalities in land and social relations in the rural environment, deepening external dependency and carrying out an ultra-predatory exploitation of nature. Its protagonists are finance capital, the large production and marketing chains for global commodities, the large estates, and the Brazilian state in its financing functions - including using public funding for large projects and infrastructure works -- and deregulating the land.

The capitalist project underway in Brazil pursues capital accumulation, specializing in the primary sector, promoting the super-exploitation of agriculture, hydroelectricity, minerals and oil. This super-exploitation, in the name of the need to balance foreign transactions, serves the interests and rule of foreign capital in the rural areas through the agro- and hydro-business corporations.

This project causes the crushing and displacement of workers and peoples of the countryside and of the waters and forests. Its social and environmental consequences are that agrarian reform is not carried out, indigenous and afro-descendant territories are not demarcated and recognized, violence is increased, the territories of the fisher folk and peoples of the forest are violated, family and peasant farming is weakened, workers and consumers are subjected to contaminated foods and to living with environmental degradation. There are also socio-cultural consequences such as the masculinization and the aging of the countryside because of the lack of opportunities for youth and women, resulting in the lack of social reproduction of the peasantry.

These consequences were aggravated by a lack of adequate public policies for social welfare. These policies contributed to the process of social inequality between the countryside and the city, emptying out of the countryside and the increased vulnerability of the peoples of the countryside, waters, and forests. Instead of promoting equality and dignity, the policies and actions of the state often take away the rights and promote violence in the countryside.

Even creating conflicts and being the enemy of the peoples, the Brazilian state in its Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches historically has been investing in strengthening the model of development that is concentrating, exclusive, and degrading. Despite the problems created, the successive governments -- including the current one -- support the agro- and hydro-business option.

Brazil, as a country rich in land, water, natural resources, and biodiversity, attracts speculative and agro-export capital, intensifying the negative impacts on the indigenous, afro-descendant, traditional communities and peasant territories and populations. Externally, Brazil is becoming the lever for a neo-colonizing project, expanding this model into other countries, especially in Latin America and Africa. 

A project for life and work for the production of healthy foods on a sufficient scale to serve the needs of society, which respects nature and creates dignity in the countryside is becoming indispensable. At the same time, the rescue and strengthening of the peasantry, the defense and recovery of their cultures and knowledge is necessary for alternative projects of development and society.

Given this, we uphold:

1)       Agrarian reform as an essential policy for a just, popular, compassionate, and sustainable development, presupposing a change in the land structure, a democratization of access to land, respect for territories, and a guarantee of social reproduction for the people of the countryside, of the waters and forests.

2)      Territorial sovereignty, which comprises the power and autonomy of peoples to freely protect and defend the common good and social space and place of struggle that they occupy, on which they can establish their relationships and lifestyles, develop different cultures and forms of production and reproduction that give identity to the territory

3)    Food sovereignty as the right of peoples to define their own policies and sustainable strategies for production, distribution, and consumption of foods that ensure the right to adequate nourishment for the whole population, respecting their cultures and diverse methods of producing, marketing, and managing these processes. 

4)      Agroecology as a basis for sustainability and social and productive organization for family and peasant farming in opposition to the model of agribusiness. Agroecology is a way to produce related to agriculture that preserves biodiversity, the ecosystems, and the genetic heritage that produces healthy foods, free from genetic modification and agrotoxins, which values knowledge and culture of the peoples of the countryside, of the waters, and forests and defends life.

5)      The centrality of family and peasant agriculture and traditional forms of production and their empowerment through structural policies such as promotion and credit that is subsidized and adequate for the realities; technical assistance based on agroecological principles; research that recognizes and incorporates traditional knowledge; training especially for the youth, encouragement for cooperation, industrialization and marketing.

6)      The need for egalitarian relations of recognition and mutual respect, especially in relation to women, overcoming the gender division of labor and patriarchal power and combating all types of violence.

7)      Energy sovereignty as a right of the peoples, which requires social control over the sources, production, and distribution of energy, changing the current model of Brazilian energy.

8)      Rural, indigenous, and afro-inclusive education as strategic tools for emancipation of individuals, which arise from the experiences of struggle for the right to education and for a political-pedagogical project linked to the interests of the working class. These are counterpoised to rural education whose goal is to prepare minimally-qualified, cheap manual labor to enslave  workers in the monoculture production system.

9)      The need to democratize the media, today concentrated in the hands of a few families and at the service of the capitalist project, which criminalizes the social movements and organizations in the countryside, the waters, and forests.

10)   The necessity for the State to recognize the rights of the populations affected by the huge projects, ensuring that they have open, informed consultation in advance and reparation in the cases in which rights are violated.

We are committed:

1- To strengthening the social organizations and intensifying the unity process among the workers, peoples of the countryside, the waters, and forests, placing them as the center of the class struggle and the confrontation with the common enemy, which is capital and its current expression in the rural area, agribusiness and hydro-business.

