[E-rundbrief] Info 1366 - UN-masking Climate Smart Agriculture

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 1366 - International Peasant Movement/Movimiento 
Campesino Internacional: UN-masking Climate Smart Agriculture.

Bad Ischl, 23.9.2014

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UN-masking Climate Smart Agriculture

Published on Tuesday, 23 September 2014 15:13

Press Release

International Peasant Movement/Movimiento Campesino Internacional

History presents itself first as tragedy, and the second time as a farce.

As women, men, peasants, smallholder family farmers, migrant, rural 
workers, indigenous, and youth of La Via Campesina, we denounce 
climate smart agriculture which is presented to us as a solution to 
climate change and as a mechanism for sustainable development. For us, 
it is clear that underneath its pretense of addressing the persistent 
poverty in the countryside and climate change, there is nothing new. 
Rather, this is a continuation of a project first begun with the Green 
Revolution in the early 1940’s and continued through the 70’s and 80’s 
by the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction projects and the corporate 
interests involved. These projects, such as the so-called Green 
Revolution, decimated numerous peasant economies, particularly in the 
South, to the extent that many countries, like México for example, 
that were self-sufficient in food production, became dependent on the 
North to feed their population within a short couple of decades.

The result of these projects, dictated by industrial capital’s need 
for expansion, was the coopting of traditional agricultural producers 
and production and their insertion into the present industrial 
agriculture and food regime. A regime that is based on increased use 
of toxic chemicals, dependent on fossil fuel inputs and technology, 
increasing exploitation of agricultural and rural workers, with its 
resulting loss of biodiversity; a food system that is now under the 
control of corporations and large industrial farmers, the main 
beneficiaries of these projects. The result has been the loss of food 
security and sovereignty, transforming entire countries that were once 
net food exporters into net food importers. This is not so much that 
they cannot produce food, but because now, instead, they produce 
commodity crops used to produce industrialized foods, fuels, 
manufactured products for sale, and for speculation in the world 
financial markets.

Today, some of the same actors of these previous projects, such as the 
World Bank, are the forces behind the imposition of climate smart 
agriculture as a solution to climate change and to increase income of 
the rural poor using the same failed thesis that to increase incomes 
one must increase productivity. It is clear that the intention is to 
create a market for the Green Revolution as a solution to climate 
change, poverty and as a proposal for sustainable development in rural 
areas. We identify this as part of a larger process of “green” 
structural adjustment projects required by an economic system and the 
political elites in distress, because they have exhausted other places 
for enormous speculative financial investments and now see agriculture 
and agricultural land as the new frontier.

Climate smart agriculture begins with deception by not making a 
differentiation between the negative effects of industrialized 
agriculture and the real solutions offered by traditional sustainable 
peasant agriculture which has contributed to alleviating poverty, 
hunger and remediation of climate change. To the contrary, climate 
smart agriculture equates and equally blames all forms of agricultural 
production for the negative effects that in fact only industrialized 
agricultural and food production has caused, and fails to recognize 
and accept the differences between “agri-cultures” and agricultural 
production methods. The agricultural activity that has most 
contributed to greenhouse gas emissions has been industrial 
agriculture, not smallholder sustainable agriculture.

Climate smart agriculture will lead to further consolidation of land, 
pushing peasant and family farmers towards World Bank Projects, the 
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other institutions, 
creating dependency on so-called new technologies through their 
complete packages that include prescriptions of "climate smart 
varieties", inputs, and credit, while ignoring traditional tried and 
true adaptive farming techniques and stewardship of seed varieties in 
practice by farmers.  Reliance on World Bank promoted methods of 
production and genetically modified seed varieties will only increase 
the vulnerability of peasants and small-scale producers, as those 
packages will not allow them to adapt to climate change, nor will they 
be able to improve their incomes, and will only result in pushing them 
further into debt and increased dependency. As the Green Revolution 
meant the imposition of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides as 
requirement to access loans and technical support, now it is the 
imposition of transgenic and biotechnology for the same requirements, 
and all under the name of productivity.

