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Small-scale fishers are stewards of our waters and seas

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As competition to control the world’s water resources increases, the 2022 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch calls for global fisheries governance that recognizes small-scale fishers as custodians of water ecosystems and protects their rights from extractive industries and other commercial interests. 

The world’s water and fisheries resources once seemed abundant and everlasting. That is no longer the case. Small-scale fishers across the globe are facing constraints in sustaining their livelihoods through fishing and losing their ties to water and their own identity. More than 482 million traditional fisher people depend on waters and seas for their livelihoods. They also play a key role in preserving water ecosystems through sustainable fishing, yet their right to food and nutrition and related human rights are often ignored, jeopardized, or outright violated due to ever-increasing ocean and territory grabbing by extractive industries.  

Mining, oil, and gas, overfishing and depletion of resources by large-scale industrial fishing, expansion of industrial aquaculture, tourism, construction of ports and infrastructure projects, and top-down conservation initiatives are contributing to the environmental destruction of ocean ecosystems and exacerbating climate change.  

Against this backdrop, the 2022 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch report is dedicated to small-scale fishers and traditional fisherfolk who are speaking out against the capitalist onslaught of their territories and reclaiming what has been expropriated from fisher communities across the globe.

Stewards of our Waters and Seas – Time to Recognize and Support Small-Scale Fishers  is being launched on World Fisheries Day and is published by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition . It critically examines the challenges faced by small-scale fishers, including policy processes and global fisheries governance that affect their right to food and nutrition. 

The 2022 Watch also focuses on fisherwomen who are severely affected by water and ocean grabbing.  

“Contemporary development, guised under so-called Blue Economy, continues to dispossess small-scale fisher communities from water bodies indispensable for our right to food and nutrition,” says Margare Nakato, from KATOSI Women Development Trust, a member of the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers (WFF) in Uganda.  

Women not only fish but engage in postharvest activities, contributing enormously to the household well-being and sustainable production of nutritious food, especially for rural communities. And yet, they are unrecognized and marginalized, and decisions are made without their participation. 

2022 is the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture and it would be a missed opportunity if small-scale fishers were not recognized and supported as custodians of ocean ecology through their sustainable management of its resources.  

“We will no longer tolerate “blue-fencing” of our people that is happening all over the world. The current dire crisis of the nature and environment is the result of corporate greed, supported by governments,” says Jones Spartegus, National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) India, a member of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFF).  “We call upon the international community to support in bringing back the ocean and its resources to us and our future generations.”

 

Read online Stewards of our Waters and Seas – Time to Recognize and Support Small-Scale Fishers

Read more about the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch

Putting the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure and the Voluntary Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries into practice

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This learning guide has been designed specifically to give civil society and grassroots organizations a deeper understanding of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) and the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines). The aim is to enable the members of these organizations and their constituents, especially small-scale fishers and fishworkers, to use the VGGT and SSF Guidelines meaningfully and effectively to improve the governance of tenure in their respective countries.

Published by FAO and FIAN International, 2022

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New pop-ed booklet on rural people’s access to resources and means of production

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The purpose of this toolkit on access to resources and means of production is to create awareness, promote understanding and enhance the capacities of rural people’s movements to advocate for their rights.

Is it the latest in a five-part series of training modules, which break down UNDROP into practical themes to increase people’s understanding of this UN recognition of the human rights of peasants and other people in rural areas.

The series focuses on specific articles adopted in UNDROP and how affected people can apply them in legal and advocacy spaces in their struggles for food sovereignty and agroecology.

“It is crucial to reconnect the objectives of UNDROP to small-scale food producers worldwide – the same people who inspired its content and worked on its development,” says Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International.

UNDROP recognizes peasants’ rights to conserve, use, exchange and sell their seeds. It defends people’s right to oppose blatant attempts to grab land, rivers and oceans. This toolkit brings the UN Declaration to life, turning it into an effective tool for these struggles.