2-    To broadening our unity in the coming period, constructing common agendas and unifying processes for the struggle to carry out agrarian reform, for the recognition, entitlement, demarcation and withdrawal from indigenous lands, lands of afro-descendants, and traditional communities, ensuring territorial rights, dignity and autonomy.

3-    To strengthen the struggle for agrarian reform as a unifying banner of workers and peoples of the countryside, waters, and forests.

4-    To build and strengthen alliances between people in the countryside and in the city on national and international levels, in class strategies against capital and in defense of a society that is just, egalitarian, compassionate and sustainable.

5-    To struggle for a massive agro-ecology transition, against agrotoxins, for the production of healthy foods, for food sovereignty, in defense of biodiversity and seeds.

6-    To construct a common agenda to revisit the criteria for construction, access, scope, character and social control over public policies, such as the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (PRONAF), National Program of School Nutrition (PNAE), PAA, National Program for Education in Agrarian Reform (PRONERA), National Program for Education in the Countryside (PRONACAMPO), research and extension, among others, focusing on the peoples of the countryside, waters, and forests.

7-  To strengthen the struggle of women for their rights, for equality and for an end to violence.

8-  To broaden the recognition of the strategic importance of youth in the dynamic of development and in the social reproduction of the peoples of the countryside, the waters and the forests.

9-  To struggle for changes in the current production model delineated by the petro-dependents, with high energy consumption.

10-  To combat and denounce the violence and impunity in the countryside and the criminalization of the leaders of the social movements that is being promoted by public and private agents.

11- To struggle for the recognition of the State’s responsibility for the deaths and forced disappearances of the peasants as well as for the rights of redress for their families with the creation of a Peasant Commission for Amnesty, Memory, Truth, and Justice to affect the works of the Special Commission on the political dead and disappeared, aiming for the inclusion of all those affected by repression.

We workers, peoples of the countryside, the waters, and the forests, demand that the policies and actions of the Brazilian state be redirected because the rural areas cannot take it any longer. We will continue mobilized in unity and struggle and, in combat against our common enemy, we will build a country and a society that is just, compassionate, and sustainable.

Brasília, August 22 2012.

Association of Rural Family Homes (Associação das Casas Familiares Rurais , ARCAFAR)
Association of Brazilian Women (Associação das Mulheres do Brasil, AMB)
Brazilian Association for Agrarian Reform (Associação Brasileira de Reforma Agrária, ABRA)
Brazilian Association of Forestry Engineering Students (Associação Brasileira dos Estudantes de Engenharia Florestal ,ABEEF)
National Coalition for Agroecology (Articulação Nacional de Agroecologia , ANA)
Coalition of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil , APIB)
Indigenous Ministry Council (Conselho Indigenista Missionário, CIMI)
CARITAS Brasileira
National Coordination of Quilombolas (Coordenação Nacional dos Quilombolas , CONAQ)
National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura , CONTAG)
Pastoral Commission on Fishing (Comissão Pastoral da Pesca, CPP)
Pastoral Commission on Land (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT)
Workers Center of Brazil (Central dos Trabalhadores do Brasil, CTB)
Central Workers Union (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT)
Federation of Agronomy Students of Brazil (Federação dos Estudantes de Agronomia do Brasil, FEAB)
Federation of Workers in Family Farming (Federação dos Trabalhadores da Agricultura Familiar FETRAF)
FASE
Greenpeace
Institute for Socio-economic Studies (INESC)
Global March of Women (Marcha Mundial das Mulheres, MMM)
Movement of People Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, MAB)
Popular Peasant Movement (Movimento Camponês Popular, MCP)
Movement of Peasant Women (Movimento das Mulheres Camponesas, MMC)
Movement of Rural Women Workers of the Northeast (Movimento das Mulheres Trabalhadoras Rurais do Nordeste,MMTR-NE)
Movement of Small Farmers (Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores, MPA)
Movement of Artisinal Fishermen and Women (Movimento dos Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais, MPP)Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST)
Interstate Movement of Women Babaçu Coconut-breakers (Movimento Interestadual das Mulheres Quebradeiras de Coco Babaçu, MIQCB)
OXFAM Brazil
Rural Youth Pastoral (Pastoral da Juventude Rural, PJR)
National Network of Human Rights (Rede Nacional de Direitos Humanos, Plataforma Dhesca)
CEFAS Network (Rede Cefas)
National Syndicate of Workers in Agricultural Research and Development (Sindicato Nacional dos Trabalhadores em Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Agropecuário, SINPAF)
SINPRO DF
Land of Rights (Terra de Direitos)
Unicafes
VIA CAMPESINA BRASIL

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Big Food Must Go

Find original article at Alternet.org

Big Food Must Go: Why We Need to Radically Change the Way We Eat

This is not a problem we can solve by going vegetarian or vegan, or buying organic and fair trade.

