Preserving and Advancing Food Sovereignty and Food Security

We affirm that the right to food is a basic human right.The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) subordinates this right to corporate profitability.The food system promoted by the WTO is built on industrialized and capital-intensive, export-driven agriculture that is furthering corporate concentration along the food chain and undermining the livelihoods, rights, health and living and working conditions of agricultural and food workers and thus further undermining food security.

Moreover, it fails torecognize that farming is a way of life and an important basis of community and culture. Thus, its policies and those of other trade agreements foster further concentration and increase of power of transnational corporations and cause the expulsion of millions of peasants and family farmers from the land and production, in Northern and Southern countries. Since the introduction of “structural adjustment programs” and the establishment of theWTO, many peasants, family farmers, and agricultural workers have been displaced from the land and experienced hunger, with many driven into suicide, owing to import liberalization via tariff reductions, the abolition of quantitative restrictions and inequitable national agricultural policies.At the same timemany subsidies going to agribusiness, including export-oriented industrial farming, have been increased rather than reduced.

While these rules allow increasingly powerful agribusiness trading companies to push down the commodity prices paid to farmers worldwide, the concentration of food distribution and processing under the WTO’s agriculture and service sector rules has led to increased food prices for consumers. Therefore:

• To avoid further escalation in hunger, displacement and death, action must be taken immediately to curtail agricultural, trade and investment policies that encourage chronic overproduction and to ban the dumping of agricultural commodities onto world markets below the cost of production by global food corporations and others involved in global agricultural trade. Direct and indirect export subsidies that lead to dumping must be banned. Countries should retain and reassert their sovereign rights to protect their agricultural markets and sectors from dumping in order to implement measures that can effectively and actively support peasant- and family farmer-based sustainable production.
• Measures must be taken to promote and protect peoples´ food sovereignty (the right of peoples and communities to define their own food and agricultural policies, as well as the right to produce their basic foods in a manner that respects cultural and productive diversity and supports peasant- and family farmer-based sustainable production) and food safety and security (both for consumers and producers).
• Measures that only concern production for domestic consumption and do not contribute to increased exports to international markets should be exempted from any international trade agreement. The trading system must not undermine the livelihood of peasants, family farmers, agricultural workers, artisan fishers, and indigenous peoples.
• We believe that the development of food sovereignty, food security and peasant- and family farmer-based sustainable agriculture requires governments to acknowledge the flaws in the “free market” principles that underpin perceived comparative advantage, export-led agricultural development and “structural adjustment” policies; and replace those policies with ones that prioritize and protect local, subsistence and sustainable production, including use of import controls and regulation that ensure more equitable sustainable production methods.
• Various agreements will be required to ensure these objectives. These could include a convention on food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, and a declaration on the rights of peasants and family farmers. Ultimately, the WTO and other "free trade” agreements, with their current focus on trade liberalization at all costs, are not appropriate places for such rules; therefore, alternative spaces to discuss these rules have to be strengthened.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14