La Via Campesina organized an Agrarian Reforms conference which was held in Marabà, Para, Brazil last week.
The final declaration is shared with is as follows;
The final declaration is shared with is as follows;
(Marabá,
April 17 2016) We are more than 130 representatives of La Via Campesina
member organizations and allies from four continents, 10 regions and 28
countries of the world. We are here in Marabá, Pará, Brazil, to
analyze, reflect and continue our collective processes to develop our
ideas, proposals, and alternative projects for confronting the offensive
of global capital against the peoples and natural goods of the
countryside, coasts and seas. More than anything, we come together to
struggle for our territories, and for a different kind of society.
We
are organizations of peasants, family farmers, indigenous peoples,
landless, farm workers, herders, fisherfolk, collectors, forest
dwellers, rural women and youth, as well as allied organizations from
across the world. We are here to remember the massacre of rural workers
in El Dorado dos Carajás, Pará, which took place exactly 20 years ago
and led to the creation of the International Day of Peasant Struggle,
celebrated every year on April 17th.
We are also here to demand that the governments of the world follow
through on their commitments to agrarian reform, made 10 years ago at
the FAO's International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural
Development (ICARRD) in Porto Alegre, Brazil
The current situation: The offensive of Capital against our territories throughout the world and the attacks on democracy
We
have listened to our brothers and sisters from our organizations in the
Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and we can see that
everywhere we are facing the same enemy and the same problems. There
are ever more cases of land-, forest- and water-grabbing, attacks
against democracy and popular will, political prisoners, etc. in Latin
America, Asia Africa, Europe and North America. In the current
historical period, we are witnessing the emergence of an alliance
between financial capital, transnational corporations, imperialism,
broad sectors within national states (almost without regard to their
purported ideology), particularly but not only judicial and public
security institutions, the private sectors in industrial agriculture,
fishing and food (including agribusiness and aquaculture), mining,
construction, forestry and other extractive sectors, and the mainstream
media. The members of this new alliance are promoting an avalanche of
privatizations, grabbing and taking over the commons and public goods,
such as land, water resources, forests, seeds, cattle raising,
fisheries, glaciers and entire territories. In order to achieve their
goals, they are using financialization to convert everything into
commodities, free trade and investment agreements, the corruption of our
politicians and leaders, control of the mass media and financial
system, and mergers and acquisitions of companies.
Lately
we have noted, with increasing alarm, how this alliance—and Capital in
general—no longer tolerates the implementation by democratically elected
governments of public policies that show the slightest independence, no
matter how weak. This alliance has become the main force behind a wave
of coup d'état attempts, many of which are taking place right now. These
coups range from "soft," "technical," "parliamentary," and "judicial"
coups, to the most "hard-core," military and violent coups, all of which
disregard the law, constitutions and popular will. This is the case in
Brazil, where we find ourselves together now. We add our voices to the
voices of the Brazilian people, who struggle to defend democracy against
an illegitimate coup attempt, and try to push forward the political
reforms needed so that democracy can get out of the dead-end it is in
toda
Why we struggle against agribusiness
The
offensive of Capital is threatening rural life and our entire society,
including our health, Mother Earth, the climate, biodiversity, and our
peoples and cultures. Mass migration, the destruction of the social
fabric of our communities, urban sprawl, insecurity, agrochemicals,
GMOs, junk food, the homogenization of diets, global warming, the
destruction of mangrove forests, the acidification of the sea, the
depletion of fish stocks, and the loss of anything that resembles
democracy, are all symptoms of what is taking place.
The
emergence of this new alliance between financial capital, agribusiness,
the State and mass media—and its capacity to dispute territories,
public opinion and the State, even where the government is
"progressive"—has forced us once again carry out a process of reflection
and reformulation of our concepts and proposals, as well as our
strategies, forms and practices of struggle.
Here
in Brazil, we have seen how financial capital has transformed the old
enemy of peasants and landless workers—the unproductive large
landholdings or latifúndios—into capitalized agribusinesses, mines,
industrial fishing and aquaculture, and energy projects. In reality, all
these so-called "productive" sectors are mostly "producing" extreme
poverty and environmental devastation. In this transformation,
capitalism no longer requires a "classical agrarian reform" to raise
productivity in rural areas. In the past, the landless peasantry formed
alliances in favour of this kind of agrarian reform, with factions
inside the parts of the State that represented the interests of
productive capital. But this change takes any alliance with a fraction
of capital off the table, leaving future agrarian reform squarely in the
domain of class struggle. It also reduces the usefulness of the old
argument for agrarian reform, that so much land in the hands of people
-who do not even use most of it- is an injustice in the face of so many
more people with no land at all. But at the same time it creates the
basis for a new call to all of society and to all working classes, both
rural and urban, to question the very basis of the project of Capital
for the countryside.
