[E-rundbrief] Info 195 - Democratisation of Aid: Via Campesina Tsunami Relief

Di Feb 1 12:24:07 CET 2005

E-Rundbrief - Info 195 - Peter Rosset and María Elena Martínez:  The 
Democratisation of Aid: Via Campesina Tsunami Relief.

Bad Ischl, 1.2.2005

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

===========================================================

The Democratisation of Aid

Peter Rosset and María Elena Martínez

February 2005

Red Pepper Magazine (UK)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is the best way to ensure disaster relief programmes achieve their 
stated goals instead of simply funding aid-agency bureaucracy, neo-liberal 
'restructuring programmes' or even religious extremists? By giving to 
organisations rooted in the communities affected. The global alliance Via 
Campesina follows exactly that approach. Here, Peter Rosset and María Elena 
Martínez explain how Via Campesina works

When governments and mainstream aid organisations roll into action in the 
wake of events like the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, it's hard not to 
have mixed feelings. While recognising the obvious need for a massive 
relief operation, you can't but feel anxious about the Pentagon sending 
troops to, and building new bases in, the disaster areas, all in the name 
of 'humanitarian aid'. You also wonder about the 'overhead' expenses of the 
aid industry, already criticised for dumping GM food in Indonesia, and 
about aid shipments being received at military airports and used as the 
'carrot' in counter-insurgency campaigns that carry very big sticks.

Perhaps a more positive approach to helping the fisher-folk and peasants 
who make up the vast majority of the tsunami victims is being pursued by 
the Via Campesina Tsunami Relief and Reconstruction Fund. This global 
campaign is unusual because it is being carried out by grass-roots 
community groups based in the regions affected by the disaster.

Via Campesina is a unique global alliance of peasant, family-farmer and 
farm-worker, rural women and youth, indigenous and landless peoples' 
organisations, which represent as many as 150 million people worldwide. In 
the tsunami-affected areas, key Via Campesina members include the 
Indonesian Federation of Peasant Unions (FSPI), which has a large presence 
in Aceh and North Sumatra provinces, the areas closest to the earthquake 
epicentre, the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, which includes the 
Federation of Southern Fisherfolk, and the Sri Lankan peasant federation, 
the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform. In this campaign 
Via Campesina is also working closely with,and sending support to, the 
member organisations of its sister alliance: the World Forum of Fisher 
Peoples, which has a strong presence in the affected regions of India and 
Sri Lanka.

The alliance has been at the forefront of political mobilisation against 
corporate-led globalisation, untrammelled free-trade agreements, and 
pernicious World Bank rural development policies since it was founded in 
1993. In the political space that Via Campesina has created, family farmers 
in the US , Europe and Canada have discovered that they have more in common 
with peasants and indigenous people in India , Mozambique and Mexico than 
they do with the corporations that drive industrial agriculture in the 
North. On this common ground family farmers from the North and peasants 
from the South have stood together at anti-WTO protests ranging from 
Seattle in 1999 to Cancún in 2003. Now they have turned their collective 
sights to rebuilding the communities devastated by the tsunami.

Via Campesina's global fundraising campaign is channelling assistance 
directly to affected communities of fisher-folk and peasants, for their own 
relief and reconstruction efforts, through their grass-roots member 
organisations. The basic principle is that peasants and fisher-folk should 
be the key actors in relief and reconstruction of their own communities and 
livelihoods. Thus, in Indonesia members of local peasant groups affiliated 
to the FSPI are donating fresh, locally produced food to affected 
communities; and in Sri Lanka the Via Campesina friend the National 
Federation of Fishworkers (Nafso) is organising unaffected people to assist 
the affected, and is helping local boat builders repair or replace the 
fishing boats damaged or lost in the tsunami, so people can get back on 
their feet as quickly as possible.

Local Via Campesina organisations have several concerns about mainstream 
aid. They fear, for example, that the Bush administration will use the need 
for humanitarian relief as a pretext for establishing military posts all 
over the region. They are worried that instead of buying food aid locally, 
which would strengthen local production and distribution networks, 
international donors and charities will dump excess GM grain from the US on 
local markets, thus undercutting the local peasant economy. They are 
concerned that charities will use the tsunami donations to cover the cost 
of their international payrolls, and that they will cooperate in using the 
reconstruction effort to implement World Bank-led 'structural reforms' that 
intensify poverty. They also fear that aid shipments fall into the hands of 
local militaries.

