Open letter to SADC Ministerial Committee responsible for Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources

Honourable Ministers,

We write to you as La Via Campesina Southern and Eastern Africa Region, part of a global peasant movement, which brings together millions of peasants, small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous people, pastoralists and nomads, migrant farmworkers, people with insecure land tenure and the landless (among them, mainly youth and women).

We write to you to express our concern and request your remedial action in many issues related to peasant rights and climate change, and insist that our governments understand these problems from the perspective of small-scale food producers and peasants, which constitute the majority of the population of our respective nations.

We recognise and greatly appreciate the incredible efforts our governments have made towards the realization of peasant rights in our continent through the landmark ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). However, in order for Peasant Rights to be instrumental in achieving Climate Justice, we exhort member states to swiftly take action in domestication of UNDROP and having policies that are implemented within grassroots communities.

Our territories within Southern Africa have borne the brunt of the onslaught of climate disasters we face because of the climate crisis. We are facing consecutive years of declining summer rainfalls, changing and unpredictable weather patterns and increased occurrence of extreme weather events. These are causing widespread scarcity of food and water and severe disruption of our food systems. Floods from extreme rainfall are claiming many lives and displacing thousands of people in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Moreover, recent climate models and emerging research suggests that, in the coming years, temperatures in Southern Africa will increase 1,5 times quicker than the global average. This is a grim picture of the future for our region unless real and decisive global and local actions are taken to mitigate and adapt to the current trends.

From our perspective, real solutions to the climate crisis will not come from conforming to the industrial model of food production and consumption. Solutions will come from people-centered initiatives, which critically involve peasant communities. As people directly impacted by climate change, we hereby strongly demand climate justice for a better, cleaner, and more peaceful world. Peasant agroecology is the answer to how we can transform and repair our food system and rural world, and is a core solution in the context of adapting to and mitigating global climate change. We totally reject market-based mechanisms, and other false solutions including Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), Carbon Markets, geo-engineering, among others. We call these false solutions because they are being used to justify widespread land grabbing, and to drive small-scale farmers away from diverse and healthy food production towards export-oriented monoculture farming models, continued dependence on corporate controlled and toxic farm inputs, and the commodification of Nature and Nature’s “services”.

Real solutions impact positively on the lives of the people most affected by climate change. We see a number of crucial issues in our region that need to be addressed in order to effect real solutions to climate change:

1. The full application of the Maputo Declaration is necessary for climate justice. Application must democratically distribute sufficient and appropriate resources towards peasant production systems, instead of covering public operation costs and government agencies who are often not held accountable for the use of these resources, and which deliver very limited or no positive results at all. The agreed 10% of the national budget to agriculture has never been met by any African government. The amount that has been allocated for the past 10 years are deliberately insufficient and they have been allocated inappropriately, creating the space for public-private partnerships that undermine policy and advance profit-driven interests at the expense of our peasant communities. ¹
2. The ongoing wars, specifically in DRC and Mozambique. Our fellow peasants in Cabo Delgado province in Mozambique the off-shore area rich in natural gas reserve and Kivu provinces in the East of DRC have been violated their rights to produce food and enjoy their human rights to farm their lands as enshrined under article 15 of UNDROP due to the presence of war in their areas. Hundreds of peasants in these areas and nearby provinces have lost their lives and livelihoods, while others have managed to escape these war zones to urban areas where they have become landless and jobless while suffering from hunger. Article 15 of the UNDROP guarantees all peasants the right to a decent income and livelihood and means of production, article 17 guarantees the peasants right to land while article 24 guarantees the right to adequate housing.
3. We continue to witness in despair the eviction of rural communities in the name of nature reserves. A number of rural communities are being affected by the implementation of such projects. These so-called “nature-positive” projects have resulted in the eviction of rural communities in Ngorongoro and Mbarali in Tanzania, Virunga in DRC, parts of Namaqualand in the Northern Cape, and the communities surrounding the Kruger National Park, in South Africa. Article 24 of the UNDROP guarantees all peasants the right to adequate housing including protection against forced eviction from their homes.
4. Resource grabbing is also coming in many other forms: We remain concerned with the current efforts to harmonize seed laws that make it illegal for us peasants to exchange and sell our farm-saved and indigenous seeds. This impoverishes and further disempowers peasants and the majority of local populations in favour of multinational seed companies while weakening local food systems. We see the deliberate push for GMO and gene-edited seeds and in our region without consulting us or without any sufficient safeguards. We do not want to get trapped in the hands of multinational seed companies who have patent rights to such technologies risking our food sovereignty and peasant rights in general. Article 19 of the UNDROP guarantees the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas to save, use, exchange and sell their farm saved seed and propagating materials. The same article obligates the SADC countries to take measures to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of peasants to seeds.
5. Land reform in many countries in Africa, including the most successful examples, such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, hasn’t reached the level of total agrarian reform yet. These countries still operate within the context of programs that do not give equality to the majority of their citizens contrary to article 3 of the UNDROP that guarantees the rights of peasants to equality and non-discrimination. Instead, they continue to allocate huge amounts of arable land to big investors (including mining conglomerates), who consistently make false promises to local populations, destroying communities, culture, environment, livelihoods, and local food systems – all in the name of maximising profits of the very few. This includes the growing trend of land-grabbing through contract farming. Article 18 of the UNDROP guarantees the right of peasants to clean the environment while article 26 guarantees the rights to enjoy their culture and traditional knowledge.

