Decolonizing Environmentalism

We are 47 people from 22 organizations in 18 countries (Zimbabwe,
Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda,
Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Central African Republic,
Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, USA, France, and Germany). We are
farmers and staff representing member organizations of La Via
Campesina, along with allies from other farmer organizations and
networks, NGOs, academics, researchers, interpreters and others.

We have been meeting at the Shashe Endogenous Development Training
Centre in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe to plan how to promote
agroecology in our Region (Southern, Eastern & Central Africa). Here
we have been privileged to witness firsthand the successful
combination of agrarian reform with organic farming and agroecology
carried out by local small holder farming families. In what were once
large cattle ranches owned by three large farmers who owned 800 head
of cattle and produced no grain or anything else, there are now more
than 365 small holder peasant farming families with more than 3,400
head of cattle, who also produce a yearly average of 1 to 2 tonnes of
grain per family plus vegetables and other products, in many cases
using agroecological methods and local peasant seeds. This experience
strengthens our commitment to and belief in agroecology and agrarian
reform as fundamental pillars in the construction of Food Sovereignty.

Threats and Challenges to Small Holder Agriculture and Food Sovereignty

Our region of Africa is currently facing challenges and threats that
together undermine the food security and well-being of our
communities, displace small holder farmers and undercut their
livelihoods, undermine our collective ability to feed our nations, and
cause grave damage to the soil, the environment and the Mother Earth.

These include local and regional manifestations of the global food
price crisis and the climate crisis that have been produced by runaway
neoliberal policies and the greed and profit-taking of Transnational
Corporations (TNCs). Cheap subsidized food imports brought by TNCs,
made possible by misguided free trade agreements, lowers the prices we
receive for our farm products, forcing families to abandon farming and
migrate to cities, while undermining local and national food
production. Foreign investors, invited in by some of our governments,
grab the best farm land, displacing food producing local farmers, and
redirecting that land toward environmentally devastating mining,
agrofuel plantations that feed cars instead of people, and other
export plantations that do nothing to build Food Sovereignty for our
peoples, and only enrich a few.

At the same time, uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions and air
pollution from Developed Countries and from the global corporate food
system based on long distance transport and industrial agriculture are
changing the climate in ways that directly affect farmers. Our lands
become more arid, with water ever more scarce, we face rising
temperatures, and increased extreme weather conditions like severe
storms, floods and droughts. The dates of the rainy season have become
completely unpredictable, so that nobody knows when to plant anymore.
The changing climate is also implicated in epidemics of communicable
diseases of humans, crops and livestock. All of this hurts farming
families and affects food production.

We face TNCs who want to force GMO seeds into our countries, whether
or not we currently have GMO bans, and agencies like the Alliance for
a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) who conspire with TNCs like
Cargill and Monsanto and with our governments to buy off national
research and seed systems in order to sell GMO seeds. These seeds
threaten the integrity of our local varieties and the health of our
consumers. The same companies even manipulate regional farmer
organizations to push GMOs, and we call on such organizations to
resist being used in such ways.

While our soils, agroecosytems and forests are ever more degraded by
industrial agriculture and plantations, and local seed biodiversity is
lost, the costs of production under the conventional “Green
Revolution” model are more expensive and out of the reach of small
holder farmers. The price of chemical fertilizer on the world market,
for example, has risen more than 300% in the last few years.

Faced with this bleak situation for small holder agriculture and Food
Sovereignty in our region, as members of organizations belonging to La
Via Campesina we take the following positions:

Positions of La Via Campesina in Africa Region 1

We believe that…

• Agroecological farming as practiced by small holder farmers, and
Food Sovereignty policies, offer the only reasonable and feasible
solutions to these multiple challenges facing our Region.

• Only agroecological methods (also called sustainable agriculture,
organic farming, ecological agriculture, etc.) can restore soils and
agroecosystems that have been degraded by industrial agriculture. Even
chemicals do not work after severe degradation, but with agroecology
we can restore soil organic matter and fertility, along with
functional agroecosystem processes and services like nutrient
recycling, soil biology, natural pest control, etc. We have seen that
small holder agroecological systems have much greater total
productivity than industrial monocultures, with little or no purchased
inputs, reducing the dependency and increasing the autonomy and
well-being of rural families while producing abundant and healthy food
for our peoples. Global research by La Via Campesina demonstrates that
Sustainable Peasant Agriculture Can Feed the World, based on
endogenous knowledge and agroecology.

