Food Sovereignty Prize: The peoples’ alternative to the World Food Prize
Moderator’s Note: The
World Food Prize was conceived by Norman E. Borlaug, one of the key figures
behind the misnamed Green Revolution that led to the globalization of
chemical-intensive, highly mechanized mono-crop agriculture. Since 1986, The
World Food Prize has been awarded to individuals and entities (including
corporations) that are seen as having “made vital contributions to improving
the quality, quantity or availability of food throughout the world.”
The
Prize has never been granted to alternative agriculture groups or individuals
that promote agroecology, permaculture, and other more sustainable and
equitable forms of food production and is instead typically granted to
individuals and entities promoting corporate and industrial models of
agriculture. So, we have watched with a considerable amount of disgust as the
World Food Prize this past June was awarded to corporate executives associated
with Monsanto and Syngenta. The 2013 recipients of the prize are Robert
Fraley, the chief technology officer at Monsanto and Mary Dell Chelton of
Syngenta. The granting of an award to Fraley and Chelton seems more than dishonorable
given that both Monsanto and Syngenta are major financial sponsors of the
Prize.
The
granting of the World Food Prize to corporations may allow these capitalist
interests to celebrate their ability to manipulate technological advances to
increase profits but betrays the very idea that this has anything to do with
addressing hunger, malnutrition, or the structural violence of poverty
underlying these horrific conditions. We note that despite the promises these
companies have made to end world hunger through the application of commercial
agricultural biotechnology, the number of hungry and malnourished persons
across the plant stands a more than a billion. The biotechnology paradigm has
been great for the bottom line of these corporations but has done little to
reverse the growing hunger, malnutrition, and ecological devastation we see
across the planet. If anything, a rapidly growing body of scientific evidence,
which we continue to report on here, suggests that these corporations are
actually increasing the problem of world hunger largely by undermining the
ability of local communities to grow their own heritage foods based on
environmentally sound and socially equitable methods.
Again,
the recognition of these corporations is no surprise since the sponsors of the
so-called World Food Prize is a list of the corporate who’s who interested in
advancing capitalist control of food systems and includes, among others: The
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DuPont Pioneer, Archer Daniels Midland
Company, Bayer CropScience, Cargill, Monsanto, Syngenta Corporation, Pepsico,
and other usual suspects including banks and other financial interests.
So,
it is with a great deal of enthusiasm that we share news of the peoples’ grassroots alternative to the World
Food Prize. The Food Sovereignty
Prize (established in 2007) is awarded by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance. According to its
homepage, the US Food Sovereignty Alliance “works to end poverty, rebuild local
food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system.” In
contrast to the World Food prize and its emphasis on corporate or large state
actors, the Food Sovereignty Prize recognizes that “all people have the right
to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound
manner” and “uphold the right to
food as a basic human necessity and public good and work to connect our local
and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty.”
To
recognize and celebrate the establishment of the peoples’ alternative to the
World Food prize, I am posting the press release associated with the
announcement of the 2013 or Fifth Food Sovereignty Prize, which was granted to four
grassroots activist farmer organizations from southern India, the Basque Country,
Mali, Brazil and Haiti. The 2013 award ceremony will take place October 15 n New York City.
Reject The Big Lie: Big Ag and the
World Food Prize
THE ALTERNATIVE FOOD SOVEREIGNTY PRIZE
To the Lovers of Justice and Defenders of People of the Land
Stephen Bartlett | Louisville, KY | October 2, 2013
The
US Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Food Sovereignty Prize Committee sent this
very important message (below) to the world, with the question regarding the
Big Ag “World Food Prize”. How
could corporations whose technologies undermine food sovereignty—by destroying
plant diversity and displacing millions of farmers— be honored for fighting
hunger?
Our
response? Awarding the
alternative, or the legitimate prize, for agricultural organizations responding
intelligently to the reality of hunger and ill health in the world – the Food Sovereignty Prize, which is to be
awarded Oct 15 in New York. (Read more below).
Ag
Missions, together with the Food Sovereignty Prize committee and Grassroots
International, have organized a Haiti Food Sovereignty tour Oct 13-27 with
representatives of the 1st Prize Winners, the G4 and Dessalines Brigade of
Haiti! (Our tour partner
organizations ended up winning!)
Contact
me for more info on events being planned for that tour in NYC, Des Moines,
Detroit, Chicago, Wisconsin, and Louisville, Kentucky... there is a description of the speakers
and tour at bottom of this email.
Peace
through justice,
Stephen Bartlett Agricultural Missions
US Food Sovereignty Alliance
sbartlett@ag-missions.org
502-896-9171
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
The Fifth
Annual Food Sovereignty Prize
FARMERS, WORKERS, AND NATURE FEED THE WORLD—NOT CORPORATE
GMOS
A message from the Food Sovereignty Prize Committee, U.S.
Food Sovereignty Alliance
Wednesday
October 2, 2013
When
it comes to ‘feeding the world,’ agribusiness keeps selling the same old
“solutions” that are actually undermining people’s access to healthful and
sustainable food: massive industrialized farming operations, biotech (GMO)
crops, pesticide-intensive mono-cropping, and so-called “free trade” agreements.
They insist we just need to produce more food (with their seeds and
petrochemicals) for the nearly one billion people who go hungry each year—yet
landfills overflow with food waste in countries where agribusinesses have
gained control of seeds, livestock, markets, and prices.
