[03/07/2006] Two conferences, two views of agrarian reform - FMST reports

Two conferences, two views of agrarian reform
Author: FMST's Charlotte Casey

Two international conferences are taking place this week in Porto Alegre, both sponsored by the United Nations Agency on Food and Agriculture (FAO) and both on the subject of agrarian reform. The similarities end there.

Approximately 70 nations sent ministers or other high-ranking officials and their entourages to the official conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. (The US sent a relatively low-level bureaucrat, undoubtedly with his own entourage.)

The parallel conference (a “people´s conference‿) is also meeting in the same building at the Catholic University under the title of Land, Territory, and Human Rights.About 400 delegates and observers to this conference come from peasant and small-farmer organizations, member groups of the international coalition La Via Campesina (www.viacampesina.org) (Brazil´s MST is a member organization.)

Over the weekend, La Via Campesina members from all over Central and Latin America and as far away as Indonesia, South Korea, and Nepal gathered at the Capuchin Convent in Porto Alegre to work out their political position and strategy and tactics for the coming week.

A press release issued on Sunday by La Via Campesina follows:
For peasant organization, FAO initiates a discussion
The International Conference on Agrarian Reform sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was organized in a rushed manner and therefore cannot be conclusive. This is the position of La Via Campesina International that was presented in a press conference on Sunday (March 5) in Porto Alegre.

La Via Campesina, which comprises peasant movements, considers the discussion on the topic to be a positive step but it questions the rush to hold the conference. For La Via Campesina, the conference was put together in a hurried way that prevented the effective participation of the parties involved.

"The Conference should not publish any letter of principles or directions. It should serve as a space for accumulating knowledge and for integration among the various peasants of the world, looking forward to a future meeting, more organized, in three or four years", according to Egídio Brunetto, of the national coordinating body of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST). He highlighted the low level of participation by heads of states and countries, which shows the lack of representation in the meeting. "This is serious, because it shows the governments´ lack of interest in carrying out agrarian reform", he stated.

La Via Campesina believes that what was lacking in the planning process for the conference was to put together a discussion about Agrarian Reform in the various countries. "The people in rural areas do not know about the existence of this Conference", declared Rafael Alegría from Honduras, a member of the peasant organization COCOCH.

Market-based Agrarian Reform

La Via Campesina also reiterated its criticisms of the World Bank’s model for Agrarian Reform. For La Via Campesina, the international agency is based on financing the purchase of lands and not on expropriating large estates. So they transform land into a commodity.

Nettie Wiebe, representing the National Farmers Union of Canada, related the tragic experience promoted by the World Bank in Canada, one of the countries that is considered as a laboratory for its policies. "Currently, more than two-thirds of the farm families have left the land. Those who remain are in debt and are impoverished, despite the country’s great productivity", she said. In 2005 alone, more than two thousand peasants in the region of Bangalore, in the South of India, committed suicide because of the debts to financial institutions.

Rafael Alegría stated that the question of land is a world-wide problem. Along these lines, La Via Campesina is launching the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, involving peasant organizations from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. "In this campaign, besides the importance of Agrarian Reform, we are denouncing the criminalization of the social movements by the police forces and by the governments".