For La Via Campesina and FIAN International, the adoption of UNDROP by the UN in December 2018 was a battle half won. It is now crucial to see it fully implemented in letter and spirit in every country, everywhere.

Download the thematic booklet here

Download the first booklet here

Read a series of briefings on how to implement UNDROP here

Small-scale fishers : Struggles and mobilisations

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The United Nations has declared 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022) to highlight the importance of artisanal fishing and aquaculture.

Over the past ten years, and even more so since the pandemic, blue economy initiatives have been blooming. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit advanced the notion of “Blue Foods”, which first and foremost means aquaculture. In 2021, the FAO Committee on Fisheries took unprecedented steps to advance aquaculture, giving birth to the “Shanghai Declaration” drafted by WorldFish, industry players, and other stakeholders.

IYAFA is now also showcasing artisanal fishing. Some prefer the term small-scale fishing, but regardless of the term used, it is always about the way of life that provides food and income for over a hundred million people globally. However, fisher people’s territories and resources are increasingly being grabbed: the entire blue economy agenda spanning from displacing people in the name of conservation (Marine Protected Areas -MPAs), to massive-scale investments for fish farming, to expanding ports to facilitate more global trade, and to unprecedented sound blasting and drilling for oil and gas, are examples of contemporary development that have and continue to dispossess fishing communities. We hope IYAFA will become the year for fisher people all over the world to scale up resistance and mobilise masses in demands for restitution and regeneration of nature.

Transnational Institute and FIAN International

Download / view the Nyéléni newsletter no 47 here :
Small-scale fishers: Struggles and mobilisations

More info at https://nyeleni.org/

Time for Human Rights-based Seed Policies

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The rights and seed systems of peasants and Indigenous Peoples are under attack from laws on intellectual property rights and seed marketing and increasingly undermined by biotechnology, digitalization and increasing corporate control over food and technology. This has far-reaching consequences for the right to food and rapidly declining biodiversity. It is therefore critical that states and multilateral institutions take action to realize the right to seeds as part of a transition toward healthy, sustainable and just food systems.

This briefing paper argues that seeds should be dealt with as a human rights issue. It explains recent normative developments toward the recognition of a right to seeds. A specific emphasis is placed on the centrality of recognizing and protecting peasants’ and Indigenous Peoples’ distinct seed systems for the realization of the right to seeds. This would in turn help to ensure sustainable food production, improved nutrition, and addresses the existential challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Download the briefing Time for Human Righs-based Seed Policies

Paraguay: Stop the wave of forced evictions and criminalization of peasant and indigenous communities

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On the occasion of International Human Rights Day, FIAN International joins FIAN Paraguay and FIAN Germany in calling for an end to violent forced evictions and harassment of peasants and indigenous communities across Paraguay.

According to Paraguayan research group BASE Investigaciones Sociales, at least 3,000 people from peasant and indigenous communities have been violently evicted in nine seperate cases across the country since September this year.

In most cases, the evictions were violent, with excessive numbers of security forces acting outside the law, without court orders. In many cases the belongings of the affected families were destroyed.

The communities facing these evictions mostly have decades-long roots in the areas they occupy, and to which they are legally entitled under Paraguay’s Agrarian Reform. Their claims are challenged by Paraguayan landowners who run large scale agribusinesses on the land, contributing to the country’s acute hunger and malnutrition problem. According to the FAO, 700,000 people in Paraguay were suffering from malnutrition in 2020.

“The underlying problem behind these evictions is the concentration of land in the hands of a few. Paraguay is Latin America’s most unequal country in terms of access to land. 90% of the land is in the hands of less than 5% of the population,” says Wilma Strothenke, FIAN International's Country Officer for Paraguay.

The disputed land was illegally acquired by large landowners and widely referred to as “tierras malhabidas” (ill-gotten lands). It was meant to be transferred to peasants and indigenous people as agrarian reform beneficiaries during the Stroessner dictatorship which ruled the country for three decades until 1989. Instead the land was illegally awarded to private actors close to the regime.

Today there are still eight million hectares of tierras malhabidas.

