Real World Radio interviewed FoEI’s Food Sovereignty Program Coordinator, Martin Drago, who participated in the forum. The activist is also a member of REDES-Friends of the Earth Uruguay.

Drago said that nothing new was discovered in Dakar, but he highlighted that several movements and social organizations had the opportunity to analyze, in a joint and coordinated way, their actions in order to have a larger impact.

The environmentalist made reference to the need to resist GMOs, to fight against the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and to fight against agrofuels. But at the same time he said that peasant agriculture should be strengthened and the exchange of peasant seeds should be protected and promoted. According to Drago, it is also necessary to ensure access to land and food production for local markets.

“Grassroots work is essential for food sovereignty. We should work with producers but also with urban communities on urban agriculture, bridging the gap between food producers and consumers”, said Drago. The idea is to “avoid large chains that pay little to producers and charge a lot to consumers, profiting with the difference”, he added.

On land grabbing, the Friends of the Earth International’s coordinator identified several mechanisms: land acquisition by foreign companies or governments and land concessions are among the most common. But Drago highlighted that hiring producers to work on their own lands without taking care of environmental impacts later is another common practice. This is generally an intensive, extractive agriculture, highly based on agrotoxics, heavy machinery and GM seeds”. The activist said that this is a mechanism mainly used in Europe and that it is a way to appropriate territories, because it implies the imposition of a production model.

According to Drago, there is a fourth land grabbing method with serious impacts to the food sovereignty of people: the establishment of extractive projects such as forestry or mining, and the building of large hydroelectric dams.

“These ways of appropriating lands share the same features in all continents”, with the natural differences between the South and the North, he said. Companies and governments come, occupy and destroy with their machines the existing crops, and then they repress the people who oppose”, he added.

On the violence in the rural area caused by agribusiness projects, Drago said that although the patterns are similar in all continents, there are cultural differences. “I think that the expansion of agribusiness has worse impacts on women than men.” He said that women are displaced from their lands and that they are not even hired as rural workers, so they are left in a disadvantageous position.

With reference to this, he said: “La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth and the World March of Women consider that this patriarchal capitalist system that imposes agribusiness as the production model, considers the domination against women as another form of accumulation.”

The International Coordinator also said that social movements and organizations should continue looking for their own ways of coordination, because there isn’t enough space at the World Social Forum.

“The Forum is an excellent opportunity to meet with allies, to think of resistance strategies and to promote our alternatives and ideals”, he said. But “we can’t be subject to the large NGOs that are guided by projects or even companies”. “Social movements and organizations must think of ways to work jointly. Social movements are responsible for change. We need to take control of how we want to coordinate ourselves”, he concluded.

Photo: http://viacampesina.org/sp/