• The global food system currently generates between 44 and 57% of
global greenhouse gas emissions, almost all of which could be
eliminated by transforming the food system based on the principles of
agroecology, agrarian reform and Food Sovereignty. Sustainable Peasant
Agriculture Cools the Planet, and this is our best solution to climate
change.

• In order to adapt to a changing climate we need the greater
resiliency of diversified agroecological systems (and water
conservation and harvesting, watershed management, agroforestry,
ground cover, etc.) and the genetic diversity of local peasant seeds
and peasant seed systems. We demand that our governments withdraw
support from the corporate seed industry with it’s standardized and
often genetically modified seeds, and instead support peasant seed
systems based on recovering, saving, multiplying, storing, breeding
and exchanging seeds at the local level.

• Our national education and research systems are heavily biased
toward the very industrial agriculture practices that are killing our
planet and contributing to the failure of Africans to feed ourselves.
We demand the reorientation of research toward farmer-led methods and
agroecology, and the transformation of curricula at primary and
secondary schools levels, and in higher education, to focus on
agroecology.

• We call for an end to trade liberalization and the renewed
protection of domestic markets so that African farmers can receive the
fair prices that will enable us to boost production and feed our
peoples.

• We call on governments to create comprehensive programs to support
agroecological farming by small holders and to rebuild Food
Sovereignty, including genuine agrarian reform and the defense of
peasant lands from land grabbing, the reorientation of government food
procurement from agribusiness toward purchasing ecological food at
fair prices from small holders to supply schools, hospitals,
institutional cafeterias, etc., as a way to support farmers and to
provide healthy food to children, sick people and government
employees, and programs of production credit for small holders engaged
in ecological farming instead of subsidies tied to chemical
fertilizers and pesticides.

• At the COP-16 in Cancun, Mexico, the governments of the world
(except Bolivia) met to conduct business with TNCs who traffic in
false solutions to climate changes like agrofuels, GMOs, carbon
markets, REDD+, etc., instead of meeting to seriously and effectively
reverse global warming through real emission reductions by Developed
Countries and the transformation of our global food, energy and
transport systems. We demand that our governments behave more
responsibly at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa, refusing to sign
agreements imposed by the North and by TNCs, instead supporting the
Cochabamba Principles on the Climate and the Rights of the Mother
Earth.

Commitments of La Via Campesina

While we demand that our governments act in all the ways mentioned
above, and will turn up the pressure on them to do so, we will not
wait for them. Instead we pledge to continue to build agroecology and
Food Sovereignty from below. We pledge to take the following practical
steps:

• We will build organizational structures in La Via Campesina at the
regional level to support our national member organizations in their
work to promote agroecology among their member families. This includes
regional training programs, exchange visits, the production and
sharing of educational materials, and the identification and
documentation of successful cases in the region so that all can learn
the lessons they offer. Among the structures we will build is a
network of agroecology trainers and practitioners in La Via Campesina
in our Region.

• We will promote the creation of agroecology training programs and
schools in our organizations, and farmer-to-farmer and
community-to-community agroecology promotion programs.

• Through our own organizations we will promote the creation and
strengthening of local peasant seed systems.

• We will document the experience in Zimbabwe of agrarian reform and
organic farming by beneficiary families, as successful steps toward
Food Sovereignty that we who are in other countries can learn from.

• We will work to “keep carbon in the ground and in trees” in the
areas under our control, by promoting agroforestry, tree planting,
agroecology, energy conservation, and by fighting land grabs for
mining and industrial plantations.

• We will engage and pressure governments at all levels (local,
traditional provincial, national and regional) to adopt Public
Policies that favor agroecology and Food Sovereignty.

• We will build a powerful small holder farmer and peasant voice to be
present with other sectors of civil society at COP-17 in Durban, and
at Rio +20 in Brazil, with the message that we oppose false solutions
to climate change and demand the adoption of the Cochabamba
Principles. We will insist on Small Holder Sustainable Agriculture and
Food Sovereignty as the most important true solutions to climate
change.

Africans! We Can Feed Ourselves with Agroecology and Food Sovereignty!

Sustainable Agriculture by Small Holder Farmers Cools the Planet!

No to the Corporate Food System, GMOs and Land Grabbing!

Yes to Agrarian Reform and an Agroecological Food System!

Globalize Struggle! Globalize Hope!

Masvingo District, Zimbabwe, 20 June 2011