Many people don't think of diversity as a food and agriculture issue. But Jerry Pennick placed it dead center when he stated at a bi-national farmers' conference: “Food sovereignty can only be achieved through diverse agricultural systems.”
Pennick is a leader of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization of smallholder African-American farmers in the southern United States. Alongside farmers from fifty organizations throughout the United States and Mexico, the diversity he was talking about was both obvious and not so obvious.
The Bi-National Family Farmer and Farmworker Congress held September 26-29 in Mexico City, included Zapotecans, Nahautls, mestizos, Afro-Americans, Mixes and European descendents from the U.S. breadbasket. It brought together men and women farmers, researchers, and farmworkers; Mexicans and U.S. citizens; farmers who work hundreds of acres and farmers who scrap out a living on tiny hillside plots.
While they represent diversity, they share a common cause. The Mexican and the U.S. farmers united because their way of living is threatened. Both groups are being pushed off the land by low prices, and the control over production and marketing exercised by large agribusiness corporations.
A Dispute over Who Will Feed the World
In spite of the tremendous economic and political odds against them, these farmers do not consider themselves an endangered species. Their position is that the global food chain is what's endangered, if their needs and proposals aren't taken into account.
Participants described the battle as a dispute over who will feed the world. They are confident that they not only have a right to farm and be farmers, but that their survival is crucial for the world's food supply. The diversity of the varieties they maintain, their knowledge of local ecosystems, and the quality of the food they produce are contributions to society that should be valued.
Family farmers left to their own devices often make good decisions—good for the environment, good for the land, good for the consumer, and good for the farmer. But under the current system they usually don't have choices. Ben Burkett knows how to grow cotton and grew it for years on his small farm in Petal, Mississippi. Today the price of cotton is so far below his production price, even adding in government subsidy payments, that he can't make a go of it. Instead he's patching together a livelihood out of watermelons and the government payments he receives for reforesting part of his land that was devastated when Hurricane Katrina ripped through.
Likewise, choice had very little to do with the transformation of Mexican small farmers into U.S. farmworkers. The low prices and hardships in the countryside forced people out. “Many migrants have to sell their lands to make the trip to the United States,” says Carlos Marentes of the border farmworkers organization, “In this way communities are stripped of their land.” The cheap labor of workers without rights, collective bargaining power, or benefits is an important and unjust factor in U.S. agriculture's ability to produce at such low prices and flood markets in countries whose own farmers become economic refugees. Mily Trevino, an organizer of women farmworkers in California, noted that conditions for women are even worse, yet a growing leadership is speaking out and building force in the sector.
Shared Battles: NAFTA and the Farm Bill
Farmers in the world's wealthiest and most productive nation and Mexican campesinos share more experiences than one might imagine .
For example, the transnational giant Monsanto enjoyed instant name recognition in English and Spanish. Mexican farmers explained the importance of their struggle to save, sow, and protect their native seed. The contamination of maize by illegal genetically modified varieties was a new issue for the U.S. farmers but critical to the continued existence of campesino agriculture in Mexico. Biotech companies are waging a major offensive to legalize cultivation of genetically modified maize in Mexico and seek to substitute criollo varieties of maize seed with their patent-protected varieties. In the U.S. they have already won that battle in some crops—Burkett complains that to grow cotton, he has been forced to use genetically modified seed because that's all that is available.
Most importantly, they both find themselves being squeezed by an international market controlled by large corporations. Regulation of that market to protect and support small farmers is a single call. In the final declaration of this encounter, the farmers demand a “deep reform” of the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill: “ We want an agricultural law that makes it possible for farmers to receive a fair price guaranteeing a minimum price above the costs of production.”
It goes on to suggest public policies to support agriculture oriented not to large corporate farmers but to family farms and sustainability: “To achieve this there must be a reduction in overproduction, by means of supply management programs, conservation programs and through commodity reserves controlled by family farmers. We want anti-trust laws—which have been largely ignored in recent decades—to be enforced, in order to diminish the dangerous control by agribusiness of the agricultural markets.”
The declaration makes an emphatic call to get free trade rules, whether the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central American agreement or others, out of agriculture. It also specifically demands elimination of the agricultural chapter of NAFTA. Participants warned that the compete liberalization of corn and beans will force even more peasant farmers out of farming. Alicia Serafin Cruza of the Mexican state of Puebla says, “there is no land, or there's land but bad prices on the market because everything is so cheap. People are discouraged, there's malnutrition … this Free Trade Agreement is crushing us.”
When a question was raised about the viability of renegotiating NAFTA, Marentes reminded the meeting that the battle against NAFTA has lasted over a decade. “We started to fight NAFTA before the signing and this struggle is not over yet,” he affirmed. Quoting Cesar Chavez, he noted: “There are no lost battles, just battles that have been abandoned.”
US-Mexico Bi-National Family Farmer and Farmworker Congress
Final Declaration
Mexico City, September 28, 2006
We the undersigned participants in the Binational Congress of Campesinos, Indigenous Peoples, Family Farmers and Migrant Farm Workers declare our unity in defending our rights to continue working on the land.