As a popular social movement committed to real solutions, we regret that our regional block has failed to act in an articulated and harmonized manner across the relevant spaces (UN Human Rights Council, UNFCCC, WTO, ARIPO, AU, among others) in favour of climate justice and food sovereignty (Article 15 of the UNDROP) in defending peasant rights who are the majority of your citizens.

In addition, African governments’ over-reliance on foreign aid, foreign direct investments (FDIs), and their capitulation to powerful foreign governments and international finance organs has been a major challenge. Such support comes with stringent conditions which favour private multinational, and foreign interests in detriment of our own. This dependency, aggravated by the severe poverty levels across our regions, creates a situation where global creditors use our governments’ public debts as leverage to force them to accept and capitulate to the whims of powerful foreign governments and TNCs.

We, the signatories to this Open Letter to the SADC governments, demand:

• Meaningful consultations with peasants through our organisations and movements in the new Kampala Declaration processes as we have not been consulted enough. Article 2 of the UNDROP guarantees the right to active, free, effective, meaningful and informed participation of individuals and groups in associated decision-making processes.
• Decisively take actions to stop ongoing massacres in Northern Mozambique, DRC and other places in the name of natural resources. Article 6 of the UNDROP guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of a person.
• Commitment to comprehensive and people-centred Agrarian Reforms for the improvement of small-scale food producers’ livelihoods in SADC region. Article 10 of the UNDROP guarantees the peasants right to participation in policy making processes.
• Stop eviction of rural communities from their lands in the name of nature conservation, major extractive projects that only favour the interests of foreign investors and multinational corporations. The relocation of peasant communities from our lands must be accompanied by deep and meaningful consultations with our communities to ensure proper relocation and compensations. Article 24 of the UNDROP guarantees all peasants the right to adequate housing including protection against forced eviction from their homes.
• Promotion of food sovereignty as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Article 15 of the UNDROP guarantees the rights to food and food sovereignty.
• Recognition, adoption, and promotion of peasant agroecology as a viable alternative to industrial agriculture by having supportive structures and policies towards the promotion of agroecology and food sovereignty.
• Stop the ongoing GMO trials in our region as they do not meet our needs. Instead, the resources and efforts employed in those trials should be channelled to support farmer-led research centres and development of farming methods and technical packages that use science to enhance local solutions based on our African farming knowledge systems. Article 26 guarantees peasants rights to culture and traditional knowledge.
• We call for our governments in the SADC region never to get trapped in the commercializing and use of GMO seeds in our region. As peasants whose major role is to feed our region do not need such seeds since we have our own seeds as guaranteed under article 19 of the UNDROP.
• Recognition of true Climate Justice as a core foundation for the development and implementation of real solutions to climate change by adoption of peasant agroecology.
• Our governments must reject externally driven false solutions, especially Climate Smart Agriculture, carbon credits and geoengineering.
• Meaningful representation of women and girls, children, youth, persons with disabilities and the poorest of the poor in policy processes that affects communities. Article 4 of the UNDROP guarantees the rights of peasant women and other women working in rural areas.

We, the peasants of La Via Campesina Southern and Eastern Africa Region and our allies, express our solidarity with all struggles towards the rights of peasants in our region as have been stated in the United Nation Declaration of Peasant Rights and other People living in rural Areas (UNDROP), climate justice, food sovereignty, against false solutions to climate change, all forms of peasant exploitation and discrimination, against industrial farming models and patriarchy.

Standing in solidarity and hope with all the peoples of our region, we remain committed to the struggle for food sovereignty, agroecology, and rights to our territories, culture and identity as the basis for climate justice, and the emancipation and sovereignty of our nations.

WE FEED THE PEOPLES AND BUILD THE MOVEMENT TO CHANGE THE WORLD!

GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE, GLOBALIZE HOPE!

AMANDLA! AWETU!

August | 2024

Below are the organizations, members of LVC SEAF, which sign this letter:

1. Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF) – ZIMBABWE
2. Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania (MVIWATA) – TANZANIA
3. The Right to Agrarian Reform for Food Sovereignty Campaign (FSC) – SOUTH AFRICA
4. The Kenyan Peasants League (KPL) – KENYA
5. Landless Peoples Movement (LPM) – SOUTH AFRICA
6. Eastern and Southern Africa Small-scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF) – UGANDA
7. Confédération Paysanne du Congo (COPACOPRP) – DRC
8. União Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC) – MOZAMBIQUE

Letter also available in Portuguese

1 Smallholder Farmers’ Call for Accelerated Progress in SADC Agriculture, ESAFF, Policy Brief No. 3, June 2024.

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