. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT .

An article by La Via Campesina

On the International Day of Peasant Struggles and after a march through Buenos Aires streets from the US Embassy, an imperialistic symbol, to the Argentinean Rural Association, a symbol of agribusiness in the country, the organizers shared the final statement of the 6th Congress of the Latin American Coordination of Countryside Organizations (CLOC-Via Campesina) which you can read below.

The document is a result of eight days of debates and was read by representatives of the Youth Assembly of CLOC.

“Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire”. (Eduardo Galeano)

In Argentina, the homeland of Che Guevara, Evita, Mercedes Sosa, 200 years after the Congress of Free Peoples called by Artigas which prompted the first Agrarian Reform in Latin America, 10 years after the defeat of the FTAA in Mar del Plata, we are holding the 6th Latin American Congress of Countryside Organizations.

We are the CLOC-VC, an organized expression of peasant men and women, native peoples, afro-descendants and rural workers.

CLOC is the flame, the light and the actions of Via Campesina in Latin America. We emerged from the heart itself of the 500-year process of indigenous, peasant, black and popular resistance, which gathered the historical peasant movement and the new movements emerging as a response to the dismantling processes imposed by neoliberal policies.

We gather strength, experience and struggles and we build proposals according to the new political moments, highlighting that the agrarian issues are relevant for the society as a whole, and as such, we need to face it with an alternative and popular power strategy.

Our Congress has taken place in a time where contradictions and the class struggle are reflected in the attacks of capital that promotes new wars, oppression and conspiracy against the peoples, for instance the direct attack against Venezuela by declaring it a risk for US security, but also with the different destabilizing coup strategies implemented by an alliance of large communication, business and financial groups that aim to undermine the sovereignty of our peoples and prevent progressive governments of the region from taking action.

Recognizing the advance of regional and continental processes of integration such as UNASUR, ALBA, MERCOSUR and CELAC, the 6th Congress welcomes the solidarity and unity of Latin American and Caribbean countries and organizations that supported Cuba’s position and denunciation of the US blockade and the campaigns against their people, an attitude that encourages us to continue building the Motherland of Bolivar, San Martin, Martí, Sandino and Chavez.

We reject patriarchy, racism, sexism and homophobia. We struggle for democratic and participatory societies, free from exploitation, discrimination, oppression, and exclusion of women and young people. We condemn all forms of domestic, social, work and institutional violence towards women.

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What is the relation between movements for food sovereignty and the global movement for a culture of peace?

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We raise the flags of our women colleagues: peasant and popular feminism is part of our strategic horizon for a socialist transformation.

The work to strengthen our organizations, especially at grassroots level, will continue being at the center of our priorities. We are committed to strengthen the participation and integration of young people in all organizational processes.

We reclaim Integral and Popular Agrarian Reform, peasant and indigenous agroecological farming as essential elements of our path towards food sovereignty and cooling down the planet, ensuring access to land and water for women, young people, landless workers and ensuring the recovery of territories by native and afrodescendant peoples. We also struggle for the recognition of the social function of land and water, and the prohibition of all forms of speculation and land grabbing affecting them.

We are committed to continue defending and keeping alive our peasant and indigenous seeds, to recover them in the hands of communities so as to reproduce and multiply them based on our peasant systems. We will not hesitate in the struggle against all forms of privatization and appropriation of seeds and life forms.

We need to defeat the agricultural model imposed by agribusiness corporations that is supported by international financial capitals and is based on GM monocultures, the massive use of agrotoxics and the displacement of peasants from the countryside. In addition, this model is responsible for the food, climate, energy and urbanization crises.

We call people to continue struggling for a world free from GMOs and agrotoxics that pollute, make ill and kill our peoples and Mother Earth. We will resist together with the people and communities against extractivism, megamining and all megaprojects threatening our territories.

We celebrate la Via Campesina´s achievement of putting the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants in the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Council and demand governments to ratify our positions. We call our organizations to turn the declaration into an instrument for the struggle of rural peoples and the society as a whole.

The future becomes a fertile place when hundreds of children gathered at the 1st Children’s Congress delivered their message in favor of peace and protection of our Mother Earth.

