This is a CTP of initiative: La Via Campesina/ANAMURI (Chile)
In 2001, women from the Latin American Coordinator of rural organizations (CLOC, in it spanish initials) met in Mexico at the II Continental Assembly of the Women of the rural areas: "Women of the countryside, cultivating a millennium of life, justice and equality." After the meeting they presented before the III Congress of the CLOC and La Via Campesina the idea of carrying out a worldwide campaign in defense of the native and Creole seeds.
Members of ANAMURI were part of that meeting:
“We were in Mexico arguing about Food Sovereignty, and we came to the conclusion that we were food sovereignty in all its dimension and although the food sovereignty was in the discourse of men, they did not fully assume it. We realized that the food sovereignty was going to be at risk, because even if we had agrarian reform, if we did not defend the seed, the reform would remain at the discretion of transnational seed companies. It was not an emotional identity at heart, it was a political decision to propose the Campaign."
In 2002, during the Forum held in parallel to the World Food Summit, Via Campesina and 'Friends of the Earth International' with other organizations decided to launch the global campaign, whose first name was: 'The seeds common heritage of humanity'.
The Campaign was based on the multiple forms of indigenous and peasant knowledge about seeds, agriculture and biodiversity, and these are valid in themselves and do not require any external validation, scientific or otherwise. It looks for effective ways to involve and compromise society as a whole, getting involved and requiring the input of technicians and scientists when biological and cultural erosion processes make it necessary. Leadership and final decision-making must be in the hands of La Vía Campesina, and in the organizations of peasants, indigenous peoples and communities. The Campaign is part of the struggle to defend, reinforce and / or recover the political, cultural, economic and food sovereignty of the peoples, and is part of a broader struggle against the capitalist system and its neoliberal phase. That is why it is part of the search for alternative popular projects, and is closely linked to the defense of land, territories and peasant and indigenous cultures.
The campaign consisted of a plan of actions coordinated by different member organizations of Via Campesina:
"At the moment we are in a process of general awareness, but to sensitize ourselves as well. We are pulling it out, and the rich thing is that we are pulling it out through the action. Every new thing that we are recovering, discovering, the little understanding that we are achieving, we take it out to the world immediately, it is not cloistered in our houses or in our organizations. It spreads like the seed. And that is very important. Equally important is that we unravel the causes of what happens. According to how we feel and understand; To the extent that we are aware of the causes of the abuses and abuses we have suffered, the campaign will grow wider."
This CTP responds to multiple co-production processes. On the one hand, there is a collective construction that arises from the meetings and exchanges experienced by peasant organizations in Latin America. From the exchange of experiences and perspectives came the proposal to launch the international campaign with particular actions in each country.
On the other hand, the campaign was strengthened as an alternative proposal to other global actions:
"At Rio +10, in Johannesburg in 2002, the transnational company Monsanto agreed that the seeds were a World Heritage site, because so we all had rights over them, including them. That gave us an attack! We questioned our strategy, and it was at our second meeting in Caguazu, in the south of Paraguay, where we said: 'No, they are not the patrimony of humanity, they are the heritage of our indigenous and peasant peoples, And we have put them at the service of humanity. In the seed is the key that opens the food sovereignty. There everything begins, therefore there can be no food sovereignty if there is no seed. There can be no agrarian reform, if there are no seeds. We can not be sovereign peoples if we do not have our own seeds. Because we lost everything and we are what the food industry - which took over our seeds - wants to offer, sell and thus determines how you feed, and is also determining your way of life."
In this way, the campaign positioned Vía Campesina and ANAMURI in Chile as the alternative proposal for the advance of commercial agriculture based on transgenic crops. The seed campaign imposed the concept of 'Food Sovereignty' in relation to the Food Security approach promoted by FAO within the framework of the 1st FAO World Food Summit and the formulation of its Plan of Action to combat Hunger in the world.
“This formulation of FAO on Food Security was established in the context of an agriculture imposed by neoliberal capitalism, where food becomes mere commodities, and food becomes a tool of domination, pressure and control over people by guaranteeing food only to those who have the capacity to buy them. This concept says nothing about the quality and provenance of food, or how they are produced, or who are producing them. It is against this conception, that the peasants of the world make their proposal to the humanity and establish that only the Food Sovereignty of the towns will be able to guarantee the production of the foods, diminishing the lack of these, in order to advance in the fight against the poverty.”
This CTP is directly related to the deep changes generated by the advance of the agribusiness model based on the use of transgenic crops:
“The campaign 'Seeds Patrimony of the Peoples in the Service of Humanity', took place in a world context where the peasant world (farmers, indigenous women and men), their culture and knowledge, were almost no longer a referent For the humanity that has been forced to the displacement and overcrowding in the cities, consequences of the application of the politics of extermination and of 'free market' imposed by the American empire and the transnational ones that today dominate and impose their ideology of death and predation To almost everyone."
The seed campaign to raise the position of the world peasant movement and of Latin America in front of the position of different international forums related to the agricultural production and the feeding.