We affirm that the principle of food sovereignty is the basis for an agricultural system that is healthy, sustainable and just. Food sovereignty is the right of the peoples and nations to define their own agricultural and trade policies, in which small family producers, campesinos and indigenous peoples play a fundamental role. We demand laws and domestic agricultural policies that do not impact on domestic markets of neighboring countries.
We demand a fair trade of agricultural products that respect the viability of neighboring national markets. That is why we oppose the free trade agreements that facilitate and legalize the invasion of products at prices below the cost of production and that prioritize transnational export and agribusiness corporations. In particular, we oppose the policies and agreements contained in the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA-DR and other bilateral free-trade agreements. Given the profound crisis in the countryside, we demand that the WTO, NAFTA and all other trade agreements get out of agriculture, because they are an attack on peoples' well-being and democratic processes, and trump agricultural policies that support rural and family economies.
In 2008, the completion of the opening of the U.S., Canadian and Mexican markets under NAFTA is set occur, which would mean the deepening of the farm crisis in all three countries, and as a result, the displacement of thousands of campesino and indigenous peoples from their places of origin and, in the U.S., the near completion of the disappearance of family farms. For this reason, we demand that the agricultural chapter of NAFTA be eliminated, as a means of assuring the survival of producers from both sides of the border.
We think that among the principle causes of the high levels of migration is the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of large transnational corporations and the policies that favor them, especially in the agricultural sector. The massive exodus from the Mexican and Central American countryside is largely a result of the trade and agricultural policies already mentioned.
We support movement in favor of immigrant rights in the U.S., including a comprehensive immigration reform, with paths to legalization and citizenship for migrants. We demand humane and dignified treatment for farm workers who come to Mexico from Central America. They are our neighbors, our sisters and brothers. In the long term, the only solution to the problem of mass forced migration is a profound change in the economic model, in North America and worldwide. We demand the demilitarization of the border and the destruction of the walls that have caused so many tragic deaths in the border region. We have a vision of an economic model that does not force people to migrate because of precarious economic conditions.
We believe that a deep reform of the 2007 Farm Bill in the U.S. is a matter of great urgency. We want an agricultural law that makes it possible for farmers to receive a fair price, guaranteeing a minimum price above the costs of production. To achieve this there must be a reduction in overproduction, by means of supply management programs, conservation programs and through commodity reserves controlled by family farmers. We want anti-trust laws—which have been largely ignored in recent decades—to be enforced, in order to diminish the dangerous control by agribusiness of the agricultural markets.
We recognize that there is a crisis of land loss among African Americans, Indigenous, Asian Americans, Latinos and women and we demand an end to discrimination to assure full access to land, to credits and to all the necessary federal agricultural programs.
The economic policies directed to the Mexican countryside are generating rejection by the population, as is being manifested in Oaxaca. This Bi-National Congress of Small and Campesino farmers expresses our solidarity with the teacher and popular movement headed by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), whose principal demand is the departure of the current governor of the state, Mr. Ulises Ruiz. We will maintain our vigilance over the situation in Oaxaca and we emphatically reject any resolution of the conflict by force.
We support the worldview of the indigenous peoples who have shown us that the basic elements of life, such as land, water, air and seeds, must be accessible to everyone. The concentration of these elements in few privileged and powerful hands threatens the future of humanity. In particular, genetically modified seeds are a threat against biodiversity and the rights of farmers to conserve varieties of seeds, plants and animals that have nourished humanity for millennia. We support the right of indigenous peoples to collective control of their territories and of biodiversity.
The undersigned,
Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural, Washington DC and Mexico City; Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, Atlanta, GA; Friends of the Earth USA, Washington, DC;
National Family Farm Coalition, Washington, DC; Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns, Washington DC; Via Campesina North American Region; Border Agricultural Workers Project, El Paso, TX; Family Farm Defenders , Madison, WI; Farmworker Association of Florida, Apopka, FL; Organización de Líderes Campesinas de California, Pomona, CA; Agriculture Missions, Inc., New York, NY; Hispanic Organizations Leadership Alliance, Takoma Park, MD; National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association, Takoma Park, MD; Texas-Mexico Border Coalition, Texas; Centro de Desarrollo Integral Campesino de la Mixteca CEDICAM, Oaxaca; Frente Democrático Campesino de Chihuahua; Servicios del Pueblo Mixe –Ser Mixe, Oaxaca; Unión de Organizaciones de la Sierra Juárez de Oaxaca UNOSJO; Organización de Agricultores Biológicos de Oaxaca, ORAB
Kie' Lui, Oaxaca; Promotores de Salud, PROSA, Oaxaca; Unión Nacional de Organizaciones Regionales Autónomos, UNORCA, México DF; Asociación de Empresas Comercializadoras del Campo, ANEC, México DF; Grupo Vicente Guerrero, Tlaxcala; Servicios para una Educación Alternativa, EDUCA, Oaxaca; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México DF;
Promotores Campesinos Conservacionistas; Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo, CECCAM, México DF; Organización Regional Nahuatl Independiente, ORNI, Puebla;
NETECO, Puebla; Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Rural, CESDER, Puebla.
Translated for the Americas Program by Katie Kohlstedt y Diana González Ovando.
Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City, where she has been a writer and political analyst for more than two decades.
