In Rome a delegation of 25 members of La Via Campesina representing all continents have arrived some days before the FAO Special Forum that was held on October 30 and 31, 2006. Some of them joined the International Planning Committee of Food Sovereignty (IPC), while others participated in preparatory meetings on the issues of biodiversity and agrarian reform.
During the first day of the Special Forum on 30 October, La Via Campesina together with other organisations walked out of the Forum to protest against the fact that several representatives of La Via Campesina and other organisations were not given the floor to give their opinion although a dialogue between civil society’s organisations and governements was the main goal of the Forum. After some negotiation with the president of the Forum this was corrected and the representatives of La Via Campesina and other organisations were allocated some speaking time as it had been agreed with the FAO ahead.

Henry Saragih as the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina said that “it was a pity that not so many head of state, nor agricultural ministers from each government could attend this important FAO meeting, while huge numbers of people sill suffer from hunger around the world”. Farmers and people’s organization however did give due attention to the meeting but did not at all receive the adequate speaking time during the first day of the forum to put forward their views.

The morning of 31 October, La Via Campesina organized another action for official delegates when they entered the conference hall. Farmers of La Via Campesina made a people corridor to make the delegates pass into the building. They had to step over a paper on which was written “IMF, World Bank and WTO”. After this they had to go through a “door” with the text “It is time for Food Sovereignty” welcoming them to the FAO. La Via Campesina wanted to tell the delegates that hunger in the world occurs because of the policies imposed by the programmes and consensus under the IMF, the World Bank and the IMF. La Via Campesina wants FAO to adopt Food Sovereignty as their key policy to end hunger in the world.

The message of La Via Campesina was made even clearer for the delegates of FAO on that day, when Henry Saragih and Rafael Alegria addressed two official sessions in the afternoon as panelists. Henry Saragih told the Forum that four years ago he stood in the same place, tearing the FAO document on food security and then eating it. This was a protest to show that farmers, who are the first victims of hunger in the world, will remain hungry because only declarations on paper about food security were available to address the problem. He stated: “It is time for FAO to change its approach and adopt food sovereignty”.

Rafael Alegria of La Via Campesina from Latin America made concrete proposals to the Forum when he addressed the issue of agrarian reform. He said that the FAO should follow up the decisions made during the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), held this year in March in Porto Alegre, giving importance to agrarian reform and also acknowledging food sovereignty in its official document. Rafael emphasized that to end hunger will need the concrete implementation of policies based on Food Sovereignty among others implementing a genuine, distributive agrarian reform.

La Via Campesina opens the doors for FAO to food sovereignty

Tuesday, 31 October 2006

Press Release

Rome, 31-10-2006

Time for food sovereignty

La Via Campesina opens the doors for FAO to food sovereignty

At the beginning of the second day of the FAO Special Forum in Rome La Via Campesina together with representatives of other social movements have received FAO functionaries and governmental delegates at the main entrance inviting them to step through the door of food sovereignty.)° This was the start for the second day of the dialogue between organisations of civil society and the governmental members of FAO.

In several speeches to the plenary of the Forum)°° representatives of La Via Campesina raised critical situation in which the agricultural sector finds itself and critized the approach of FAO.

Henry Saragih, international co-ordinator of LVC said in the panel on trade: “the very principles of Food Security that were chosen by the FAO to eliminate hunger are based on the mistaken principles of trade as the solution to all problems, and on the development of expensive and dangerous technology like GMO´s as the way to supposedly boost production.”

FAO should put the Food Sovereignty at the hart of its strategies and actions. La Via Campesina expects a pro-active role of FAO together with IFAD to bring along real changes to combat hunger and poverty in the rural areas. Initiatives to protect peasant based production against dumping and low price imports are urgently needed.

It also includes the active promotion and support of genuine, distributive agrarian reform in those countries where this is desperately needed to give a perspective to people in the rural areas that at the moment live under miserable conditions and are forced to migrate to slums of the mega cities in the south or to the industrialized countries to work often under slavery like conditions.

La Via Campesina also has insisted that the Committee on Food Security of FAO should decide the follow up of the ICARRD Conference that was held in March of this year. It should demand FAO to define concrete actions and mechanisms to support the implementation of genuine agrarian reform as well as initiatives to support and strengthen peasant based production for domestic consumption.

Rafael Alegria made in the panel on Agrarian Reform a call to the FAO Committee on Food Security “to define together with the CSO organisations in the recently established joint working committee the concrete follow up and implementation mechanisms of the ICARRD-Conference and to allocate the necessary resources to support governments that put forward genuine agrarian reform programs.

In a meeting between La Via Campesina, representatives of other social movements and Mr J. Diouf Secretary General of FAO it was stressed that we expect concrete steps from FAO regarding the implementation of the ICARRD Conference.