Miguel A. Altieri, President, Sociedad Cientifica Latino Americana de Agroecologia (SOCLA)

May 2008

The Via Campesina has long argued that farmers need land to produce food for their own communities and for their country and for this reason has advocated for genuine agrarian reforms to access and control land, water, agrobiodiversity, etc, which are of central importance for communities to be able to meet growing food demands. The Via Campesina believes that in order to protect livelihoods, jobs, people's food security and health as well as the environment, food production has to remain in the hands of small scale sustainable farmers and cannot be left under the control of large agribusiness companies or supermarket chains. Only by changing the export-led, free-trade based, industrial agriculture model of large farms can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger and environmental degradation be halted. Social rural movements embrace the concept of food sovereignty as an alternative to the neo-liberal approach that puts its faith in an inequitable international trade to solve the world’s food problem. Instead, it focuses on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty and farmer to farmer networks.

Being a global movement, the Via Campesina has recently brought their message to the North, partly to gain the support of foundations and consumers, as political pressure from a wealthier public which increasingly depends on unique food products from the South marketed via organic, fair trade, or slow food channels could marshal the sufficient political will to curve the expansion of biofuels, transgenic crops and agroexports and put an end to subsidies to industrial farming and dumping practices that hurt small farmers in the South. But can these arguments really captivate the attention and support of northern consumers and philanthropists? Or is there a need to come up with a different argument, one that emphasizes that the very quality of life and food security of the populations in the North depend not only on the food products but in the ecological services provided by small farms of the South. In fact it is herein argued that the functions performed by small farming systems still prevalent in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the post peak oil era that humanity is entering, comprise an ecological asset for humankind and planetary survival. In fact, in an era of escalating fuel and food costs, climate change, environmental degradation, GMO pollution and corporate dominated food systems, small, biodiverse, agroecologically managed farms in the Global South are the only viable form of agriculture that will feed the world under the new ecological end economic scenario.

There are at last five reasons why Northern consumers should support the cause and struggle of small farmers in the South

International Agroecology Program

The main goal of this program is to promote agroecological initiatives that exert a positive impact on the livelihoods and food sovereignty of small farming communities in various Latin American countries.