Page 3 of 3 Farmers fight back against free
trade By Walden Bello
agrarian distress led to the unexpected
defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led ruling
coalition that had campaigned on the vision of
"India Shining".
India's rural electoral
revolt was part of a global phenomenon that put
governments on notice that the countryside would
no longer accept policies that sacrifice farmer
interests. In Asia, protests in
the
form of land occupations, hunger strikes, violent
demonstrations and symbolic suicides made rural
distress a pressing issue.
In China, what
the Ministry of Public Security calls "mass group
incidents" - in other words, protest actions
increased from 8,700 in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005,
most of them in the countryside. Moreover, the
incidents are growing in average size, from 10 or
fewer persons in the mid-1990s to 52 people per
incident in 2004. Not surprisingly, the current
leadership increasingly sees the countryside as a
powder keg that needs to be defused.
Farmers' Internationale? The
suicide of Korean farmer Lee Kyung-hae at the
barricades in Cancun in September 2003 was a
milestone in the development of farmers'
resistance globally. Committed under a banner that
read "WTO Kills Farmers", Lee's suicide was
designed to draw international attention to the
number of suicides by farmers in countries
subjected to liberalization. He succeeded only too
well.
The event shocked the WTO delegates,
who observed a minute of silence in Lee's memory.
By adding to what was already a charged
atmosphere, Lee's act was certainly a key factor
in the unraveling of the talks.
In
December 2005, invoking Lee's sacrifice, hundreds
of Korean farmers tried to break through police
lines in an effort to storm the Hong Kong
Convention Center. Some 900 protesters, the bulk
of them Korean farmers, were arrested.
Both Lee and the Korean farmers protesting
in Hong Kong were members of Via Campesina, an
international federation of farmers established in
the mid-1990s. Since its founding, Via Campesina -
literally translated as the Peasants' Path - has
become known as one of the most militant opponents
of the WTO and bilateral and multilateral free
trade agreements.
While there are other
international farmers' networks, Via is
distinguished by its position that small farmers
must not only fight to survive in the current
global system of corporate-dominated industrial
farming, they should lead the process to transform
or replace the current system. Commenting on the
vision of Jose Bove, the famous French activist
who dismantled a McDonald's restaurant in his
hometown of Millau, France and other Via leaders,
one progressive journal has described the aim of
the organization as the creation of a Farmers'
Internationale in much the same way that communist
and social democratic groups sought to establish
the Communist International and Socialist
International to unite workers in the 20th
century.
The main battle cry of Via
Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in
Indonesia, is "WTO Out of Agriculture" and its
alternative program is food sovereignty. Food
sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate
adoption of policies that favor small producers.
This would include, according to Indonesian farmer
Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad
Ya'kub, deputy for policy studies of the
Indonesian Peasant Union Federation, "the
protection of the domestic market from low-priced
imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and
fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect
export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic
subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture".
Via's program, however, goes beyond the
adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It
also calls for an end to the Trade-Related
Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows
corporations to patent plant seeds, thus
appropriating for private profit what has evolved
through the creative interaction of the natural
world with human communities over eons. Seeds and
all other plant genetic resources should be
considered part of the common heritage of
humanity, the group believes, and not be subject
to privatization.
Agrarian reform, long
avoided by landed elites in countries like the
Philippines, is a central element in Via's
platform, as is sustainable, ecologically
sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small
peasant producers. The organization has set itself
apart from both the First Green Revolution based
on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second
Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering
(GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of
the first are well known, says Via, which means
all the more that the precautionary principle must
be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid
negative health and environmental outcomes.
The opposition to GE-based agriculture has
created a powerful link between farmers and
consumers who are angry at corporations for
marketing genetically modified commodities without
proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice.
In the European Union, a solid alliance of
farmers, consumers and environmentalists prevented
the import of GE-modified products from the United
States for several years. Although the EU has
cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004,
54% of European consumers continue to think GE
food is "dangerous".
Opposition to other
harmful processes such as food irradiation has
also contributed to the tightening of ties between
farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now
think that public health and environmental impact
should be more important determinants of consumer
behavior than price.
More and more people
are beginning to realize that local production and
culinary traditions are intimately related, and
that this relationship is threatened by corporate
control of food production, processing, marketing,
and consumption.
This is why Jose Bove's
justification for dismantling a McDonald's
resonated widely in Asia: "When we said we would
protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's
in our town, everybody understood why - the
symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food
against malbouffe [awful standardized
food], agricultural workers against
multinationals. The extreme right and other
nationalists tried to make out it was
anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it
was no such thing. It was a protest against a form
of production that wants to dominate the world."
Many economists, technocrats, policymakers
and urban intellectuals have long viewed small
farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as
passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they
are now resisting the capitalist, socialist and
developmentalist paradigms that would consign them
to ruin.
They have become what Karl Marx
described as a politically conscious
"class-for-itself". And even as peasants refuse to
"go gently into that good night", to borrow a line
from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st
century are revealing traditional pro-development
visions to be deeply flawed.
The
escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via
Campesina are not a return to the past. As
environmental crises multiply and the social
dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the
farmers' movement has relevance not only to
peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the
catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist
paradigms for organizing production, community and
life.
Walden Bello is executive
director of Focus on the Global South, a
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and
a professor of sociology at the University of the
Philippines at Diliman.
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