|
UNITY STATEMENT OF THE PEOPLES’ STREET CONFERENCE
|
MASIPAG
|
Nov 07, 2002 23:28 PST
|
Here's the UNITY STATEMENT OF THE PEOPLES’ STREET CONFERENCE, please
sign on. Send us an e-mail and we'll add your name to our list.
UNITY STATEMENT OF THE PEOPLES’ STREET CONFERENCE
We, the farmers, representatives of farmers organizations, peoples’
movements and civil society from throughout the Philippines and around
the world who gather here for the People’s Street Conference against the
Annual General Meeting of the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) uphold this statement of unity.
The Street Conference is an independent initiative to claim space for
critiques of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR) and for the presentation of alternatives.
The CGIAR, including the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI),
has consistently failed to meet the needs of poor farmers throughout the
world. From the start of the Green Revolution, the research centers of
the CGIAR have promoted a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to
research that ignores the knowledge and experience of farmers, farming
communities, and indigenous people. The agriculture promoted by the
CGIAR, with its dependence on pesticides, fertilizers and other
chemicals, is environmentally and socially unsustainable. Farmers have
been plunged into debt, their health and the health of their families
has suffered, their knowledge, culture and social systems have been
exploited, and the agro-environment of their farms has been severely
degraded.
Despite decades of effort by civil society, by farmers and farming
communities both requesting and demanding reform of the system, the
CGIAR has shown itself unable or unwilling to reform. Despite
participation in conferences, on committees, writing papers, and
letters, despite interviews, speeches, briefings and meetings, by
millions of farmers throughout the world, we do not see any significant
change in the CGIAR approach. For this reason we are forced to take to
the streets.
The following issues are of particular concern to us:
1. Accountability and governance: The CGIAR has never been accountable
to whom it claims to serve. This is reflected in its governance
structure which is fundamentally controlled by four rich countries of
the North. It has never attempted to solve its problems of
accountability and continues to refuse attempts to genuinely involve
farmers’ organizations in its decision-making processes.
2. The Green Revolution to the Gene Revolution: The Green Revolution
continues to cause immense damage. Far from learning from the mistakes
of the Green Revolution, the CGIAR are frantically chasing the tail of
the latest mythological ‘one-technology-fixes-all:’ genetic engineering.
GMOs are associated with genetic privatization through patenting and
IPR; genetic contamination; market rejection; threats to farmers' rights
through increasing monopolization in agriculture; negative health
effects; environmental damage, and a deepening of the structural
inequalities between rich and poor. The failure of the CGIAR to defend
genetic diversity in the light of contamination is disgraceful.
3. Trusteeship and biopiracy: The inability of the CGIAR to protect
material it holds in its genebanks from biopiracy is a betrayal of the
trust of farmers and farming communities. The FAO-CGIAR trust agreement
has been handled inadequately and must be fundamentally restructured.
Germplasm, its components and derivatives must be kept free of
intellectual property control.
4. Worker health and safety: The relationship between CGIAR centers and
the national workforces facilitates exploitation including, in some
instances, immunity from national labor laws. Illness and death of
workers, contractualization of labor, unfair dismissals and worker
harassment result. Workers have the right to stable, ongoing, safe
employment with adequate remuneration protected by national and
international law.
5. Business as usual: The ever strengthening links with the private
sector and capitulation to private sector values and agendas brings into
question the independence and integrity of the CGIAR. The stated aims of
corporations (to make money) and the CGIAR (supposedly to increase food
security) are completely different. Biopiracy, the undermining of
public-oriented research agendas and a continuing flow of knowledge and
resources from the South to the North are the result.
6. The CGIAR have grossly failed to recognize and enforce farmers’
rights despite their rhetoric.
The CGIAR has shown itself to be unable to change. The use of nice
language and pro-farmer rhetoric to clothe the same unsustainable
approach does not constitute change. For this reason and the reasons
listed above, the Peoples’ Street Conference calls for a dismantling of
the current international agricultural research system and the
reorientation of public funds into responsive, pro-poor, pro-farmer,
sustainable approaches.