The first World Food Summit was held in Rome in November 1996. The meeting had 10,000 participants and provided a forum for the debate on the eradication of hunger as a global goal. The adoption of the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the Plan of Action of the World Food Summit was ratified by 112 Heads of State and Government. In addition, representatives of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have actively participated in the meeting, contributed to raising public awareness and provided a framework for changes in policies and programs in order to achieve food for all.
In the case of Chile, in July of 2001, the National Agricultural and Livestock Service approved resolution 1523 which establishes rules for the introduction and introduction into the environment of living modified organisms of propagation. This legislation covers: import; Multiplication in field; harvest; Export of the production, measure of protection for the remnants, by-products and waste. This resolution did not allow agricultural production with transgenics for the domestic market.
The main contestation process that occurs in this CTP is presented in conceptual terms: food security or food sovereignty:
"We are against it because the conception of Food Security, both of FAO and of governments, is due to people's ability to acquire food, not because of the need for food production and their capacity to establish Solidarity, horizontal relations among peoples to guarantee the fundamental right to food. We want access to healthy, culturally appropriate food produced by peasants to be available to all. Food is a right, not a business. And so our demand is for governments to invest. That is where we need to have the resources available, because it is an obligation, a duty to ensure the food of the people.
Today people do not have a clear awareness that what they are eating and access to information is much lower for most people in the popular sectors. That is why we are going to defend agroecology, so that it does not become a business anymore. Urban agriculture is located in a middle sector, elitist, which has the possibility of paying a higher price for its health.
We want to bring our production closer to the people in the local markets, bringing the product from the countryside to the city, ending with the chain of intermediaries. Let people know, for example, where their vegetables come from, who and under what conditions they were produced. As long as the people of the city understand this, peasant agriculture will have been saved. Agrarian Reform is not a social process, which is a process of life, which takes care of the right to food of the peoples."
ANAMURI continues to give that dispute in Chile revaluing the role of peasant women in the process of care and reproduction of seeds. For this reason, the idea of seeds as a patrimony of humanity is rejected and the idea is defended that the seeds are patrimony of the towns and these put them at the service of the humanity.
The international campaign was developed over the years since the founding of Vía Campesina in 1992 and the CLOC in 1994:
"In Vía Campesina there have been three important moments. The first was when we raised the concept and proposal of food sovereignty. We raised it from a perspective of defense and strengthening of rights, and it was a proposal that came to the passage to the WTO. Our most important struggles have been articulated around this fight against the WTO, so that the WTO is outside of agriculture, other than that which determines social relations and ways of doing agriculture.
It was food sovereignty that led us to propose our first campaign, the Campaign for Agrarian Reform, which we specify as the struggle for genuine agrarian reform. A second important step was to have begun to discuss this seed campaign, which emerged from what we began to discuss in Mexico, which was the construction of a popular project and the role we had in that project. And that implied that peasant agriculture had to have a future, a projection. We could not play a role if peasant agriculture succumbed. That is why, when we have set up our approach in order to involve not only indigenous people and peasants, but all peoples, we have made an important leap to argue that the problem of agriculture is not a problem for peasants, but of the countries.
I believe that the third important step that Vía Campesina has taken is to have developed an integrative approach. It incorporates women, young people, incorporates peasant knowledge, but also resorts to what we can call institutional knowledge."
A central aspect of this CTP was the concrete actions that were developed as part of the campaign. These actions involve different types of learning:
"They are mainly exchanges, fairs, but we must also recover popular research. Let us be the same Indians and peasants we investigate; That allows us to recover, and we have to build it. This is coupled with a very strong training process, because we have to recover, but recover for what? The interests around the knowledge are very strong and very diverse, we must have it very clear. Today we have to be very careful with the researchers who come in sheepskin and actually behind have a wolf, that's why we need our own researchers. We need to know what they have stolen from us, that is missing information. And as part of this campaign we also have to feel rage. It must give us much anger, not impotence, but rage. Because rage means that we do not tolerate any more, that until now we do not get there, we do not continue to endure it, but for that we need to know: what took us, who took it from us, and what."
Likewise, there is a pending learning that is how this peasant revalorized knowledge is shared with the rest of the population:
"The campaign is led by peasants, starts from here, a peasant knowledge that we do not want it to die. But the rest of the people have a very important role: that of knowing, being aware. As we see that we have imposed a new food culture, in which you are ordered to what you have to eat, people have to understand how far this system has led us, what we have lost and what affects us. The peasants are defending a trade, it is the mission that we had to play on earth, and that we like, that fills our life. We have the job of producing and people have to know the value of food, which has to do with the quality of life, and what has to do with the interests of the nation. And that is why it is a campaign of all, because it involves the life of human beings, the planet.
In addition, the office of peasants should be valued. It is our mission that must be recognized and valued. But behind that there are economic interests to be understood. And this campaign then has to create new relationships between rural and urban."
Stay informed. Subscribe for project updates by e-mail.