Increased criminalization against peasants and indigenous people

This latest wave of forced evictions coincides with the recent adoption of the so-called Zavala-Riera Law, which reforms Paraguay’s penal code to include harsher penalties for land occupation. This law is being used as another instrument to criminalize the struggle for land under the guise of protecting private property.

Abel Areco, from FIAN Paraguay, points out: “There is an imbalance in the management of the state, since without guaranteeing the basic rights of access to land, it is passing laws that can end up being misapplied to criminalize those who claim their land rights”.

The community of the María la Esperanza Settlement in Tava'i, Caazapá, is one of the first to be targeted by the criminalizing application of this law. This community returned to occupy land from which they had been expelled after verifying that there was in fact no eviction order against them. However, shortly after, 26 settlers and the community's own lawyer were detained and now face prosecution for trespassing, despite the fact that they have lived there for decades and that authorities recognise them as a de facto community.

The case of the Primero de Marzo community: evictions, criminalization and denial of expropriation

Another example of the increase in criminalization and evictions is the Primero de Marzo peasant community, whose members have been occupying the Pindó farm in the department of Canindeyú (near the Brazilian border) since 2012, as legitimate beneficiaries of the Agrarian Reform.

The Pindó farm is registered as the property of the Bendlin Beyersdoff family of businessmen, who acquired it from the Institute of Rural Assets (IBR) in 1969 in exchange for an airplane, an illegal operation according to the rules of the time, which makes this farm a “tierra malhabida”, as accredited by the Final Report of the Truth and Justice Commission.

Since their settlement on the Pindó Farm, the inhabitants of the Primero de Marzo community have been questioning the legal origin of the farm and requesting that Paraguayan authorities expropriate it for adjudication, in compliance with the agrarian reform. However, the inaction of the National Institute for Rural and Land Development (INDERT) and the refusal of the owners of the farm have prevented the community's right to land from being respected.

There are currently 430 families occupying the farm. They cultivate their gardens, raise animals and have built houses and other facilities including sewage, electricity systems, schools and so on. However, they face continuous threats of forced eviction by public and private authorities. This situation is not new as they were also subjected to numerous forced evictions between 2013 and 2016 when their houses, facilities and crops were razed and several members convicted.  

Open Letter

FIAN International in collaboration with FIAN Paraguay and FIAN Germany has launched an open letter to alert Paraguayan authorities about the constant threats of forced evictions to which the families of the Primero de Marzo Community are subjected.

“If these threats are carried out, not only would they be violating national and international norms that protect the right to land of indigenous and peasant communities,” says Almudena Abascal, Head of Latin America for FIAN Germany, “but also their basic human rights such as the right to food, education and decent housing. “

Contact us:

Almudena Abascal a.abascal@fian.de Tel: +49 (0)221 474491 13,  Wilma Strothenke: strothenke@fian.org Tel: +49 (0)6221-65300-30

More information about the evicted communities:

Global social movements stand in solidarity with Indian farmers a year after protests began

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JOINT STATEMENT: Salute to India’s Farmers! A Big Win for Peoples’ Power!

In a big win for India’s protesting farmers, who were leading a historic agitation for nearly a year, the Government of India – on the 19th of November – announced the repeal of three controversial farm laws that threatened to corporatize the country’s agricultural sector. It is an inspirational account of what peoples’ power can achieve even in the most adverse conditions.

The Indian farmers' protest, one of the largest mobilizations in recent history, completes a year on 26th November 2021. In the course of this historic protest, peasants and workers have braved harsh winters, heavy rains, brutal crackdowns and a wave of campaigns that tried to criminalize, imprison, defame and delegitimize the protestors and their supporters.

According to Samkyukta Kisan Morcha, the coalition spearheading this agitation, at least 650 farmers have died in the past year while on protest. Among these are five farmers who were heinously mowed down by a car in October 2021, allegedly driven by a Union Minister's son.

