Food sovereignty: Restoring the rights of farmers

Witoro, Jakarta

Access to food has been declared a basic human right in several international conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The right to food is also recognized in national laws, such as the Law No. 7/1996 on food.

In this country, close to 90 percent of land-tilling farmers produce food. However, according to a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report in 2002, Indonesia was one of the countries that had between 5 and 19 percent of its population going hungry from 1998 to 2000.

Ministry of Health figures from the 2000 Census showed almost five million Indonesian children suffered from malnutrition deficiencies. About 305,000 babies and children aged under five die every year in Indonesia, with an estimated 180,000 of them due to malnutrition.

In the past decade, food globalization, the inevitable consequence of agricultural trade liberalization, has accelerated. This process has pushed the integration of national food agriculture in the global market.

Liberalized trade agreements regarding agricultural products have allowed transnational companies to intensify their role in producing a variety of agricultural products and trade them on the international market. Most of these companies are based in rich countries and receive massive subsidies from their governments. They enjoy the greatest benefits from the World Trade Organization's program to scrap global trade barriers.

This strategy awards monopolies to a handful of giant companies that derive profit from the monopoly of genetic and agricultural resources as well as export subsidies for food and agricultural products and input, including pesticides. By extending massive subsidies, food exporting countries can raise their food production surplus and sell their products below of production cost.

A rise in food production in advanced countries has caused developing nations, including Indonesia, previously known as exporters, to gradually turn into importers.

In 1989-1991 period, Indonesia was a net food exporter securing about US$418 million of export value a year. However, by 1994 the tide had turned. From the 1998 to 2000 period, Indonesia recorded a net food import of $863 million annually. In 2002, it was even estimated that Indonesia's food imports stood at some $2.3 billion.

Consequently the country has an abundant supply of cheap food as a result of imports, food smuggling and food aid from rich countries. This has caused the price of small-scale farmers' food products to become increasingly depressed. Meanwhile, the government's support for the farmers has continued to shrink. In Indonesia, subsidies for farmers have been reduced or even scrapped since 1998. The agricultural liberalization is part of the policy changes Indonesia had to implement to obtain International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans.

Lowering food import tariffs and the scrapping of the role of the State Logistics Agency (BULOG) to stabilize food prices and hold monopoly over the import of strategic food products have led to an influx of imported food.

The influx of cheap imported food and the absence of a policy framework to protect farmers' interests in Third World countries have reduced farmers' earnings, caused farmers' debts to swell and increased the number of those affected by food shortages.

An agricultural system oriented towards subsistence and sustainability, which for many centuries has become the basis of farmers' livelihood, has given way to the ownership of land, seedlings and other production by a small number of companies.

Efforts have indeed been made to reduce the number of starving people in the world. World leaders attending the 1996 FAO World Food Summit in Rome agreed to act to cut the number of hungry people worldwide from 840 million to 400 million by 2015. Unfortunately, during the past eight years, statistics show only 25 million people have been freed from starvation.

Given this reality, Via Campesina (Food Sovereignty), an international farmers organization, has come up with an alternative concept to replace the neo-liberal food policy that has proven unsuccessful in protecting food production.

Since it was first introduced in a public debate in the 1996 World Food Summit, the concept of food sovereignty has now become a theme in various meetings.

Food sovereignty is the right of the people or a state to determine its agricultural and food policies. This sovereignty refers to prioritizing local agricultural production to meet the people's food requirements and providing small-scale farmers access to water, seedlings and loans. All this requires an agrarian reform, resistance against transgenic plants or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), free access to seedlings and efforts to protect water as public property.

This concept also covers the right to food as well as the rights of farmers and local communities to control their own food system. Food problems are also political and various communities and the state have lost their capacity to determine their own food policies.

This concept differs from the concept of food security, which is not concerned with where food comes from and how it is produced. It is this food security concept that has encouraged the importing of cheap food, rather than producing food locally, is the most reasonable way for poor countries to fulfill their food needs.

The acceptance of this argument has led to the influx of cheap food imports to poor countries in such a way that domestic food products from small-scale farmers have dropped in price. The absence of an incentive to produce food has led to increased starvation and encouraged rural people to migrate to towns and cities for a living. Many of them have become trapped in a new vicious circle of poverty and hunger.

The food sovereignty concept, meanwhile, emphasizes the importance of giving authority to local communities to make their own choices about how they produce, distribute, and consume food.

To be able to achieve genuine food resilience, rural people must have access to resources through an agrarian reform drive and they must also receive a fair price for their products. Local communities, involving small-scale farmers, farm laborers, small- scale fishermen, women farmers, traditional communities and the people living around forest areas, must gain access to resources such as land, water, forests, seedlings, genetic resources and knowledge.

Food sovereignty does not mean isolating the community from the rest of the world. Neither does it mean going against trade practices. This concept demands that a just trading system be introduced by prioritizing the needs of the family and community.

Therefore, each country must protect and regulate their food agricultural production and trading to sustain farmers' livelihood and sustainable supplies of food for the entire population. Food sovereignty appreciates the role of farmers' families as they constitute a sound local and national economic basis and part of national resilience and sovereignty.

Witoro is the coordinator of the working team of People's Coalition for Food Sovereignty based in Bogor, West Java.