Press Release – La Via Campesina
(Rome, October 11, 2010) With the number of hungry people in the world at almost 1 billion, it is clear that the current food system blatantly fails in providing healthy and adequate food for all. The recent increase in land grabbing is an integral part of the dominant corporate agribusiness model with large-scale industrial monocultures. This system has caused climate change and allows speculation on food for the benefit of a small minority.
Today the plenary session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the United Nations started in Rome. La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, wants to take advantage of this occasion to reiterate that sustainable peasant and family farm agriculture can feed the world, as mentioned in our newest publication.
This also means that the solutions reside in changing our food system to a system within the framework of food sovereignty that has sustaibable family farming at its centre.
Small food producers are already feeding a huge amount of people, using smaller plots of land and working in a sustainable way.
More and more actors, such as stated in the IAASTD report recognise that small-scale sustainable farming is the way to find sustainable solutions to this terrible violation of the human right to food.
The CFS should put the right to food at the heart of the global food and agricultural governance and international institutions and governments should be made accountable regarding their efforts to implement this right. The points of view of civil society organisations directly affected by the food crisis should constitute the basis for the development of solutions. La Via Campesina will be present at the CFS to provide a follow-up to the discussions and propose real solutions.
Press contacts
Annelies Schorpion: +393393972104 (7th to 15th of October) or +32474847280, a.schorpion@eurovia.org, viacampesina@viacampesina.org
Lorenzo Misuraca (Aiab): +393293562461, l.misuraca@aiab.it