Despite all the adversities and oppressive measures, the millions of farmers who have laid siege to the borders of New Delhi for a year are in no haste to call off their protest. While they welcome the announcement to roll back the three laws as a step in the right direction, their other crucial demand to bring a legal guarantee for a Minimum Support Price (MSP) for their produce remains unmet. The government is planning to constitute a committee that would make the procurement system more transparent, but agitating farmers insist that a legal guarantee is an absolute necessity. They also demand that the government withdraws all the criminal cases filed against the protestors during the year.

India’s farmers have inspired the world with their resilience. They have shown us what a united struggle of the working class and the peasantry can achieve even in the face of all adversities. Over the last year, this protest has stitched alliances with workers unions and other social movements and issued inspiring messages of solidarity, communal harmony and unity among rural societies.

We, the global civil society members, offer our unwavering support and solidarity for India's farmers. We salute your resilience. You inspire every social movement everywhere. We stand with you in your demands to resist the corporatization of Indian agriculture that endangers India's food sovereignty. Your protest resonates with every peasant and indigenous community in every corner of the world. Behind you, we stand united and alert to the daily developments.

The threat of privatization and corporatization of agriculture is not unique to India. But what is at stake for India is the lives and livelihoods of nearly 600 million people linked to agricultural and allied sectors.

History teaches us the perils of agribusiness expansion. Europe, the US, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, and several wealthy nations are living evidence of how agribusiness expansion marginalizes small-scale food producers and tilt agricultural production to large industrial farms. It is a model that pushes millions out of their farms, leads to large-scale land concentration, and turns precious natural resources into the hands of a few. It is a model that takes away small-scale food producers' autonomy and control over their seeds, farm inputs, and farm machinery. It is a model favouring large-scale monoculture with devastating consequences for the planet, soil health, biodiversity, and our communities' nutritional choices.

For a predominantly agrarian society like India, to undergo this path of corporatization – primarily when a large majority of its peasants comprise tenant farmers and small-holder farmers – is akin to inviting despair to the doors of millions. And when farmers of the country lose autonomy over their food production, it endangers their food sovereignty.

India is a signatory to the UN Declaration on Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which lays out the obligation of the State in guaranteeing adequate income and fair price to its food producers (Article 16). Despite its commitment to the UN Declaration, and contrary to the spirit of this Declaration, the Indian government brought in three controversial laws, in the middle of a pandemic year, without consulting the farmers. We insist that any attempts to reform Indian agriculture must be conducted with due consultation with the small-scale food producers through a transparent and democratic process.

Over the last two decades, the agitating farmers in India have carried out several mobilizations demanding a legal guarantee for a minimum support price and a robust mechanism to ensure efficient public procurement of their produce. At this point, the protesting farmers fear that in the absence of such a legal guarantee, there is still scope for a backdoor entry for private corporations. That is why they insist on a legislation that ensures a Minimum Support Price to farmers in every state of India.

As a signatory to the UNDROP, India must listen to its people, and institute a process to consult the unions before instituting any reforms. It must bring in a legal guarantee that offers a minimum support price for its farmers. It must acknowledge and compensate the families of those who lost their lives in this struggle. It must immediately bring to justice the culprits who mowed down protesting farmers in Lakhimpur Kheri. It must stop any actions that criminalize the leaders or members of the protesting unions and immediately resume the dialogue and negotiations.

Call for Global Solidarity Actions:

On 26th November, we the members of the global civil society will carry out peaceful solidarity actions – online and offline – in support of India’s farmers.

Hashtag #SalutetoIndiasFarmers 

Send photos, statements, videos to samyuktkisanmorcha@gmail.com 

Globalize the Struggle, Globalize Hope! 

Salute to India’s farmers! You inspire us! 

————————————————————————————————–

Statement Signed by:

FIAN International

FIMARC – International Federation of Adult Rural Catholic Movements

FOEI – Friends of the Earth International

HIC – Habitat International Coalition

IITC – International Indian Treaty Council

LVC – La Via Campesina

URGENCI – International Network for Community Supported Agriculture

WAMIP – World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples

WWM – World Women March

 

 

 

Towards a pesticides-free planet

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This has been underlined in three key UN reports on toxic substances, the right to a healthy environment and food systems published ahead of this week’s UN Food Systems Summit.  

