Spain: Call for Support for Family Farming for a Just Agroecological Transition
The “Nos Plantamos” movement, aligned with La Via Campesina on the International Day of Peasant Struggles, emphasizes the necessity of an immediate agroecological transition. The Galician Farmer Syndicate-Labour Commissions (SLG-CCLL) also joined in, stressing support for family and social agriculture. Amidst the agricultural crisis, the movement asserts the importance of defending food sovereignty, emphasizing respect for both people and ecosystems.
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April 15, 2024. – On the occasion of International Day of Peasant Struggles on April 17, Nos plantamos movement, which comprises more than 50 organizations, claims the urgent need for a transition to agroecological, sustainable, and diversified production methods within prosperous and small-scale family projects. They also demand a food system in the hands of farmers and consumers, not dominated by the power of the agri-food industry, large supermarkets, or agro-industry lobbies. Consumers want easy access to healthy, equitably produced, and sustainable food.
This agroecological model, which addresses current social and environmental challenges, also aims to preserve biodiversity and promote peace with social justice, offering peasant solutions to the food and climate crisis in Spain and other regions of the world. In this transition, the collective also considers access to land, fair prices for producers and consumers, the promotion of agroecology and peasant seeds, as well as the defense of people’s sovereignty, indispensable.
The decrease in the number of farmers, the increase in large-scale farms, the decrease in small and medium-sized farms, as well as the unequal distribution of aid from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), testify to the reality of a dominant model in Spain: agriculture without farmers, dominated by markets, free trade agreements, and tailor-made norms and policies of the agri-business, which neglect family and social agriculture based on peasant agroecology.
This industrial agri-food system continues to push for the loss of rural population, family and social farming, and the lack of generational succession. It also leads to serious environmental consequences, such as increased water pollution due to intensive agriculture and loss of biodiversity. Added to this is the impact of the climate crisis and biodiversity on small and medium-scale agriculture, with losses of up to 80% depending on the crop.
Family farming in Spain represents 82% of agricultural holdings and is essential for social cohesion in rural areas, for the preservation of agricultural biodiversity that produces healthy and sustainable food, and for the development of a socially just and sustainable agricultural model. It is on this agriculture that the development of sustainable and resilient food systems in the face of the ecological, climate, and biodiversity crisis should focus.
Therefore, the member organizations of La Via Campesina, as well as Nos plantamos, emphasize the importance of supporting small family and social farms towards a more sustainable and just transition, according to a social, environmental, and economic approach that strengthens food sovereignty.
Nos plantamos is an alliance of organizations and individuals from the Food Sovereignty movement in favor of peasant agroecology, with the participation of farmers and agricultural workers, which advocates for respect for the environment, rural areas, and offers consumers healthy, quality, and local food.
*Nos plantamos is a play on words that refers to both staying in a public place to protest and evoking the action of planting and working the land.