AAN: Policy Institute for Farmers’ Welfare, National Food Security and Community Empowerment

Yesterday’s meeting, featured in the Bangkok Post article below, touched on a lot more than AFTA tariff reductions and their impacts on small farmers.  This new Institute is the product of many years of work and collaboration with Thailand’s Agriculture and Cooperatives Ministry, Commerce Ministry and Public Health Ministry.  Over the next three years, the Policy Institute will work to mobilize information about sustainable agriculture and our network’s way of thinking about sustainable agriculture and farmer welfare.

The meeting also featured a proposal from Dr. Prawet Wasee to change the Agriculture Ministry’s name to the “Farmers Ministry.”  While this change is unlikely, it speaks to the kind of ideological change needed within the government.  It is clear that farmers are seen by the government as inefficient goods-producers and without any reform of this approach, the government will again fail in supporting small farmers in the liberalized ASEAN economy.  Farming is actually a way of life for many people – they don’t see themselves as just chow naa (rice farmers) but chow baan (villagers), and life takes place in and around their fields.  Market production and agrochemicals have destroyed this relationship for many farmers, but even with the impacts of the 1997 financial crisis and current global recession, rural communities have been able to absorb migrants.  Food security has been maintained in rural communities because of how many people continue to grow food or see the importance of preserving local biodiversity (and local foods). The government cannot afford to view farmers’ careers as simply commodity-producing and view them as people with important social value.

Beneficial insects กองทัพมดจัดการเพลี้ย

beneficial insects at work – red ants taking care of aphids on a yardlong bean plant

กองทัพมดจัดการเพลี้ย

from last winter: growing yardlong beans integrated with corn – the corn is harvested and the beans climb up

La Via Campesina Statement on Haiti

To the governments and organizations gathered in Montreal on the situation in Haiti

The recent tragedy in Haiti shocked the people of the world for its destructive impact, the environmental and social consequences, and especially for the loss of human lives. Unfortunately, natural disasters are not new in that Caribbean country, which was impacted in 2008 by hurricanes Hanna and Ike.

Nor is it the first time we have watched the international community make pledges of cooperation and assistance to Haiti. We are concerned, as organizations and social movements and on the basis of permanent contact and consultation with our partners there, that the international response be coordinated on the basis of respect for their sovereignty and in full accordance with the needs and demands of the Haitian people.

Now is the moment for the governments that form part of the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH), the United Nations, and especially the U.S., Canada, and France, to reasses the many mistaken policies they have implemented in Haiti. The country’s condition of vulnerability to natural disasters – in large part caused by the devastation of the environment, the lack of basic infrastructure and the weak capacity of state social action – is not unrelated to these policies, which have historically undermined the sovereignty of the people and their country, thus generating a historical, social, economic, environmental, and cultural debt in which these same countries and institutions have a major share of responsibility. Reparations must be made to the Haitian people for these debts, and all the more so in the face of the present situation affecting the country.