Around the world it seems more and more that the time has come for La Via Campesina.  The global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an alternative proposal for how to structure a country's food system, called Food Sovereignty.  It was clear at the World Forum for Food Sovereignty, held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been gaining ground with other social movements, including those of indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade unions, and others.  Though when it comes to governments and international agencies, it has until recently been met with mostly deaf ears.  But now things have changed.  The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already

"Burning food today so as to serve the mobility of the rich countries is a crime against humanity" said Jean Ziegler, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food criticizing the growing push for using food crops as fuel crops and diverting land use from food cultivation to fuel cultivation. In the face of the growing global crisis that he said could lead to "widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale" United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convened a global task force to respond, and called for closing the $755 million funding gap in the UN's World Food Programme.

Biofuels can be effective disguises. They disguise the unseemly profiteering of agribusinesses that earn millions from corn- and sugarcane-based ethanol. They disguise the power-grabbing of governments that use biofuels as political pawns. And they disguise the suffering of land and people in the Global South whenever they are touted as "safe green technologies."

A new report from the Oakland Institute and Terra de Direitos lifts these disguises and documents how sugarcane grown for ethanol in Brazil has become the country's international bargaining chip, yet has also mobilized millions of Brazilians--and people throughout Latin America--against the growth of monocultures for export as fuel.

The Via Campesina, a global movement of family farmers, agricultural workers, landless, fisherfolk and indigenous peoples, brought their message of food sovereignty to Pascal Lamy, Director General of the World Trade Organization. The very fact that Lamy agreed to meet with them demonstrates that their members have hugely affected the outcome of the WTO negotiations. Among social movements, including labor and environmental circles, there is a growing sentiment that the global food system should serve the needs of the producers, workers and communities most connected to it.

While the Via Campesina is making global leaders hear this message of food sovereignty, Grassroots International is bringing this message, in conjunction with the National Family Farm Coalition, to the U.S. where movement building for rights to land, water, food and seeds are sorely needed. Today, we are lifted by this new global political opportunity.

In this piece written July 26, 2006, Dr. Shiva points out that while there is certainly cause to celebrate the collapse of the WTO's Doha Round, the underlying logic of free (as opposed to fair) trade and its harmful effects on the world's impoverished majority are alive and well in bilateral agreements between the U.S. and individual Third World countries; and that multinational corporations in fact don't need the WTO and multilateral free trade agreements and rules as they can get much of what they want in bilateral deals. Citing the case of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, Dr. Shiva shows that even formal bilateral trade agreements are in and of themselves not required and that ostensibly scientific cooperation and knowledge sharing frameworks can advance the agenda of multinational corporations and their political backers.

The WTO "compromise" being pushed by the industrialized countries and the WTO director would have dealt a double-whammy to Third World countries --devastating their agricultural and industrial sectors in one blow. As Carin Smaller of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy notes, "The current system hasn't worked for U.S. farmers or West African farmers. It has failed workers in Europe as well as those in Bangladesh."

La Via Campesina (a Grassroots International partner and grantee) jointly released a press statement with major Via allies, including Marche mondiale des femmes, Friends of the Earth, and World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers after the World Trade Organization (WTO) announced the collapse of the Doha Round of global trade talks.

In spite of the WTO's announcement of new compromises and "progress" on the agreement on agriculture (which would deepen the damage done to agricultural systems, food sovereignty and rural economies around the world by years of neo-liberal policies), many observers doubt that negotiators will be able to meet the deadlines and goals of the proposed deal.

Grassroots supporter Andy Lin has traveled to Hong Kong with United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker's Rights Consortium, and has sent us a few photographs of the scene there.

Our latest dispatch from Hong Kong: The NFFC's Dena Hoff gives us an inside look at how the WTO tries to keep popular voices as far from the treaty deliberations--and from the press--as they can.

Our latest dispatch from Hong Kong comes from George Naylor, who farms near Churdan, Iowa, is a member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and is President of the National Family Farm Coalition:

Hong Kong.

I'm afraid it's lost it's exotic quality. Now almost everything is name brand. At least there's good public transportation, so traffic jams wouldn't be one reason to leave the city for the family farm like I left California 30 years ago.

Shopping for a cell phone the other night, a young salesperson wanted to know why anyone would oppose the WTO. "It does so many good things," he said.

Hmmm....

I wish I'd had the time to find out what he saw as a future for a young Hong Kong resident like himself. To what would one advance?