5.4 Activity: How is La Vía Campesina championing food sovereignty?

The objective of La via Camporenia is to help developing countries benefit fully from the global trading system and discourage them from partaking in the WTO agreement. His thinks that the WTO is bad for agriculture and doing more harm than good to the peasant farmer because of the following reasons

 WTO provides huge subsidies to agri business to produce cheap food and dumping global market

1 WTO increases inequality and rural debts by destroying local peasant market

2 Few cooperation now control the global food system- consolidation and control is the essence

3 Free trade agreement criminalizes a 10 000 years old food systems by putting paint on seeds and given cooperation the upper hand

4 industrial Agriculture is heating up the planent  

WTO and free trade agreement destructive Agriculture and Food sovereignty.  Where the author described food sovereignty as the ability of the country or community to produce its own food for the local people.

The peasants are disadvantageous and the free trade put pressure on their lands, rivers, oceans, biodiversity by the profit making world- cooperatives

The September 2013 rebellion of the Korea Farmer Lee to expose the harmful consequence of the establishment of WTO on peasant farmers and rural communities by increasing joblessness, increase in hunger, the overwhelming levels of food disparity existing between countries and within countries.

The WTO is seeming to be operating from top to bottom governance and do not considers the peasants and local farmers’ interest.

The La Via Campanian started fighting and advocating that agriculture should not be part of the WTO ‘Free Trade Negotiation” because the free trade arrangement has disastrous effect to the peasant farmers and rural communities.

What is interesting in his quest to discourage the negativity of the WTO, was his smartness to understand the pretense of the western cooperatives to withdrew from WTO but they were busy establishing mutual free trade agreement that they would use to continue as an alternative to WTO, it was intended to have different names in different location. Amazing!!

The movement- La Via Campesina Mobilized for peasant –led alternative, calling on all collaborators to advocate for policies that promotes peasant farmer using agro ecological method to produce food for the local markets and reject Free trade agreement that makes profit out of them.

The movement also aimed to support the Global Campaign for a UN Binding Treaty for Transnational Corporations on Human Rights that aims to end the impunity of transnational corporations and work to strike out the controversial provisions of ISDS from all free trade agreements.

They tried to put pressure on 182 peasant organizations of La Via Campesina in 81 countries, and all their allied social movements, academic institutions, political schools of training and NGOs to organise direct actions, public events, study sessions and demonstrations to expose the dangers of these free trade agreements in regions and countries and also to present an alternative that are rooted in local cultures, context and biodiversity.