Newsletter no 30 - Advancing Food Sovereignty

Editorial - Advancing the Paradigm of Food Sovereignty Illustration : Angelo Monne | www.angelomonne.com
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the historic International Forum on Food Sovereignty that was held Mali in 2007. The Forum brought together more than 500 peasants, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, workers, migrants, women, youth, consumers, researchers and press/media from 80 countries to build a global movement on food sovereignty. The Forum was named Nyéléni, as (...)

The UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas
Introduction
Peasants and people living in rural areas, such as small-scale fishers, pastoralists and rural workers, still represent almost half of the world’s population. The great majority of them have to face massive and systematic violations of their rights : they suffer disproportionately from hunger and malnutrition, are being increasingly dispossessed from their lands, water bodies, fisheries, (...)

The Right to Resist
Thirty-five Filipino farmers, including 10 women, are facing imprisonment as landowners of a large coconut estate filed 19 criminal cases of theft against them in 2016. The coconut estate is an agrarian hotspot for land distribution under the Philippine agrarian reform program. Now the farmers need to raise more than USD $22,000 as bail money to grant them temporary liberty. Due to poverty and the recent destruction of their crops by a typhoon, they are unable to raise (...)

Voice 1 – Globalise the Struggle, Globalise Hope ! Elizabeth Mpofu, General Coordinator, La Via Campesina
There is an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone, but you won’t go far. If you want to go far, go with others.”
I believe that the struggle for Food Sovereignty is captured in the latter part of the proverb. Food Sovereignty is a lasting global solution for how we should relate with nature and people as we feed ourselves. It is a struggle that requires alliances (...)

A Poem on Hope
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them ?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have (...)