SOLIDARITY MESSAGEs for API
Februari 09, 2009
We want to congratulate API for promoting resistance and struggle against agriculture liberalization and building peasant bases for developing alternative propositions. APIs efforts to liberate peasantry from exploitation, is both urgent and necessary at this time in history.Peasant struggle is critical for human progress and authentic development. It is a pressing need of millions of people. Small and marginal peasantry, landless agriculture workers and women among them, continue to be one of the most exploited groups of the world. Their situation of exploitation and crisis is not new…. and not improving. Condemned to misery and humiliation, small holder farmers and landless have very little to turn to, to ensure survival, except to join the swelling ranks of urban wage labour in oppressive peripheries of modern cities.
This group of peasantry lives in areas of the developing world where over the years agriculture has been “orphaned”, or if one understands it in a historical perspective, has never had a chance to be nurtured into young adulthood. With the march of neo-liberal economic globalization the situation of peasantry has further worsened. Over the last 25 years or so, the shrinking state support to agriculture has further eroded potential for agricultural development in most of the developing world. Even where the regions they live in have seen benefits of agriculture revolutions such as in parts of East Asia, Latin America, India and Pakistan, small farmers have never had the means to access and be part of agriculture progression. Large parts of African agriculture have continued in orphanage, and continued to suffer from distress once imposed on it in different phases of colonial development.
The efforts of peasants to renew themselves through their own hard labour, have also been denied. International prices of food have remained too low for peasants in developing countries to earn enough to support themselves, invest in means of production, renew themselves, and support their own development. Depressed agricultural prices, we know are a result of surplus production in a few areas which have had huge state support in its development. It is only with all subsidies that agriculture in the north is able to produce food at a low price and take the benefits of free trade to export to other regions. It is necessary to underline that international agriculture trade tends to align prices with the lowest ones being offered by exporters of surplus produce.
We have seen how low prices lead to dumping starvation and impoverishment - excluding millions of peasants from agriculture, while promoting under-consumption and under utilization of agricultural resources in regions where majority of agricultural producers reside. Indonesia is no stranger to such dumping during the last crisis.
We have also witnessed how the control over knowledge and technology has been shifted away from farmers to the realm of profits of large corporations. Instruments of Intellectual Property Rights, genetic engineering and technological control at the hands of multinationals mean that the rights of peasants over use of their traditional knowledge for their own good are also lost
In most of the developing countries under-equipped agriculture, often taxed, and insufficiently protected, never had a chance to develop. It has been continuously marauded by North-South and South-South competition, a fall in prices and a large attendant exodus from agriculture. For long, peasants have asked a simple question. Why should we not be allowed to make policies for our own good?
Escaping peasantry has had nowhere to go. Industrialization has never had a chance to progress on the trajectory it begun to, during early stages of post-colonial development. The Bandung dream of post colonial reconstruction did not come to fruition. Since the 1980s, austerity policies of governments, deregulation, relocation, and the business use of free capital have all worked together to ensure that a happy dream of the exploited world, remained a momentary memory at the dawn of liberation.
As the world wakes up to a anti crisis strategy, and a recognition that the whole way of life will need fundamental alternation if we are to see long term sustainable solutions to feed and develop humanity in the coming years, it is clear that such a strategy will need to be firmly based on developing poor peasant economy. The contours of this strategy will need to:
1. Increase Food production, availability and access based on the principle of
Food Sovereignty.
2. Reverse abandonment of sovereign policies of economic development.
3. Increase agricultural prices in a gradual manner, to ensure promotion of
agricultural growth in areas where exodus is now taking place, to ensure the
crisis of peasantry is averted
4. Promote, through policy paradigm and state financing sustainable bases of
agriculture including subsidies for such agriculture to develop
5. Ensure popular control of knowledge and technology in all spheres, including
critically in the sphere of agriculture. Ensure through public research and
development, investments in knowledge and technology and extension services to
promote sustainable small scale agriculture
6. To protect peasants and workers through reducing taxation (direct and
indirect) on agriculture and to encourage taxation on basic imports of food
grains and other agricultural goods.