Any
resistance by rural peoples is demonized by the mainstream media, as
organizations, their leaders and supporters face repression,
criminalization, persecution, assassinations, enforced disappearances,
illegitimate jailing, administrative detentions, sexual harassment and
rape. Laws are being changed to criminalize peasant and working class
struggles even more, as well as granting total impunity to perpetrators
of crimes against peasants, workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and
all rights defenders.
Facing
this terrible panorama, rural peoples, and our organizations,
movements, alliances and convergences, currently represent the best hope
for humanity and Mother Earth. We are on the front lines of the
territorial and political fight against this dark alliance. Our
proposals for food sovereignty, popular agrarian reform, the building of
agroecological food production territories, and peasant agriculture to
cool the planet, represent real alternatives and solutions to the
problems created by the capitalist system and by this barbaric alliance
in particular.
What we defend and call for: Popular Agrarian Reform
In
La Via Campesina and the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform we have
more than 20 years of history in the struggle for land and the defense
of land and territory. In 2012, in Bukit Tinggi, Indonesia, we took
stock of this history, how it has evolved in the context of a changing
world and our own accumulation of experiences and dialogues, and
identified key elements of a common strategy for agrarian reform. But in
2012 we were only beginning to see the scope of the ascendance of
financial capital and its growing dominance over other kinds of capital.
This changes the nature of the game, and how we approach society on the
question of rural territories.
Now
we ask, which is better? Do we want a countryside without peasants,
trees or biodiversity? Do we want a countryside full of monocultures and
feedlots, agrochemicals and GMOs, producing exports and junk food,
causing climate change and undermining the adaptive capacity of
communities? Do we want pollution, illness, and massive migration to
cities? Or do we want a countryside made up of the food producing
territories of peasants, indigenous peoples, family farmers, artisanal
fisherfolk, and other rural peoples, based on human dignity and diverse
knowledges and cosmovisions, with trees, biodiversity, and the
agroecological production of healthy food, which cool the planet,
produce food sovereignty and take care of Mother Earth?
In
this sense, we consider the proposal of our Brazilian comrades for a
Popular Agrarian Reform, an agrarian reform not only for landless
peasants, but for all of the working classes and for all of society.
This agroecological and territorial approach to agrarian reform can only
be won through class struggle and direct confrontation of the project
of Capital, including its profits, media outlets and its national and
international agents. This is an agrarian reform to maximize the
potential of peasant agriculture, economy and territory.
Throughout
the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, our
organizations, movements and convergences are putting forth similar
proposals and territorial approaches in their dispute with the global
project of Capital. These include the convergence among our diverse
popular and traditional knowledges and ways of knowing the world in
agroecology, artisanal fishing, traditional herding, and in our diverse
strategies and ways of life. Our proposals, though similar, differ based
on the nature of our different realities. In places where land is
concentrated in few hands, we struggle for its redistribution. In some
countries, we speak of an "agrarian revolution." In places where our
peoples still hold onto their lands and territories, we struggle to
defend those territories, and prevent land and water grabbing.
Meanwhile, in places where land was nationalized and is now being
conceded to foreign entities by governments, we struggle for the return
of ancestral land rights to our communities. The fisherfolk among us
speak of the struggle for the recovery and defense of artisanal fishing
territories. In Europe we have once again taken up the strategy of land
occupations, and organized struggles against land use changes, making
clear to all that the problems of land grabbing and concentration are
also a growing problem in Northern countries. In Palestine we struggle
against a brutal occupation and we call to boycott Israeli products. And
everywhere, there are burning struggles by young people to access land
and other resources.
We
have achieved great victories, such as the massive agrarian reform
carried out after peoples' land occupations and recuperations in
Zimbabwe, the "Education for and by the Countryside" policy in Brazil,
the cancellations of mining concessions and plantations in many parts of
Africa and Asia, and the permanence of Cuba's agrarian reform and its
successful "peasant-to-peasant" agroecology movement. We also have
partial but promising victories, such as the possibility of a large
scale agrarian reform in Indonesia, for which we must mobilize in order
to make our governments follow through on their promises.
We
have organized our struggles by providing political and agroecological
training for both leaders and grassroots members of our organizations.
We have built training centers and peasant agroecology schools in all
continents, and provided educational alternatives for our children. We
have learned from the indigenous peoples of our movements that "the life
of people and nature are one." We have old and new tactics, such as
occupation and recovery of land and territory, solidarity, caravans—such
as in East Africa and in Bangladesh—as well as alternative media
outlets, art and culture. We continue to develop our popular peasant
feminist, humanist, environmentalist and socialist values, youth
mobilization and creativity, new rural-urban alliances, the voluntary
guidelines of the FAO, the Peasant Rights Charter, and other efforts. We
need to continue to adjust and innovate new tactics, especially since
the enemy quickly evolves new ways of taking our territories. We need
new approaches and strategies, such as the construction of autonomous
spaces and self-provisioning, as well as the scaling-up of peoples'
agroecology.