The idea of increasing agricultural productivity in a sustainable way, 
or what is now called “sustainable intensification”, is false. Even 
more so, when one considers that raising yield per hectare through 
production intensification only increases the income for corporations, 
financial market speculators, and large landholding farmers. So called 
“sustainable intensification” is not really about increasing yield per 
acre, it is more about green-washing large scale industrialized 
production following the old adage “get big or get out”. Increasingly, 
peasant and smallholder family farmers have to produce crops for the 
commodity market and not for local and regional food systems. They are 
producing for corporations who are manufacturing unhealthy processed 
food, fuel and supplies to make other products such as farmed –meat 
and pharmaceuticals. Peasants and small–scale family farmers will have 
no choice but to continue to accept the task of feeding the insatiable 
capitalist food production machine and its speculative activities in 
the financial markets.

This intensification of production is also an effort to reduce the 
cost of labor, which means further degrading working conditions, and 
lower salaries for migrant workers.  Most peasants and small holders 
will be cast aside because there's no room for them in industrial 
agriculture except as landless peasants and one of millions of 
migrants that are seeking to try their luck as low wage laborers in 
the cities and countryside.

Ultimately, climate smart agriculture tries to cover-up and hide the 
need for genuine agriculture and land reform. It also hides, and lies 
about, the issue of scarcity of land and natural resources.  Land and 
natural resources are only scarce for peasant and small holding 
farmers. Poverty exists as a result of lack of access to land, land 
tenure and use, the unfair treatment and wages of workers and an 
unrelenting exploitation of their labor in order to meet the needs of 
capitalism, all of which is shaping the madness we are facing today.

In addition, climate smart agriculture, like the Reduction for 
Emission on Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), will expand 
the carbon market and its use for financial speculation. The 
possibility of big profits with investments in carbon credits 
generated from farmlands involved in climate smart agriculture 
projects will increase speculation in the carbon market, leading to 
further “carbon land grabs” by large-scale investors and producers, 
and the further displacement of peasant and smallholder farmers, just 
as REDD displaces indigenous people.

Under this climate smart agriculture framework, there is little hope 
of reducing and removing greenhouse gases, trying to solve food 
insecurity or any significant rural economic and social development. 
The problems of poverty, food insecurity and climate change are not 
market failures, but rather are structural flaws that will persist and 
worsen with its implementation.

We need systemic change NOW!

Today, just as in the past, we are ready to fight against the false 
solutions of the capitalist “green economy” and for real solutions to 
climate change and poverty, through our demands for climate and 
environmental justice.

We continue to propose and put into practice wherever we can 
agroecological production and the construction of people’s food 
sovereignty. We consciously do this as another space to bring about 
the structural changes that we really need to deal with the issues of 
poverty, climate change and peoples’ inability to feed themselves.

We call on all social movements gathered in New York to denounce 
climate smart agriculture as a false solution, oppose the launching of 
the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture by UN Secretary 
General Ban Ki-moon at the UN Climate Summit in New York City, and to 
join us in the struggle for food sovereignty, and for a different 
model of agriculture and food production that will provide a just 
economic well being for small-scale farmers and their communities 
while producing enough healthy food to meet people’s nutritional needs 
and guaranteed access to food for everyone. Any method of production 
and consumption, to be truly sustainable, must enrich and protect 
Mother Earth. (Download PDF)

NO TO CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE!

YES TO LAND REFORM AND AGROECOLOGY

FOR PEOPLE’S FOOD SOVEREIGNTY!

GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE GLOBALIZE HOPE!

For more information during the NYC Climate Summit, you can contact:

Dena Hoff, Antolin Huascar or Carlos Marentes Jr., at (413) 345-1137 
(USA).

Via-info-en at viacampesina.org http://viacampesina.org/Via-info-en/


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Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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