February 26, 2012  |  Christopher D. Cook

Editor's note: Find Christopher D. Cook's book, Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis, here.

It is no longer news that a few powerful corporations have literally occupied the vast majority of human sustenance. The situation is perilous: nearly all of human food production, seeds, food processing and sales, is run by a handful of for-profit firms which, like any capitalist enterprise, function to maximize profit and gain ever-greater market share and control. The question has become: What do we do about this disastrous alignment of pure profit in something so basic and fundamental to human survival?

It is time -- now, not next year -- to de-occupy Walmart. And Archer Daniels Midland. And Tyson Foods. And Monsanto. And Cargill. And Kraft Foods. And the other large corporations that decide what ends up on our plates. Take all our money out, public and personal, from our shopping dollars to school district lunch contracts to the corporate subsidies that uphold these firms' grip on our food supply, and invest it in a new system that's economically diverse and ecologically sustainable.

These corporations' stranglehold over food has wreaked havoc on the environment, our health, farmers, workers, and our very future. It is time for an end to Big Food, and a societal shift to something radically different. We all deserve a future where what we eat feeds community and land, instead of eroding soils, polluting water and air, and tossing away small farmers and immigrant workers as if they were balance sheet losers.

"Occupying the food system" has emerged as a rallying cry as activists and movements across the country, from Willie Nelson to more than 60 Occupy groups are turning up the heat on "big food" in nationwide actions today. Across the US, online and offline, thousands will be protesting icons of corporate control over food such as Monsanto and Cargill, and literally occupying vacant lots and tilling long-ignored soils in a mass-scale rejuvenation of community-led food production. (Find out more about the day of action here.) 

"We want to ignite a robust conversation about corporate control of our food supply," says Laurel Sutherlin, communications manager for Rainforest Action Network, a lead organizer in this growing coalition of food system occupiers. "Occupy has opened a national dialogue about inequality and the dangers of surrendering our basic life-support systems over to corporate control."

The idea that food ought to be spared from the all-consuming machinery of corporate control has gained wide currency, but what does it mean to "occupy" and revamp our food system? Apart from our desire for local heirloom produce and artisanal cheeses, or to save the family farm, what's wrong with a few corporations controlling our food supply?

"Occupying the food system is about taking it back from the corporations for the communities and for the people," says Erin Middleton of the California Food and Justice Coalition. "Access to good, healthy, affordable food is a basic human right that has been interfered with in the current capitalistic food system."

Beyond any aesthetic concerns about local versus multinational, or slow food versus fast food, the well-documented reality is that Big Food has attained phenomenal and destructive power over what we eat -- our diets, our health and the planet.

Consider a few quick facts:

• Four corporations, led by Walmart, control more than half of grocery sales. Walmart alone gets more than one quarter of every grocery dollar spent in the U.S.
• Three companies -- Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta -- own 47 percent of the world's seeds. And they own 65 percent of the global proprietary maize market.
• Nearly every major commodity -- wheat, corn, soy -- is controlled by just four corporations.
• Just four corporations control more than 80 percent of all our meat supply.
• According to USDA statistics, America loses more than 17,000 farmers a year -- one every half an hour.

This corporate occupation of our food isn't just unfair and wrong; it's impractical and destructive. It's ruining farmers, the land and our future food supply.

This Big Food system produces an astounding 1.3 billion tons of animal waste every year. It sprays half a million tons of toxic pesticides on our food each year. We are literally eating oil, as author Rick Manning has put it: annually 400 gallons of fossil fuel per person, 100 billion gallons a year as a nation. Rivers and streams across America are polluted by this industrial agriculture, which is now a major contributor to climate chaos -- and we're all paying for it.

But at least these corporations feed the world, right? Wrong. Worldwide, more than 850 million people go hungry every day. In the U.S., 48 million people, including 16 million children, do not have a reliable, secure food supply. Twenty percent of families with children are food-insecure.

Why all this hunger amid a global food bounty in which UN Food and Agriculture Organization data show we have far more than enough to feed everyone? Poverty. Unemployment. Underemployment. Here in the U.S., stagnant wages have combined with rising costs for everything to make simply feeding oneself a major economic stressor. We cannot separate "food issues" from economic justice issues. And the corporations that control our food supply are directly to blame.

But at least McDonald's, Walmart, Safeway, et al. offer us "cheap" food, right? Wrong again. We pay more than $100 billion a year in medical costs due to diet-related diseases from Big Food's relentless production and marketing of junk "food" and highly processed foods. We pay countless more dollars for injured and maimed workers who risk life and limb daily on the fast-food assembly line; for environmental cleanups from factory farms' rivers of toxic waste; and we pay roughly $15 billion a year, sometimes more, to subsidize corporate agribusiness commodities like corn and soy -- our tax dollars financing unhealthy sweeteners for soda, and fast food, all those burgers and fries that seem so cheap.

