Geneva, an effective tool in the fight against poverty and inequality

Oral statement of Centre Europe Tiers Monde to open-ended intergovernmental working group on a united nations declaration on the rights of peasants and Other People Living in Rural Areas

Madame Chair,

(Geneva, 17 July 2013) Famine and malnutrition continue to gain ground throughout the world, and we have known for several years that the Millennium Development Goals will not be reached in 2015. Worse, 80% of more than a billion persons suffering from hunger and malnutrition live in rural areas and are food producers, as both the Advisory Committee study and FAO reports point out.

Although the causes of this intolerable situation are perfectly well known, most governments and international financial and trade institutions continue to promote a development model that is destructive on the environmental, social and economic level.

Indeed, the imposition of structural adjustment programs and the application on the planetary level of the “market” economy as a development model have caused, among other things, a veritable agrarian counter-reform. It has reinforced the “latifundias” by suppressing all public aid to small- holder farmers and by renouncing all national rural development policies. The privatizations, the liberalization of agricultural markets, the dumping of agricultural products, the commercial development of bio-fuels, stock market speculation on agricultural products and the grabbing of land on a grand scale are the instruments and corollaries of this development model that are each year pushing tens of millions of small farmers to exodus and/or exile. These pressures on national resources are also sources of conflicts, including armed conflicts.

This model also favors the monopoly of transnational corporations within the food chain, from production to marketing of food products. The state subsidies more often than not go to these entities while the small family farm is deprived of support. However, as everyone knows, it is not the transnational corporations that feed the world but the small family farmers devoted to growing food. On the other hand, with the development model that has been implemented, the small farmers, who still constitute almost half of humanity, are threatened.

Small farmers and other family food producers can no longer manage to master the agricultural processes nor the tools nor the marketing of their products. They are stripped of their resources, and very often their property is expropriated and they are displaced. Further, they are excluded from the making of decisions that affect them. In short, they are victims of all sorts of discrimination and human rights violations, from the right to life and to food to the right to free association and to participate in decision-making.

It is in this context that the proposal of the Advisory Committee for the adoption of a United Nations declaration on small farmers must be interpreted. Obviously, existing international human rights norms cover civil and political rights as well as economic, social and cultural rights. However, it is clear that the existing norms do not correspond entirely to the human rights violations of small farmers and other producers of food products.

For example, ten transnational corporations such as Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Cargill, control more than 80% of the seed and other crop input market. Moreover, depending on the estimates, dozens, indeed hundreds, of millions of hectares of arable lands have been confiscated by transnational corporations and by some states over the past twelve years. Water sources have long been the object of desire of transnational corporations and transborder ones are often the cause of interstate conflicts.

This is why the adoption of a new international instrument such as the declaration on the rights of peasants and all other people producing food and working in related areas (fishers, cattle raisers, nomad pastoralists, hunters, gatherers, artisans etc.) which would guarantee, inter alia, access to land, to water, to seeds and to other agricultural resources and means as well as adequate public services, can bring effective protection to peasant families faced with land speculation and the monopolies of transnational corporations. Better protecting food producers will guarantee the provision of food to humanity. This declaration, in our opinion, will constitute also an effective tool in the fight against poverty and inequality.

That the declaration propposed by the Advisory Committee was drafted in consulation with the peasants organizations, in particular La Via Campesina, confers upon it greater legitimacy, given that it reflects the primary concerns of the persons in question. This having been said, it has become apparent in the course of the past two days’ discussions that two important elements are omitted in the draft declaration. These are social security and the measures that states should take to implement the declaration. These elements figure in the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants and Other People Living in Rural Areas.

Madame Chair,

Thank you for your attention