OUR WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE!
PRIORITY TO PEOPLE'S FOOD SOVEREIGNTY!
WTO OUT OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE!

Food and agriculture are fundamental to all peoples, in terms of both production and availability of sufficient quantities of safe and healthy food, and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures and environments. All of these are being undermined by the increasing emphasis on neo-liberal economic policies promoted by leading political and economic powers, such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), and realised through global institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). Instead of securing food for the peoples of the world, these institutions have presided over a system that has prioritised export-oriented production, increased global hunger and malnutrition, and alienated millions from productive assets and resources such as land, water, fish, seeds, technology and know-how. Fundamental change to this global regime is urgently required.

People’s Food Sovereignty is a Right

In order to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s peoples, it is essential that food is produced though diversified, community based production systems. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

Governments must uphold the rights of all peoples to food sovereignty and security, and adopt and implement policies that promote sustainable, family-based production rather than industry-led, high-input and export oriented production. This in turn demands that they put in place the following measures:

I. Market Policies

• Ensure adequate remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers;
• Exercise the rights to protect domestic markets from imports at low prices;
• Regulate production on the internal market in order to avoid the creation of surpluses;
• Abolish all direct and indirect export supports; and,
• Phase out domestic production subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture, inequitable land tenure patterns and destructive fishing practices; and support integrated agrarian reform programmes, including sustainable farming and fishing practices.

 II. Food Safety, Quality and the Environment

• Adequately control the spread of diseases and pests while at the same time ensuring food safety;
• Protect fish resources from both land-based and sea-based threats, such as pollution from dumping, coastal and off-shore mining, degradation of river mouths and estuaries and harmful industrial aquaculture practices that use antibiotics and hormones;
• Ban the use of dangerous technologies, such as food irradiation, which lower the nutritional value of food and create toxins in food;
• Establish food quality criteria appropriate to the preferences and needs of the people;
• Establish national mechanisms for quality control of all food products so that they comply with high environmental, social and health quality standards; and,
• Ensure that all food inspection functions are performed by appropriate and independent government bodies, and not by private corporations or contractors;

 III. Access to Productive Resources

• Recognise and enforce communities' legal and customary rights to make decisions concerning their local, traditional resources, even where no legal rights have previously been allocated;
• Ensure equitable access to land, seeds, water, credit and other productive resources;
• Grant the communities that depend on aquatic resources common property rights, and reject systems that attempt to privatise these public resources;
• Prohibit all forms of patenting of life or any of its components, and the appropriation of knowledge associated with food and agriculture through intellectual property rights regimes and
• Protect farmers', indigenous peoples’ and local community rights over plant genetic resources and associated knowledge – including farmers' rights to exchange and reproduce seeds.

IV. Production-Consumption

• Develop local food economies based on local production and processing, and the development of local food outlets.
  

V. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

• Ban the production of, and trade in genetically modified (GM) seeds, foods, animal feeds and related products;
• Ban genetically modified foods to be used as food aid;
• Expose and actively oppose the various methods (direct and indirect) by which agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Aventis/Bayer and DuPont are bringing GM crop varieties into agricultural systems and environments; and,
• Encourage and promote alternative agriculture and organic farming, based on indigenous knowledge and sustainable agriculture practices.

VI. Transparency of Information and Corporate Accountability

• Provide clear and accurate labelling of food and feed-stuff products based on consumers' and farmers' rights to access to information about content and origins;
• Establish binding regulations on all companies to ensure transparency, accountability and respect for human rights and environmental standards;
• Establish anti-trust laws to prevent the development of industrial monopolies in the food, fisheries and agricultural sectors; and,
• Hold corporate entities and their directors legally liable for corporate breaches of environmental and social laws, and of national and international laws and agreements.

VII. Specific Protection Of Coastal Communities Dependent On Marine And Inland Fish

• Prevent the expansion of shrimp aquaculture and the destruction of mangroves;
• Ensure local fishing communities have the rights to the aquatic resources;
• Negotiate a legally binding international convention to prevent illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing;
• Effectively implement international marine agreements and conventions, such as the UN Fish Stocks Agreement; and,
• Eradicate poverty and ensure food security for coastal communities through equitable and sustainable community based natural resource use and management, founded on indigenous and local knowledge, culture and experience.