Then there is the brutal sweatshop-style labor we eat. All our food today relies on terribly exploited workers, both in the U.S. and abroad. Our daily meals rest on underpaid, impoverished immigrants, tens of thousands of whom are injured each year. We cannot continue to ignore the abuse of people, land and animals by the corporations that claim to feed the world.

We cannot solve this simply by going vegetarian or vegan, or buying organic and fair trade. The very market that has created this Big Food disaster -- the market that creates monopolies and monocultures -- cannot solve these deep systemic crises. To truly "occupy the food system" we will need nothing less than a fundamental restructuring of the economics and policies that currently enable our corporate food system.

There are great things happening on the good food margins today -- local foods movements, more urban agriculture and community gardens, school gardens, small sustainable food companies, victory gardens, even some fairly radical small-scale entrepreneurialism. But we need something much bigger. We need a radical overhaul of our current food and agriculture system -- and of how our tax dollars are spent on food.

Here are a few ideas. We must pressure Congress, through education, protest and targeted campaigns, to end agribusiness subsidies and begin spending our money on sustainable healthy foods and farming. Pass a 2012 Farm Bill that not only ends subsidies for corporate agribusiness, but that reinvests public money in an economically diversified, ecologically sustainable and more locally-oriented food system. It can be done. Shift the agribusiness subsidies to fund small and mid-sized organics; subsidize smaller-scale organics, and living-wage jobs in organic farming; create public investments for local and regional sustainable agriculture, both rural and urban; stop all food industry mergers today; and ban corporate representatives from all aspects of government food policymaking-no more corporate lobbyists and advisors deciding our nation's food, farming, and nutrition policies. No more revolving door between government and agribusiness. Period.

Beyond that, we need to break up the food oligopoly. Reform anti-trust law so these companies can't control entire food and seed markets. Cargill, for instance, the world's largest privately held corporation, not only controls a huge portion of the global grain business, but it also has a near monopoly over entire regions of American grain elevators, where farmers sell their crops. For the future of the environment and local economies, we must also redistribute land from corporations and agribusiness to small sustainable farms, and reverse the long trend of huge subsidized landholders buying out the family farm.

A few more ideas: Tax fast food corporations at the point of production (not sale, where it just hurts low-income consumers) and use the money to create sustainable urban farms. Create a federal New Deal for Food that invests in a truly sustainable healthy food system that makes good food accessible to all -- reinvesting the dollars we currently throw at agribusiness, into community-driven food production and marketing.

Ultimately, we need to understand that this isn't just a few bad corporations -- this is capitalism doing what it naturally does, exploiting people and land for profit. Even Adam Smith warned of the inherent tendency of capitalism toward ceaseless growth and monopoly power. Whether you're for revolution or reform, let's be honest about the system we're dealing with. Capitalism is unraveling, undermining even its own interests with its tireless demand for more growth, more profits, endless new markets with no protections for local industry, more corporate consolidation and monopoly power over both economics and politics.

Increasingly, activists are making these deeper connections between sustenance and a larger economy. "One of the most important aspects of Occupy the Food System, especially during this time of high unemployment and economic crisis, is rebuilding local economies and creating quality jobs," Tanya Kerssen of Food First wrote in an email to me. "In many communities where unemployment is high and access to healthy food is limited or nonexistent, the food system is an obvious place to start."

Kerssen argues that community-based food production can rebuild and sustain more than just food:, "By localizing the production and consumption of food, we can generate employment along the entire value chain (from production to distribution to retail). We can also rebuild our social fabric, address our health crisis, and significantly reduce our carbon footprint."

Michele Simon, a food policy expert and author of Appetite for Profit, sees the Occupy Big Food actions as "a great opportunity to bring together a rather fragmented good food movement. I'd like to see more connections being made to the industry's massive marketing machine, especially when it comes to children and the impact on public health, which too often gets left out of the food justice critique."

But, Simon adds, "I also think we need much more long-term action. Single-day actions here and there won't cut it when powerful food industry lobbyists are roaming the halls of Congress and state legislatures all over the nation every day of the year. We need to Occupy our political system!"

Indeed, we need to occupy politics, and the economy. Capitalism's endless need for new markets, new products and new lands and people to exploit is putting our entire planet and future in peril. We must re-socialize food and other life essentials. Food is already socialized, but it's corporate socialism: the huge subsidies we all pay, directly and indirectly, to uphold agribusiness.

Reclaiming our food system, says Aaron Lehmer of Bay Localize, "must mean reclaiming control of our land, our labor, and our economy from corporate monopolies. Anything less will leave our communities enslaved by special interests, whose primary goal is extracting more and more value from the common good."

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