17 April: International Day of Peasants’ Struggles Resist the commercialisation of nature - Stop land grabbing!
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- Published on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 09:36
Call for mobilisation
The dramatic environmental, economic and social crises that we are currently observing have surprisingly not led to a complete change in the direction taken by most national and international elites. On the contrary, we are seeing an increased offensive by economic super-powers to grab all the resources still available to make a profit. Land has become a valuable commodity entering speculative trade, followed by water, seeds etc. This hyper-commercialisation of the commons leads to a massive dispossession of the people who are simply living on the land. Women and men farmers are particularly affected.
At the same time, resistance is blooming everywhere. All over the world, urban and rural communities hit by the same wave of privatisation and destruction of life are resisting against transnational companies which impose the rule of profit over the people's needs and rights.
Honduras, In a span of six hours, peasants and the brother of a Lawyer were murdered
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- Published on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 02:12
Press release from Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA)
(Bajo Aguán, Saturday February 16th ). Among an ongoing militarization, the gunmen operate freely in Bajo Aguán; on Saturday February 16th at 1:30 pm, heavily armed men murdered Santos Jacobo Cartagena (55), while waiting for the bus that would transfer him to Tocoa.
Cartagena was a member of the San Esteban Company that united the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA), and was murdered at a bus station in the diversion of community confidence of Sinaloa, led by men who were aboard a car, causing him multiple gunshot wounds in different parts of the body.
But hours later murderers led by land grabbers murdered Jose Trejo Cabrera (55) by several gunshots in the district of San Isidro de Tocoa Colon, who was the brother of the lawyer Antonio Trejo Cabrera, murdered on September 22 near the Toncontin airport in Tegucigalpa, and also a member of the Cooperative San Isidro belonging to the Movimiento Autentico Reivindicador Campesino del Aguán (MARCA).
Read more: Honduras, In a span of six hours, peasants and...
Solidarity letter from La Via Campesina to Taiwan Farmers Union
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- Published on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 01:41
February 3rd, 2012
Stop Land & Water Grabbing and Trade Liberalization in Taiwan!
The Southeast Asia and East Asia of La Via Campesina send solidarity and full support to the small-scale and family farmers who have struggled against land grabbing for last a few decades and the liberalization of agricultural market and for the right to farm and right to live in the rural area.
Once branded as one of the Four Little Dragons, Taiwan now suffers from the bitter fruit of its development under neoliberal capitalism. In the name of science and industrial complex projects, the power of eminent domain has been routinely exercised and abused in Taiwan. As of now, 6378.15 ha. of land is under threat of forced expropriation, which triggered farmers’ large and strong resistance in the form of anti-land-grabbing and anti-water-grabbing movement across Taiwan.
Taiwan : Farmers gather to express their anger
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- Published on Tuesday, 12 February 2013 12:24
(Taipei Times, Feb 4, 2013). Hundreds of people, including farmers and farming activists from Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and Malaysia, yesterday rallied against the globalization of agriculture on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office, protesting against the government’s plans to lift more bans on agricultral imports.
“We gather here today to express our anger, we want to tell the government that we’re fed up with their compromises on our food sovereignty, it’s a serious problem that our food self-sufficiency has dropped to 33 percent now,” Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) spokeswoman Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) told the crowd at the rally. “You’ve put our dining tables and refrigerators in other people’s homes, we want to keep them in our own places.”