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Friday, October 16 was World Food Day, and peasant farmers around the world participated by protesting. Think about the irony that most of the world's hungry people are farmers. You would think that they would be the most food secure because, when all else fails, they can eat their crops.
While the small farmers of the world do not control world governments or international institutions like the UN or the World Bank, they are well organized and united together through the organization Via Campesina. La Via Campesina links together farmers in North, Central and South America, Africa, India, and elsewhere around the world. I've had the good fortune of meeting several of these folks, including representatives of the organization from East Africa, Nicaragua, and Mexico, as well as (of course) the United States. One friend affiliated with the organization just wrote me upon his return from Mexico, where he visited poor farmers and participated in World Food Day efforts there.
As you can see in Via Campesina's press release (below), much of the protests' focus was on opposition of GMOs. This is their focus for a number of reasons, which are not stated in the press release itself. For one thing, sending aid money to research labs to maybe produce GM seeds in years or decades does not help the hungry today. There are a number of things that those aid dollars can be used for right now to help the hungry now. Second, the aid money used for GMOs often goes from the American government right back to American corporations. It never ends up in the hands of the poor farmers who are supposedly the recipients of the aid. The issue is much more complex than just those two factors, but I think rather than writing up something on it with my thoughts, I would do better to interview the folks from Via Campesina who are at the center of the issue. Hopefully I will be able to do that in the next few weeks.
UPDATE: Here's a write-up of a protest by French farmers, although it does not appear connected with La Via Campesina. Certainly the issues they are protested are connected, whether or not the farmers coordinated their protests with the other protests held around the world or not.
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