In
spring 2013, Monsanto grabbed headlines when its genetically modified wheat,
MON71800—not approved for production or consumption—was found growing in a
farmer’s field. Yet in June,
Monsanto and Syngenta executives were rewarded with the 2013 World Food Prize,
even as evidence keeps pouring in about how these corporations undercut
farmers’ ability to survive and feed their communities.
How
could corporations whose technologies undermine food sovereignty—destroying
plant diversity and displacing millions of farmers— be honored for fighting
hunger? Now, Monsanto has succeeded in convincing Congress to retain the
Monsanto Protection Act in its latest spending bill—preventing judges from
halting the planting and sale of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that
USDA has found unsafe.
GMOs
are the antithesis of food sovereignty—patented technology that robs
communities of the ability to feed themselves. These corporate-controlled seeds are both destructive and
unnecessary: evidence continues to confirm the effectiveness, and efficiencies,
of agro-ecological sustainable farming. In April, a long-term study on soil
health published in Crop Management demonstrated that organic farming not only
improves soil quality, but can also boost yields per acre. Many previous
studies have shown that small to medium-sized organic farms growing diverse
crops are highly productive, sustaining communities and the land.
And
the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s recent Trade and
Environment Review for 2013 entitled Wake up before it is too late: Make
agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate
claims that “The world needs a paradigm shift in agricultural development from
a ‘green revolution’ to an ‘ecological intensification’ approach.”
At
a September 21 press conference, Dave Matthews of Food Democracy Now avowed,
“We can’t eat well if we eat the giant corporate food from a profit-driven
system.” He was speaking at the 2013 Farm Aid press conference, but could have
been addressing a college campus on food sovereignty.
Farm
Aid founder Willie Nelson declared recently, “[Family farmers] restore the
Earth, grow the food, and provide the fuel to power our lives safely and
sustainably.”
Indeed,
while corporations churn out more GMO seeds, pesticides, and glossy PR, a
growing worldwide movement of farmers, fishers, workers, and eaters has created
concrete solutions to poverty and hunger—on and in the ground.
The
2013 Food Sovereignty Prize honorees from southern India, the Basque Country,
Mali, Brazil and Haiti fight resource grabs, cultivate traditional crops, and
defend their communities from exploitation by multi-national corporations. Like
family farmers in the U.S., they deserve the right to grow the foods they need
and want without pressure from foreign agribusinesses and government agencies.
“The
Food Sovereignty Prize symbolizes the fight for safe and healthy food for all
peoples of the earth,” said Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, member of the Executive
Committee for the Group of 4, one of this year’s winners. “It’s a fight that
must be waged both locally and globally, and requires deep solidarity among all
organizations fighting for food sovereignty.”
Flavio
Barbosa, of the South American Dessalines Brigade, added: “Receiving this prize
for the partnership between the Group of 4 and the Dessalines Brigade is an
incentive for others to participate in long exchanges such as the one we are
experiencing in Haiti. And it charges us with even greater responsibility to
continue our defense of peasant agriculture and agroecology as a way to produce
sustainable, healthy chemical-free foods accessible for all.”
Food
sovereignty also mean opposing international trade policies that give advantage
to transnational agricultural companies while displacing local, subsistence
farmers and rural communities around the globe. These “free trade” policies,
such as NAFTA, GATT, and now the TPP, threaten food sovereignty and farmers
around the world, and pressure millions to migrate to other countries—where
many become exploited farm laborers and food industry workers in a foreign
land.
We
don’t need GMOs to feed the world; we need access to healthy soil, fresh water,
abundant wild fish, seeds that produce ecologically and nutritionally beneficial
crops, and people who know how to grow and harvest foods with the planet and
future generations in mind.
On
Twitter: #FoodSovPrize
Tell
us what you think:
Haiti Food Sovereignty Tour: October 13-27, 2013
We
invite your organization, church committee, coalition or support group to
consider hosting an event with leaders of the dynamic Haitian family farmer
movement, who will be touring with Agricultural Missions October 13-27,
2013. The tour is co-sponsored by
Grassroots International, Why Hunger and the US Food Sovereignty Alliance Food
Sovereignty Prize committee. Our
featured speakers for the tour will also be receiving this year’s Food Sovereignty
Prize at a gala ceremony in New York City on October 15 on behalf of the G4
peasant movements of Haiti (Tet Kole, MPNKP, MPP, KROS) and the Dessalines
Brigade.
Featured speakers:
Rose Edith Germain. Veteran leader of the National Peasant Movement of
the Papaye Congress (MPNKP) and Executive Director of MULAC (Joined Hands for
Community Liberation and Advancement)
Flavio Barbosa. Coordinator of the Via Campesina Brazil solidarity
Dessalines Brigade, located in Artibonite, Haiti, and working in solidarity
with regional and national peasant movements. Member of the Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil
(MST)
The
tour will be in New York City from October 13-16, in Des Moines, Iowa October
17-19, Detroit, Michigan October 19-21, Wisconsin and Illinois October 21-24,
and Louisville, Kentucky October 25-27.
The
speakers will be addressing the strategies, programs, policy challenges and
resource challenges for the on-going revitalization of Haitian agriculture, as
well as how these inspiring and valuable lessons can be shared with food
sovereignty proponents and farmers in the U.S. After all, it was the G4 and Dessalines Brigade who managed
to stop Monsanto in its tracks in the months following the earthquake.
If
you are near any of these locations and would like to either participate in
events being planned, or to organize an event, dinner, meeting, etc… as part of
the tour, please contact: Stephen Bartlett, Coordinator for Education and
Advocacy, Agricultural Missions at: sbartlett@ag-missions.org;
502-896-9171, cell when touring:
502-415-1080.
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