Our children are the future, and the present shines with the strength of young people. Our main tools are capacity building, education, communication and mass mobilization, unity and alliances among peasants, native peoples, afrodescendants, rural and urban workers, students and popular sectors organized to conform a force that is capable of achieving the changes we are fighting for. We are living in unprecedented and complex times, determined by a new correlation of forces among capital, the government and popular forces. The imperialistic capital is now under financial and transnational control, so we need to identify ourselves with SOCIALISM as the only system capable of reaching the sovereignty or our countries, highlighting the values of solidarity, internationalism and cooperation among our peoples.

Against capitalism and in favor of the sovereignty of our peoples: the Americas united continue struggling!

. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT .

Hernán Viudes, America Latina en Movimento (translated and abridged)

20/04/2015: With the denunciation of the offense of “capital and imperialism in its policy of plundering the assets of our countries, hoarding and extractivism” expelling the peasants and indigenous people from their land, imposing monoculture, mining and imposing genetically modified products, the Sixth Congress of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations-Via Campesina (CLOC-VC) closed in Buenos Aires.

The organizations agreed to defend “Food Sovereignty supported by the realization of a Comprehensive and Popular Agrarian Reform (which) gives us back the joy of taking care of Mother Earth and producing the food that our people and humanity needs to ensure its development.”

After a week of debates in workshops and assemblies, more than a thousand delegates from across Latin America and the Caribbean, together with delegates from Africa, Asia and Europe, conducted a historical characterization of this “unprecedented and complex moment, determined by a new correlation of forces between capital and governments and popular forces. Imperialist capital is now under the financial control of transnational corporations, and therefore socialism is the only system able to achieve the sovereignty of our nations and promote the values ​​of solidarity, internationalism and cooperation between our peoples. ”

They rejected “the industrial food system and national and transnational agribusiness corporations, responsible for climate change and biodiversity loss that affects us all”, and they highlighted “peasant and indigenous agriculture as the only way to feed the world while maintaining and increasing biodiversity and halting global warming. ” That is why we promote “the good life” and a close link with “Mother Earth”, and we fight for an agroecological production system, “not only for technical and scientific issues, but as a political tool for fighting capital.” Since agroecology does not develop in isolation, “we have to build regional strategies to fight and advance public policies that promote” this model.

Discussion, peasant political education and training of leaders is part of the struggle, while identification of problems and public manifestations is the other, they said. They decided to continue “developing the global campaign for the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform and People for the defense of land and territory”; developing actions of solidarity against criminal massacres like that of the 43 students of the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa in Mexico, and repression.

They also decided to plan an international meeting for Agrarian Reformin in Brazil next year 20 years after the slaughter of Eldorado dos Carajas. Also, they found it necessary to become involved in “the international arena with CELAC, UNASUR and Pope Francis, for their support and support for the statement of peasant rights.”

Each April 17, thousands of men and women of the international peasant movement mobilize worldwide to show their disagreement with transnational corporations and free trade agreements that affect the rural and smallholder agriculture as well as national food sovereignty. Since 1996, it is the International Day of global action by Peasant Struggle.

The free trade agreements encourage transnational corporations and industrialized capitalist mode of production which depends heavily on agrochemicals, while increasing the eviction, expulsion and disappearance of peasants. The most important agreements in free trade history are now being negotiated between the European Union, the United States and Canada which, if they materialize, will liberalize trade and markets for transnational corporations.

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What is the relation between movements for food sovereignty and the global movement for a culture of peace?

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Therefore, on Friday April 17 thousands of Latin American peasants took to the streets marching past the US Embassy in Buenos Aires with their claims against extraction and their proposals for agrarian reform, alliances around topics of socialism and peasant feminism, and a declaration of rights of farmers and others who live in the country.

“We are fighting for a deep structural change in our society, against all forms of exploitation, discrimination and exclusion, and for peasant and indigenous agriculture to ensure good living of the people of the country, to continue to feed humanity and caring for Mother Earth.” That is the agreement reached by the 400 delegates from organizations of peasant men and women, native peoples, afro-descendants and rural workers from 18 countries, who met in the V Assembly of Women of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations-Via Campesina (CLOC-VC ) held this week in Buenos Aires.

