Many people don't think of diversity as a food and agriculture issue. But Jerry Pennick placed it dead center when he stated at a bi-national farmers' conference: “Food sovereignty can only be achieved through diverse agricultural systems.”

Pennick is a leader of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization of smallholder African-American farmers in the southern United States. Alongside farmers from fifty organizations throughout the United States and Mexico, the diversity he was talking about was both obvious and not so obvious.

The Bi-National Family Farmer and Farmworker Congress held September 26-29 in Mexico City, included Zapotecans, Nahautls, mestizos, Afro-Americans, Mixes and European descendents from the U.S. breadbasket. It brought together men and women farmers, researchers, and farmworkers; Mexicans and U.S. citizens; farmers who work hundreds of acres and farmers who scrap out a living on tiny hillside plots.

While they represent diversity, they share a common cause. The Mexican and the U.S. farmers united because their way of living is threatened. Both groups are being pushed off the land by low prices, and the control over production and marketing exercised by large agribusiness corporations.

A Dispute over Who Will Feed the World

In spite of the tremendous economic and political odds against them, these farmers do not consider themselves an endangered species. Their position is that the global food chain is what's endangered, if their needs and proposals aren't taken into account.
Participants described the battle as a dispute over who will feed the world. They are confident that they not only have a right to farm and be farmers, but that their survival is crucial for the world's food supply. The diversity of the varieties they maintain, their knowledge of local ecosystems, and the quality of the food they produce are contributions to society that should be valued.

Family farmers left to their own devices often make good decisions—good for the environment, good for the land, good for the consumer, and good for the farmer. But under the current system they usually don't have choices. Ben Burkett knows how to grow cotton and grew it for years on his small farm in Petal, Mississippi. Today the price of cotton is so far below his production price, even adding in government subsidy payments, that he can't make a go of it. Instead he's patching together a livelihood out of watermelons and the government payments he receives for reforesting part of his land that was devastated when Hurricane Katrina ripped through.

Likewise, choice had very little to do with the transformation of Mexican small farmers into U.S. farmworkers. The low prices and hardships in the countryside forced people out. “Many migrants have to sell their lands to make the trip to the United States,” says Carlos Marentes of the border farmworkers organization, “In this way communities are stripped of their land.” The cheap labor of workers without rights, collective bargaining power, or benefits is an important and unjust factor in U.S. agriculture's ability to produce at such low prices and flood markets in countries whose own farmers become economic refugees. Mily Trevino, an organizer of women farmworkers in California, noted that conditions for women are even worse, yet a growing leadership is speaking out and building force in the sector.

Shared Battles: NAFTA and the Farm Bill

Farmers in the world's wealthiest and most productive nation and Mexican campesinos share more experiences than one might imagine .

For example, the transnational giant Monsanto enjoyed instant name recognition in English and Spanish. Mexican farmers explained the importance of their struggle to save, sow, and protect their native seed. The contamination of maize by illegal genetically modified varieties was a new issue for the U.S. farmers but critical to the continued existence of campesino agriculture in Mexico. Biotech companies are waging a major offensive to legalize cultivation of genetically modified maize in Mexico and seek to substitute criollo varieties of maize seed with their patent-protected varieties. In the U.S. they have already won that battle in some crops—Burkett complains that to grow cotton, he has been forced to use genetically modified seed because that's all that is available.

Most importantly, they both find themselves being squeezed by an international market controlled by large corporations. Regulation of that market to protect and support small farmers is a single call. In the final declaration of this encounter, the farmers demand a “deep reform” of the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill: “ We want an agricultural law that makes it possible for farmers to receive a fair price guaranteeing a minimum price above the costs of production.”

It goes on to suggest public policies to support agriculture oriented not to large corporate farmers but to family farms and sustainability: “To achieve this there must be a reduction in overproduction, by means of supply management programs, conservation programs and through commodity reserves controlled by family farmers. We want anti-trust laws—which have been largely ignored in recent decades—to be enforced, in order to diminish the dangerous control by agribusiness of the agricultural markets.”

The declaration makes an emphatic call to get free trade rules, whether the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central American agreement or others, out of agriculture. It also specifically demands elimination of the agricultural chapter of NAFTA. Participants warned that the compete liberalization of corn and beans will force even more peasant farmers out of farming. Alicia Serafin Cruza of the Mexican state of Puebla says, “there is no land, or there's land but bad prices on the market because everything is so cheap. People are discouraged, there's malnutrition … this Free Trade Agreement is crushing us.”

When a question was raised about the viability of renegotiating NAFTA, Marentes reminded the meeting that the battle against NAFTA has lasted over a decade. “We started to fight NAFTA before the signing and this struggle is not over yet,” he affirmed. Quoting Cesar Chavez, he noted: “There are no lost battles, just battles that have been abandoned.”

- Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City, where she has been a writer and political analyst for more than two decades.

Source:  Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC) ,
americas.irc-online.org