In contrast to the practice of the mainstream, international aid sector, 
Via Campesina's approach follows a tradition of self-help, grass-roots, 
civil society relief and reconstruction responses to natural disasters 
around the world. After Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in 1998, for 
example, peasant organisations and local NGOs were far more effective than 
government agencies weakened by structural adjustment policies, and helped 
reign in the worst excesses of government corruption; they also 
strengthened and empowered grass-roots movements. Much the same was true in 
the Philippines following the earthquake on the island of Luzon in 1990 and 
the eruption of the island's Mount Pinatubo volcano in 1991; and of Mexico 
City, where a number of radical barrio organisations emerged after the 
earthquake of 1985, forcing the government to seize 7,000 properties from 
private landlords, forming citizen watchdog groups to monitor government 
abuses, and organising their own social services. Local community 
organisations also tend to have lower costs, as they typically mobilise 
local volunteers instead of highly paid international staff or costly 
military institutions.

The lessons of all this are clear. If we want the relatively small 
financial contributions we as activists can make for disaster relief and 
reconstruction to be effective, we should channel them to local grass-roots 
organisations. And if we want these efforts to contribute to the 
grass-roots mobilisation and political empowerment that is needed to effect 
structural changes for greater social justice, then we should do so in ways 
that strengthen people's organisations at the local and national levels.

Because Via Campesina is a worldwide alliance, contributions and local 
solidarity campaigns promoted by its member and friend organisations have 
already come from an impressive list of countries, including the US, 
France, Norway, Thailand, Belgium, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland, New 
Zealand, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Spain, El Salvador, 
Italy, South Korea, Denmark and Ecuador. The National Farmers Union of 
Canada, the Family Farm Alliance in the US , and the European Farmers 
Coordination have all launched fundraising drives among their members

In everything it does, from demanding that the WTO stops meddling with food 
and agricultural systems to rebuilding communities and local economies 
after disasters, Via Campesina member organisations are guided by the 
alliance's ideal of 'people's food sovereignty'. To guarantee the local 
food security and political independence of all the world's peoples, Via 
Campesina believes that food must be produced through local, diversified, 
community-based production systems. One of the most basic corollaries of 
this is that when food aid is needed for crisis situations, it should be 
procured as locally as possible, thus strengthening local food production 
and distribution systems. The only lasting way to eliminate hunger and 
reduce poverty is through supporting local economic development.

As communities devastated by the tsunami disaster rebuild, and as the 
experience of collective local mobilising for self-help empowers them, the 
food sovereignty principle should guide them towards local economic 
development. That means favouring the recovery of fish and farm production 
for local and national markets by the affected communities themselves. This 
stands in stark crisis to the situation just reported by Nafso in Sri Lanka 
, which is warning of a 'second tsunami of corporate globalisation and 
militarisation'. Nafso accuses the Sri Lankan government, international 
agencies, US troops sent for 'humanitarian' purposes and the tourism 
industry of trying to deprive displaced fishing communities of their right 
to rebuild. The federation says there is a plan to build tourist hotels on 
the coastline formerly occupied by the fishing communities, and to give the 
commercial rights to exploit the former fishing grounds to Canada 's 
industrial trawling fleet.

Peter Rosset is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Change in the 
Mexican Countryside, and María Elena Martínez is coordinator of the 
International Network of Women's Funds; they are both also affiliated to 
the Center for the Study of the Americas, and are frequent collaborators 
with Via Campesina. For details of how to donate to Via Campesina, and of 
how your money would be distributed, visit http://www.viacampesina.org

© Red Pepper

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Feb2005/x-feb2005-RossetMartinez.htm

===========================================================

Matthias Reichl

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

Wolfgangerstr.26

A-4820 BAD ISCHL

AUSTRIA

Tel. +43-6132-24590

e-mail: mareichl at ping.at

http://www.begegnungszentrum.at