By Luis Hernández Navarro and Annette Aurélie Desmarais

Briarpatch Magazine, January/February 2009

They numbered almost 650, from 86 countries and five continents, when they arrived in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. They were delegates, support teams and special guests of the Fifth International Conference of La Vía Campesina, which took place from October 16 to 23, 2008. To reach Maputo, most of the delegates had made a considerable economic and human effort. Maputo is not a city you get to easily. At a moment when the world economy had yet to come up for air, in which the credit, environmental, food, trade and finance crises were colliding against one another and shaking the international economic architecture, farm leaders from many regions of the planet gathered together to collectively analyze the global food crisis and its relation to the financial crisis, and to show the world why food sovereignty - the democratization of the global food system - is a viable and necessary alternative.

I was in Mozambique because I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the Fifth International Conference of La Via Campesina in Matola, a suburb of the capital city Maputo. La Via Campesina is an organization of organizations, a powerful aspect of the growing movement of peasants, family farmers, indigenous and landless people of the world. My goals were to help record the conference by interviewing some of the delegates and to learn more about the campesin@ way of life and how that way is crystallized in a call for and a practice of food sovereignty. In particular, I wanted to learn what that means to the peasants and small farmers of Mozambique.

Members of the First of December farmers' association, which works with the national organization UNAC (União Nacional de Camponeses / National Peasants' Union) in the Sanga district, near Lichinga, in the Niassa province of Mozambique. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Let’s destroy GMOs, cultivate biodiversity, and cultivate the sovereignty of all people!

1. Support the struggle of Palestinian farmers and Bedouins, for their survival and sovereignty including food sovereignty. The Palestinian famers struggle for their land and are part of the global farmers struggle.
2. Solidarity for Palestinian farmers faced with daily oppression including the uprooting of their olive and other trees that are sacred for Palestinian people.
3. Condemning the wall of apartheid built by the Israeli occupation which separates Palestinian farmers, farms, and fields from each other.
   

 Today, after two centuries of robberies and foreign intervention from imperialist countries, Haiti is suffering another foreign interference.

 Therefore, the Caribbean delegation taking part in this V Conference ask La Via Campesina to support the Haitian social movement and to demand the immediate withdrawal of the military troops from Haiti, under the principle of respect for the independence, sovereignty and history of the Haitian people.

In the same way, we ask to the assembly to condemn the manoeuvre of the USA using Brazilian and other Latin-American countries' military forces clearly aiming for the division of our nations.

Occupation troops out of Haiti!

Haitian people forward!