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Pambazuka News : Issue 459
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Food sovereignty entails transforming the current food system to ensure that those who produce food have equitable access to, and control over land, water, seeds, fisheries and agricultural biodiversity.
Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new ‘resource curse’?
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Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
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In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
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Pambazuka - Profits before people: The great African liquidation sale
"it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them."
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it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them.
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These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and even more dependent on foreign donors and capital, and thus more vulnerable to still more of the big plans, so that now, even as Africans struggle to confront the perfect storm of the global food crisis, financial crisis and climate change – all of which are the offspring of the unfettered free-market financial system – the same big planners are at it again with more sweeping solutions (profitable ones) for the problems they themselves caused.
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Resist/Submit: Biofuels, corporate agriculture and the predicted crisis of land and food
"It is wrong to burn the food of the poor to drive the cars of the rich."
Press Release: The Great Land Grab
The Great Land Grab critically examines the role of the private sector in agricultural development and exposes implications of private sector control over food resources. The report concludes that those who promote the benefits of private sector growth in agriculture fail to recognize that acquisition of crucial food-producing lands by foreign private entities poses a threat to rural economies and livelihoods, land reform agendas, and other efforts aimed at making access to food more equitable.
The Cutting Edge: Peak Food: Blaming the Victims
Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
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Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:
"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year... -
Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
May 6 2008 - Agrofuels on Stolen Lands Continue to Threaten Colombian Rainforests and Communities
If agrofuels -- growing food for fuel -- continue to expand in Colombia, food prices are bound to rise and the nation's food security erode as is happening around the world. Decisive government action is needed to guarantee the lives and the safety of community members and to ensure reparation for environmental destruction and the human rights abuses. The exiled community leader Ligia Maria Cheverra has summed up the situation: "Our territory is being given to the palm oil producers. We need to stop every monoculture and the projects that are targeting our Colombia. This will affect the whole continent. Everything will be lost: the land, the water, the air, the animals, the people. What belongs to us is being destroyed. In Colombia those who speak out with a loud voice are being killed. Here only the ones who sell themselves are rewarded, and those who don’t are called guerrilleros."
Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis - Green Living, Environment - The Independent
Cargill says that its results "reflect the cumulative effect of having invested more than $18bn in fixed and working capital over the past seven years to expand our physical facilities, service capabilities, and knowledge around the world".
The revelations are bound to increase outrage over multinational companies following last week's disclosure that Shell and BP between them recorded profits of £14bn in the first three months of the year – or £3m an hour – on the back of rising oil prices. Shell promptly attracted even greater condemnation by announcing that it was pulling out of plans to build the world's biggest wind farm off the Kent coast.
World leaders are to meet next month at a special summit on the food crisis, and it will be high on the agenda of the G8 summit of the world's richest countries in Hokkaido, Japan, in July.
Pambazuka News
An absolute priority has to be given to domestic food production in order to decrease dependency on the international market. Peasants and small farmers should be encouraged through better prices for their farm products and stable markets to produce food for themselves and their communities. Landless families from rural and urban areas have to get access to land, seeds and water to produce their own food. This means increased investment in peasant and farmer-based food production for domestic markets.
Spore - N°134 - April 2008
A wide-ranging book looking at some of the forces and rules shaping today's food system, and who has control over it. In particular, it looks at rules on intellectual property (IP) - patents, plant breeders' rights, trademarks and copyright - and how they relate to biodiversity, a fundamental prerequisite to food security.
Z Magazine Online, Challenging Monsanto’s Monopoly
Monsanto, the biotech giant, has elicited public protest across the world. In early May, however, a drawn-out battle against Monsanto’s entrenched corporate monopoly came to a head—not in the streets or the fields—but in an arcane technical hearing
Chiquita pleads guilty in terror probe - Yahoo! News
Banana company Chiquita Brands International admitted in federal court Monday that for years it paid Colombian terrorists to protect its most profitable banana-growing operation. ADVERTISEMENT The company pleaded guilty to one count of doing business with
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