Rights based research and advocacy organization VOICE has organized a meeting for the celebrating of International Peasants’ Day. The meeting was held on “Agricultural Trade and Farmer’s Struggle for Life and Livelihood” at Mymensingh- a district of Bangladesh on 16th April 2007. The meeting involved farmers, activists, local NGOs, students and others community peoples.

The meeting was presided over by Farjana Akter, Programme Office, VOICE. Rajib Rana Das and Swadhin Chowdhury of VOICE have presented discussion paper.

Farjana Akter discussed the importance about the importance of the day among the participants. She also said, today colonization is still exists in a new form. It is called economic colonization as well as trade liberalization. The developed countries and their transnational corporations have been unrelenting in their efforts to bring about more aggressive trade liberalization not only in the goods market but in services and investments as well, obviously to extract more profits in areas where they have the competitive advantages. On the other hand, farmers of the poorer countries and domestic industries have been devastated by rapid trade liberalization.  Their key mission is to seek profit not for the interest of people. And for this purpose they use corporatized media and transnational companies as instruments.

In that meeting farmers have described their crisis of livelihood which is created through agricultural trade. As we know that almost all least developed countries are the playing doll of multinational companies. Their imposed policies create serious harm for marginal farmers. In the meeting, a farmer described his own sufferings who cultivated hybrid seeds but he did not get any benefits against his investment.

VOICE has also published newsletter on food, agriculture and farmers’ right and distributed among the participants and also distributed countrywide from VOICE information resource centre.

The meeting was ended by the farmers raising voice against corporate agribusiness.

Contact:

Farjana Akter
Programme Officer, VOICE
Bangladesh
email: voicebd@rediffmail.com/farjana@voicebd.org