7. Raise Demand and invest in local economic development. Raise purchasing power
of poor and LDC countries where unsatisfied needs continue to be located.
8. Increase of Wages and full employment. A fundamental guarantee to work and
employment and decent wage are critical engines for human development and
auto-centric development
9. Progressive Agrarian Reform, including on land policies, policies of commons
and biodiversity and renewed industrialization, particularly in rural areas
10. Progressive protection – Social protection to reverse the historical damages,
where social protection is offered as a matter of right and as a comprehensive
package. This includes for instance; pensions, cash transfers, employment
guarantee programmes and provisions for socially vulnerable groups.
As API congress deliberates, reflects, reviews and consolidates its lessons of progress, we hope that you would share your strategies and successes with other similar struggles in the global south. Your successes and experiments of hope may serve as a beacon for several other formations.
With best wishes and
In solidarity
Sandeep Chachra
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Dear M. Nuruddin,
Many thanks for your reply and your invitation to the General Assembly. Unfortunately, I cannot join you this time. I will be travelling to Vietnam next week to visit our partner organizations there.
I wish you a fruitful meeting in the General Assembly and the included Farmers’ Dialogue with UNDP. Will be very interested in the outcome.
Regards for now,
Jeannette van Rijsoort
relatiebeheerder/liaison officer/oficial de enlace
vanRijsoort@agriterra.org
www.agriterra.org
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09 February 2009
on the occasion of
3rd General Assembly of Aliansi Petani Indonesia
9-13 February 2009, Jakarta, Indonesia
Warmest greetings from your regional organization, the Asian Farmers' Association for Sustainable Rural Development or AFA!
We are happy and proud to see the fast growth of API as a strong and capable farmers' organization in Indonesia. Since your birth in 2001, API has grown in many aspects: more members , more farmers assisted in land reclaiming, as well as in sustainable agriculture technologies and marketing of products, more involvement in international events , and more recognition, from colleagues and government agencies, as a capable Farmers' organization defending smal scale men and women farmers' righs .
Today, many farmers face daunting challenges . There is unbridled agriculture trade liberalization which threatens our livelihoods in favor of commercial agriculture.
The government provides still inadequate programs and resources for needed rural infrastructure, research and extension, pre and post harvest facilities; it still fails short of enacting favorable policies and incentives for us to exercise our rights and to want to continue farming. Global warming has exacerbated these conditions, as we face extreme weather disturbances and natural disasters that can spell not only loss of propeties but also loss of lives.
It is in this context that API is called upon to become a true social reform agent in the rural areas. As you establish your directions and strategies for 2009-2011, may you be guided by your vision: Justice, prosperity for the peasants!
AFA shares your goals and look forward to stronger collaboration so that together, we can make policies and programs work for the benefit of small men and women farmers in Indonesia, and in the Southeast Asian region!
Hidup Petani! Long Live API!
Cheers,
Ms. Sudaporn Sittisathapornkul
Chairperson
Ms Esther Penunia
Secretary General
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February 9, 2009
M. Nurrudin General Assembly of API
Dear friends, colleagues, and comrades in API:
We express our full support, solidarity, and heartfelt congratulations to Aliansi Petani Indonesia on the occasion of your Third Congress on 9-13 February, 2009.
We are particularly happy to know about your mission to “strengthen the peasant community to gain an alternative to the neoliberal system.” Like API, PAKISAMA is actively pursuing sustainable agriculture as the means to counter the destructive impact and effect of agricultural liberalization. Given our globalized world, we know that this cause can only be successfully pursued when undertaken in solidarity with farmers’ organizations in other countries.
The holding of your Third Congress is an indication of API’s growing strength which we consider as our victory too. May you continue to grow in strength and numbers in the years ahead! May our common advocacies continue to find inspiration in the lives of the farming communities we serve, and may our causes triumph over the struggles that confront us.
In solidarity,
Crispin Aguelo.
Pangulo A