They convened under the slogans “no socialism without feminism,” “rural women who sow the fields with struggles and hopes” and they agreed to struggle for “feminism and food sovereignty.” As part of the Sixth Congress of the CLOC-VC held in the complex of the Argentine Ministry of Social Development in Ezeiza, the women characterized the present system as “capitalist-patriarchal oppression, which maintains and reinforces power relations and exploitation and which puts the interests of the market and the accumulation over the rights and welfare of people, nature and Mother Earth. ”

The system often forgets that “it was our knowledge that started agriculture, that throughout history has fed humanity. It is we who create and transmit the knowledge of traditional medicine, and now it is we who produce most of the food. ”

Opposing the processes of usurpation of land and water that multinational companies carry out in Latin America and the Caribbean, the women demanded recognition of their contribution to production, and they reaffirmed “the importance of peasant and indigenous agriculture for the welfare of all mankind, and economic and environmental sustainability on the planet. Without family farming there is no food, and the people cannot survive.”

Deolinda Reed, leader of the Argentine National Peasant Indigenous Movement (MNCI), made it clear that the current agribusiness model imposed by transnational corporations is responsible for the food and environmental crisis in Latin America. “Their logic is to monopolize as much food as possible, with the exploitation of large tracts of land and the use of chemicals, to meet foreign consumption, based on market speculation. We will propose an alternative model of peasant family farming, which produces in an organic, communal way and which gives priority to local consumption, “he said. . . .

“The three key points discussed at the Fourth Assembly of Youth of CLOC Via Campesina were unity around a common enemy – imperialism, violence of capital on youth with the growth of militarism and the extermination of the youth; the exploitation of capital which has created 300 million poor and illiterate in the region; and the need for an alliance of town and country “to deal with these problems” . . .

João Pedro Stedile, from the national coordination of the Movement of Brazilian Landless Workers (MST) and a Via Campesina member, assessed the stakes in the dispute between two opposing agricultural models: agribusiness, which is characterized by private ownership of natural resources with no space for farmers; and agroecological production by peasants who reconcile healthy food production in harmony with the environment.

“Ideas alone do not change the world, to change the world we need mass struggles. We need to take a leap in the mass struggle and organize international struggle against a common enemy that includes Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta, “he said.

. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT .

An article by Raffaele Morgantini , Tarik Bouafia, Investig’Action

After the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s that saw Latin America falling into extreme poverty, mass unemployment and the explosion of public debt, the continent has since raised its head and has become an ambitious laboratory experiment for new social and economic policies. Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina … austerity cures imposed on some countries in the region by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been abandoned in favor of stimulus policies where the state has taken up a key role in managing the economy.

While some Latin American countries regain their dignity and sovereignty, in Europe, it is the opposite: austerity has wreaked havoc. Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece … no country is spared. While the GDP is collapsing, poverty, unemployment, and exploding debt continue to increase. The anti-social austerity policies have provoked popular uprisings that have shaken the powers that be. The parties of the radical left, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain (who say they want to follow the directions taken by Ecuador or Argentina about the burden of debt), are leading in the polls and producing alarm in Brussels and the financial markets. In addition, there are countless associations, unions, political parties and alternative media in Europe who are applauding the Latin American success. There is a new euphoria in the European radical left, which contrasts with the vision of reactionaries, grotesque, crude and misleading, wanting to ensure that things do not change.

In the past, many Latin Americans looked admiringly at Europe. And even today, Europe is fascinating. This regard towards the old continent comes from many factors: cultural, historical, economic. Some want to know their “motherland” such as Spain and Portugal. Others, such as Argentina, want to go to Italy, the land of their ancestors. Finally, some associate Europe with its history, its great culture and architecture.

But lately, things have started to reverse with regard to Europe’s economic attractiveness. While there are still some Latin Americans trying to reach Europe to better their social and economic conditions, the situation has changed in recent years. The political changes that occurred in many countries of the Bolivarian continent slowed the mass exodus that characterized the years 1980-1990 and early 2000. The innovative economic and social policies driven by some countries of the region in order to bring their people a more dignified life have prompted many people to stay in their country rather than emigrate. Especially now that the story has turned around and today it is Europe that suffers austerity policies. The high levels of unemployment experienced by Spain and Portugal have made ​​those countries less attractive. The Europe that once dominated and had been so contemptuous of its former colonies is now sick and now longer inspires. The situation is so dramatic that many Latin American citizens, including Argentinians, who emigrated in the early 2000s to escape the terrible economic situation have decided to return home.

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Movements against governmental fiscal austerity, are they part of the global movement for a culture of peace?

Readers’ comments are invited on this question.