Our challenges
- We
will transform the struggle for land into the struggle for territory,
along with developing a new productive model for food sovereignty, based
on a more "independent" agroecology by using our own local resources
and inputs and recovering our ancestral knowledges.
-
We will organize the struggle for public policies supporting peasant
and small farmer production as well as health, education, culture and
sports in our communities.
-
We will carry out our political and ideological training on a mass
scale, fortify our work with our membership and our work with the
masses, in order to improve the internal structure and operation of our
organizations, and progressively integrate the leadership and
participation of woman and youth.
-
We will confront the ways by which the mass media demonize our
movements and promote the culture of consumption and the hollowing out
of democracy. We will work hard to build our own media, which foster
dialogues with our membership as well as with the working class and the
entire society.
-
We will oppose more effectively the criminalization and repression of
our movements as well as militarization, and organize an international
struggle in support of our political prisoners. We will organize an
ongoing solidarity campaign that will be based on the principle of
sharing what we have rather than on sharing only what we don't need.
-
We will continue to carry out our permanent task of building class
alliances, without dependencies, between the country and the city,
between food producers and consumers, and with progressive researchers,
academics and support organisations that share our vision.
- We will denounce and oppose so-called "anti-terrorist" laws and their use against our legitimate struggles.
-
We will increase our solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian
and Kurdish peoples as well as other peoples that are subjected to
military aggression. We condemn military occupations and the
militarisation of lands and territories.
-
We will develop an analysis of the role played by drug trafficking in
the destabilization of our territories with the complicity of capital
and governments, as well as a strategy to fight this problem more
effectively.
-
We will take on corporate concentration in different sectors of the
economy, especially agro-industrial farming, fishing and food, media and
financial systems, as well as the frontal attacks against democracy. We
shall create forms of struggle that generate economic losses for
capital, transnational corporations, banks and other agents of capital.
-
We will build convergences and greater unity based on common objectives
and our diversity (women and men, peasants, workers, fisherfolk,
pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban populations, consumers, etc.).
-
We will oppose the ascendance of conservative and right-wing religious
fundamentalism, racism and cultural discrimination. We will fight the
new wave of neoliberal privatization laws and treaties.
-
We will rethink the relation between our popular movements, the State,
political parties and electoral processes, taking into account the
specific history and context of each country, and fight the generalized
undermining of international and national human rights mechanisms.
-
We will fight against US imperialism, and while we recognize the
importance of multi-polarity in the world, we sound the alert about the
emergence of new economic, political and military imperialisms.
- Through
our organizations, we will strive to build convergence movements around
alternative popular projects developed through collective
constructions; we will also work to improve the organization of
production, such as cooperatives, promote small- and medium-sized
agro-industries in order to add value to our products, and we will work
to achieve more and improved short and medium marketing circuits, and
promote cooperation.
-
We will struggle to address the issue of credit: how to obtain more
credit for the peasantry and at the same time produce without credit and
with less debt.
-
We will oppose the institutional tendency (for example by the World
Bank, FAO, and some academia and NGOs) to try to dilute the content of
concepts such as "agrarian reform" and "agroecology", by launching
"light" versions of these concepts, as in "access to land", "corporate
social responsibility" and "industrial organic" food production in
monocultures, with the objective of green-washing agribusiness.
-
We will struggle to achieve international mechanisms to defend and
support our visions and strategies that are not "voluntary" but rather
compulsory and actionable.
- We will stop the approval and proliferation of dangerous new technologies, such as "terminator" seeds and synthetic biology.
-
We will strengthen the participation of women and youth in our social
movements. We will develop mechanisms to increase the number of youth
who remain in the countryside. We will struggle against the dominant
model of patriarchy in the capitalist system, and demand the full rights
of peasant and indigenous women to land, water and territory.
- We will carry out ever more unified international struggles to oppose our common enemies.
Defending the land and honouring life
On this 17th of
April, International Day of Peasant Struggles, 20 years after the El
Dorado dos Carajás massacre in the State of Pará, Brazil, we are meeting
once again, inspired by the thousands of men and women who defend the
right to life itself, who fight for a more just society through a
permanent struggle for peoples' rights to land and territory, for the
promotion of food sovereignty and agroecological production, to end
hunger and poverty.
Globalize the struggle! Globalize hope!
Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform of La Vía Campesina
Delegates from 4 continents and 10 regions, united to Defend Land and Honour Life.
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