[E-rundbrief] Info 870 - Small farmers and climate crisis

Matthias Reichl info at begegnungszentrum.at
Do Nov 12 22:44:20 CET 2009


E-Rundbrief - Info 870 - Via Campesina: Small farmers cool down the
earth! Copenhagen: La Via Campesina joins the mobilisations. Open Letter
to the UN-Climate conference.

Bad Ischl, 12.11.2009

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Open letter from Via Campesina

Small farmers cool down the earth!

Copenhagen: La Via Campesina joins the mobilisations

Small farmers – women and men - from around the world will gather in
Copenhagen in December to defend their proposal for solving the climate
crisis. Sustainable farming and local food production are actually
cooling down the earth. Peasant agriculture allows carbon to be
sequestrated in soils and uses less fossil fuel-based machines and
chemical inputs. Moreover if we eat local, less energy is used to ship
food around the planet. Given the huge impact of industrial agriculture
on greenhouse gas emissions, a massive conversion from industrial
monocultures to small-scale sustainable agriculture and the development
of local markets would actually allow a massive reduction of all
greenhouse gases. (1)

Combined with a serious programme to reduce consumption, such a plan
would actually make irrelevant any discussion on carbon trading,
bioengineering and other technological fixes and trade mechanisms
currently discussed in the UNFCCC.

We believe that these points have to made in Copenhagen. We believe that
the people's voices from around the world have to be heard. The growing
global democratic movement for justice of many social movements
preparing for COP 15 shows the importance of these issues..

People's voices make many tunes, they can whisper or shout, they sing or
play, they talk or debate. The history of social movements shows that
protests take many shapes too. In La Via Campesina, civil disobedience
has always been part of the strategies carried out to support food
sovereignty, along with debates, political work, and the promotion of
real alternatives in our fields. When hundreds of farmers occupy a piece
of land grabbed by a transnational company, when thousands of them
gather in front of the WTO to ask for an end to the liberalisation of
agriculture markets, we defend our right to live. Our right to feed the
world and to feed ourselves. Our right to be respected and to get out of
poverty.

La Via Campesina supports and takes part in non-violent actions of civil
disobedience when it is justified politically in order to develop a
society with more justice and dignity. We clearly reject violence as a
means of action as we reject the violence of the policies discussed
behind closed doors. Policies allowing companies to get carbon credits
to develop monoculture plantations are violent policies. In remote
villages, they lead to land evictions, farmers’ resistance, repression
and environmental devastation.

We strongly condemn the repressive laws that are being passed in Denmark
to muzzle dissent. In the run up of the UNFCCC, we call for mobilisation
and unity among all social movements in our large and rich diversity. We
believe that a confident democracy can only be strengthened by allowing
people from around the world to defend and implement climate justice,
food justice and social justice.

Josie Riffaud,

Member of the La Via Campesina International Coordinating Committee and
co-responsible for the Climate Change issue

Henry Saragih

General Coordinator of La Via Campesina

Jakarta, 6 November 2009

(1) Explenatory data to be published in Copenhagen – Dec 2009.

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E-mail: viacampesina at viacampesina.org, Website: http://www.viacampesina.org
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Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
Wolfgangerstr. 26, A-4820 Bad Ischl, Austria,
fon: +43 6132 24590, Informationen/ informations,
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