New models of agricultural research:
The work of many of the farmers, Peoples’ Organizations and NGOs
attending this street conference is illustrative of the wide range of
farmer-centered research that is being pursued throughout the world
including farmer-breeding initiatives, participative research, and the
maintenance and development of community knowledge. Farmer-led and
farmer-oriented approaches, however, are chronically underfunded,
unsupported and marginalized by the mainstream approach to research.
Call to action:
It is imperative that agricultural research is farmer-centered,
farmer-led, pro-poor, and rooted in the principle of farmers rights,
genuine land reform and food sovereignty. Alternatives to the a
mainstream approach to agriculture must be strengthened and developed.
Funding for socially and environmentally sustainable agriculture must be
strengthened. We call upon donors to reorient their funding from
research on GMOs, hybrids and other damaging techno-fixes to
agro-ecological, farmer led approaches.
Public research on agriculture must be maintained free from the
influence (direct and indirect) of profit-oriented private companies.
We call on all the international scientific community to join farmers in
conducting farmer-led, farmer-oriented participatory research.
We demand that there be no patents on life or any kind of intellectual
property. The international scientific community must join peoples’
movements in explicitly rejecting patents on life, and in proactively
protecting plants, animals and agricultural processes from patents and
other forms of IPR.
The international research community must work to ensure adherence to
human rights, and labor rights in accordance with all national and
international laws.
None of these demands can be achieved without the full implementation of
farmers’ rights at national and international levels. The international
research establishment must recognize and advance farmers’ rights in all
its policies and actions.
The current system of international agricultural research, particularly
the CGIAR, has blighted the development of responsible public science by
diverting resources and subverting knowledge, technologies and agendas.
There has been a stifling of creativity, a marginalization of farmer
science and a tragic narrowing of analysis and goals of research. We
call upon ourselves, the international scientific community, donors, and
governments to start anew in agricultural research.
Uphold People's Control on Agriculture! Assert Farmer-centered
Agricultural Research and Systems!
Signatories:
1. Peasant Movement of the Philippines/KMP
2. La Via Campesina
3. Genetic Resources Action International Network/GRAIN
4. Farmers-Scientist Partnership for Development/MASIPAG (Philippines)
5. International Alliance Against Agrochemical TNCs /IAAATNCs
6. Advocates of Science and Technology for the People/AGHAM
(Philippines)
7. Alliance of Farmers in Cordillera/APIT-TAKO (Philippines)
8. Assembly of the Poor (Thailand)
9. BIOTHAI (Thailand)
10. Brotherhood of IRRI Support Services Group/BISSIG (Philippines)
11. CEDAC (Cambodia)
12. Center for Environmental Concerns/CEC (Philippines)
13. South East Asia Regional Initiatives for Community
Empowerment/SEARICE
14. Sibol ng Agham at Teknolohiya/SIBAT (Philippines)
15. EL KANA (Georgia)
16. Erosion, Technology, Corporation Group/ETC Group (Canada)
17. Forum for Bio-technology and Food Security (India)
18. Institute for Occupational Health and Safety Development /IOHSAD
(Philippines)
19. Patrick Mulvany, ITDG (United Kingdom)
20. Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Philippines)
21. LATIN (Indonesia)
22. Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific/PAN Asia Pacific
23. RRAFA (Thailand)
24. Peasant Movement of the Philippines-Cebu/KMP Cebu (Philippines)
25. Alliance of Farmers in Central Luzon/AMGL (Philippines)
26. Alliance of Farmers in Isabela//DAGAMI (Philippines)
27. Pesticide Action Network Indonesia/PAN Indonesia
28. Health Alliance for Democracy/HEAD (Philippines)
29. Rural Missionaries of the Philippines/RMP (Philippines)
30. National Network of Agrarian Reform Advocates/NNARA (Philippines)
31. National Fisherfolk Movement/PAMALAKAYA (Philippines)
32. Center for Genuine Agrarian Reform/SENTRA (Philippines)
|
|
 |
|
