Honduras, May 3rd

RA: My name is Rafael Alegría and I am from Honduras. I am the regional co-ordinator for La Via Campesina in Honduras and for all of Central America. We are co-ordinating La Via Campesina which is a movement that integrates 6 organisations at a national level: the National Office of Farm Workers (CNTC), the National Association of Campesino Organisations (ANACH), the Western Region Association (ANRO), the San Manuel Campesino Movement and the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA), amongst other organisations.

At this moment in time, there is a very serious agricultural conflict taking place - the campesinos want to work and produce their own food to feed their families and to contribute to the national economy. This is why on the 17th April, the International Day of Peasants' Struggles, the Honduran campesinos occupied 15,000 hectares of national, communal, fiscal and unoccupied lands. But the government and landowners are using repressive measures against the campesinos. At the moment, 126 campesinos have been charged and persecuted with preventive measures and I would also like to mention that there are approximately 700 women participating in the struggle to reclaim the land.

(Rome, May 10th, 2012) This week, the United Nations Committee on World Food Security is convening for a special session to formally adopt the recently concluded Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security. These new guidelines could prove to be one small but important step towards reforming the policies at the root cause of the food crisis.

La Via Campesina reminds governments that the guidelines have been built on a foundation of agreed upon human rights principles that cannot be negotiated. It is therefore the responsibility of states to support the implementation of these guidelines and to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of their citizens.

In this regard, La Via Campesina urgently requests all governments to condemn the practise of land grabbing that is currently displacing millions of peasants and small-scale producers around the world. Land grabbing is causing massive violations of human rights, whilst destroying land, society, environment and food sovereignty.

La Via Campesina calls on all the peasant organizations of the world and their allies to organize actions in the month of June

The advance of the capitalist system that has reached unprecedented dimensions in the past two decades is resulting in crises that are of equally unprecedented dimensions. The financial, food, energy and environmental crises are phases of the structural crisis of capitalism, which has no limits in its search for more profits. And, as in other structural crises, it impacts the peoples of the world and not the elites.

In every continent we have seen that even in crisis, capitalism has not reduced its momentum: the increase in land purchases and land grabbing by foreign corporations, the advance of the mining industry, the technology of genetic modification that is ever more present in the rural areas, the marketing of agrofuels and pesticides on a huge scale. Finally, to say that capitalism is in crisis does not mean that the system is in retreat. On the contrary, it is precisely in this moment that it advances with more intensity because the corporations take advantage of the crisis to extend their domination over territories that have not yet been conquered.

Dowload the report here

(Bamako, 7 May 2012) The National Coordination of Peasant Organizations (CNOP) of Mali and La Via Campesina have today published a new report on the mobilization of social movements against land grabbing. Land grabs jeopardize food sovereignty and threaten sustainable family farming and peasants everywhere in the world.

The document stems from the first international peasant and farmer conference against land grabbing, held at the Nyéléni site in Sélingué in Mali, from 17 to 19 November 2011. The gathering included about 250 participants, principally women and men of rural and peasant origin, from 40 mainly African countries. It witnessed numerous testimonies by populations that had been ousted from their land by foreign investors who have set up vast monocultures for the export of foodstuffs or agrofuels. In most cases the populations are neither informed nor compensated.

Peasants and sustainable family farmers, women and men, with the support of non-governmental organizations and personalities, have drawn up a list of the manifestations of this phenomenon on the different continents. Then joint action lines were suggested to fight this scourge: opposition to the ultra-neoliberal policies of the World Bank, the development of a global peasant and small-scale farming alliance, the use of human rights mechanisms to defend the victims, and the launch of a campaign for genuine agrarian and land reform.