www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS,
August-September 2002
Protesters challenge World Food Summit
The streets of Rome were filled with 40,000 protesters
in June, marching against the World Food Summit held under UN auspices.
Participants included farmers from the Third World and Europe, environmentalists
and activists from the movements against capitalist globalization, who
contrasted the politicians dining on lobster and foie gras with the 12.8 million
southern Africans now at risk of starvation. The U.S. led the fight to turn the World Food Summit
into a vehicle for biotech and agribusiness multinationals, using the fight
against hunger as a pretext for selling biotechnology and demanding opening of
markets. Many delegates from poor countries objected. Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni insisted that technology is not the solution: “The
most fundamental problems are not the weather; are not lack of improved seeds.
The main causes of food shortages in the world are really three: wars,
protectionism in agricultural products in Europe, the USA, China, India, and
Japan, and protectionism in value-added products on the part of the same
countries.” The U.S. did not even let the summit recognize the right
to safe and nutritious food, which is implied by the 1948 UN Declaration on
Human Rights. Many protesters echoed the message of French farmer and
anti-globalization activist Jose Bove: “GMOs (genetically modified organisms)
are no answer to hunger. It is just that big multinationals want to control all
the rights to seeds.” Activists also held a counter-summit in Rome, the World
Forum for Food Sovereignty. The counter-summit’s closing declaration attacked
“globalization and liberalization, intensifying the structural causes of
hunger and malnutrition [resulting in] displacements of peoples and massive
migration, the loss of jobs that pay living wages, the destruction of the land
and other resources that peoples depend on, an increase in polarization between
rich and poor and within and between North and South, a deepening of poverty
around the world, and an increase of hunger in the vast majority of nations.” The declaration called for “strengthening of
production by the poor themselves for local markets or the radical
redistribution of access to productive resources that is fundamental to real
change for the better.” To the plans of the rulers, it “counterpose[s] the
unifying concept of Food Sovereignty as the umbrella under which we outline the
actions and strategies that are needed to truly end hunger.” As important as it was, what the declaration disregarded
was that the phenomenon it attacked, “the unbridled monopolization and
concentration of resources and productive processes in the hands of a few giant
corporations,” is the law of development of capitalism. Or to be precise, one
pole of that law, the other pole being the growth of poverty, unemployment,
revolt of the exploited working class, and new passions and new forces to uproot
this outmoded capitalist system, which has shown a far greater ability to
generate famine and war than human development. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
