On Monday, March 7th Grassroots International (GRI) hosted José Bové, a family farmer in France and a leader of the international farmers' movement Via Campesina, and George Naylor, a family farmer from Iowa and President of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), in a talk and discussion about the influence of global agricultural policies on food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty, a concept developed by Via Campesina in the mid-90s, is gaining political and social leverage as global agricultural policies like those found in FTAA and CAFTA continue to threaten the ability of family farmers in both the North and the South to determine how food will be produced and who will make food production decisions.

Via Campesina's members, 150 to 200 million strong, believe in "the peoples', Countries' or State Unions' RIGHT to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries." (You can read the position paper online here.)

Attaching food sovereignty to current agricultural trade and policy debates broadens them to include issues of the right to food, water and land for the world's poorest communities–issues that are vitally important to Grassroots' partners like the MST and MPP and central to GRI's Resource Rights for All initiative.

José and George explained that food sovereignty has become a fight led by farmers against corporate agribusiness and national policies that support them.

It is ironic, José noted, that as global trade agreements seek to homogenize global agriculture policies and production, the largest social movement in the world, Via Campesina, is a farmers' organization calling for local policies and diversified production models.

The response from agribusiness and the U.S. and E.U. has been to divide farmers in the North and South and within nations through proposed policies like subsidy caps in the U.S. George explained that this would position U.S. cotton and rice producers against other U.S. commodity producers because the caps would only affect the former.

With the Via Campesina's resistance to global agricultural agreements and commodity producers losing face in political debates on subsidies, who is benefiting from the U.S. Farm Bill and the E.U.'s agricultural policies?

Corporate agribusinesses are the main profiteers of these policies as they provide the means for keeping production costs low (via subsidies). George revealed that without the current farmer payments "the whole system would come to a halt." Subsidies perpetuate a vicious poverty and resource degradation cycle by encouraging overproduction of crops (i.e., even when supply is met, farmers continue to produce because production costs are so low), soil erosion, increased pesticide use, driving down prices and farmer income. Agribusiness benefits from subsidies through the lowering of crop prices, minimizing their costs and increasing their profits.

What can farmers and their allies do to negotiate with powerful corporations and long skewed agricultural policies? José and George pointed out that there are linkages to be made between farmers and nations around the world. Rather than focusing on limiting subsidies, they explained, all farmers would benefit from and the poverty and resource degradation cycle could be controlled by:

1) Increasing global commodity prices through price supports;
2) Maintaining reserves for excess production to be used in times of need (e.g., drought); and
3) Stopping production when there is an oversupply.

Our partners at GRI struggle with a variety of resource issues that are closely linked with global agricultural policies. Implementing the above mentioned measures, George and José indicated, requires the right to prevent foreign imports from flooding national and local agricultural markets.

Having the capacity to cultivate a favorable environment for local control of agricultural production begins with solidifying basic rights for land, water and political and social capital for marginalized communities. Current global agricultural policies like FTAA and the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture side-line basic resource rights because the policies are geared towards large-scale production models that do not include family farmers or non-market oriented farming.

But another model is possible. Our partner the MST struggle everyday to gain access to land necessary for community self-sufficiency and demonstrate that local control of vital resources is more environmentally and economically sustainable. By connecting local struggles across the globe, GRI, the NFFC and the Via Campesina hope to change the language of agricultural trade from being about corporatization to farmers' rights and redefining the model of production.

José shared a story about an 84 year old military decorated, Frenchmen who asked to be judged before the court on a civil disobedience case for uprooting genetically modified crops in field trials. As a resistor to tyranny in WWII, the man noted that his latest efforts are a "new way to resist." It is this resistance to corporate agricultural models that is the basis of hope for a better tomorrow for our partners and their allies.