FIAN International has contributed to the momentum for change with a study of local experiences from around the world. Transitioning to pesticide free food systems: people´s power and imagination takes a bottom-up human rights approach and shows that a transition towards agroeology is underway in many parts of the world. It also maps out concrete steps for other communities and for policymakers in a “key elements” paper which aims to support advocacy towards achieving pesticide-free environments.  

Pesticides are responsible for an estimated 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year. Long-term exposure can lead to chronic health conditions including cancer, birth defects and reproductive harm, including neurological damage. Runoff from pesticides frequently pollutes surrounding ecosystems and exacerbates biodiversity loss – including the biodiversity of soils, which can lead to sharp declines in crop yields, threatening food security. 

Despite the harm caused, pesticide use has soared in recent decades to an estimated 3.5 million tonnes in 2020. Just six mega corporations — Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF — control 75 percent of the world pesticides market. 

Agricultural workers’ unions including the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations and peasants’ movements, such as La Via Campesina, have protested for years against the intensive use of pesticides due to their negative impacts on health and right to food and nutrition.  

Pesticides play a key role in the global food production system, contributing to increasing inequality, reducing food diversity, destroying the sovereignty of people over their territories, and fuelling environmental collapse. Their growing use highlights the failure of states to comply with their human rights obligations regarding the right to adequate food and nutrition and related rights. Pesticides are also an integral part of the current corporate-driven, export-focused, agri-food model, based on unsustainable monoculture. 

Already in 2017, UN Special Rapporteurs on the right to food and toxics called for an end to this model stating that:  

“While efforts to ban and appropriately regulate the use of pesticides are a necessary step in the right direction, the most effective, long-term method to reduce exposure to these toxic chemicals is to move away from industrial agriculture.”

Read more: Infograph on 4 steps to transition to pesticide-free communities

 

Philippine Supreme Court Denies Access to Land to Sariaya Peasants

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As the Philippines marks its 33rd year of implementing agrarian reform this month, 36 rights-based organizations across the globe have joined the fight of Sariaya, Quezon farmers to reclaim a vast landholding long awarded to them by the government but was returned by the Supreme Court (SC) to its former owner – an old, wealthy elite family in the province – based on an obscure and outdated municipal ordinance.  

“(T)he undersigned organizations call on the Government of the Philippines to ensure the right to food and nutrition of Sariaya peasants by guaranteeing their right to the land they till,” said the organizations headquartered in 22 countries spread in Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia, and Africa, which are mostly members of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.  

Court anchors ruling on old local ordinance declared vague, insufficient by municipal gov't  

In a ruling that it made final on Sept. 28, 2020, the high tribunal voided the ownership rights of 255 Sariaya farmers to a 295.5-hectare farmland in the town’s Barangays Concepcion I, Pinagbakuran, and Manggalang Kiling, which the latter secured in 1994 as beneficiaries of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) that the government started to implement in 1988. 

The same ruling of the SC, returned the land to its former owner, the Gala family, who became among the most politically and economically powerful clans in Quezon while the Philippines was under Spanish colonial rule and was known in the province as coconut tycoons during the said era.  

The high tribunal hinged its decision on Sariaya’s 1982 zoning ordinance that blanketly reclassified most farmlands in the town as “non-agricultural” and thus excluded from CARP coverage.  

However, the zoning supposedly no longer applies. On June 23, 2008, Sariaya’s municipal council approved a resolution stating that the 1982 ordinance had no clear boundary delineations and was insufficient to be used as basis for ascertaining the classification of landholdings in Sariaya.

The same resolution further noted that because of the said insufficiency, the ordinance should not also be used as basis to exempt lands from agrarian reform. 

The 2008 resolution was strengthened by the municipal council when it enacted an ordinance in 2018 stating that “agricultural lands distributed to agrarian reform beneficiaries” of the CARP “shall not be affected by the reclassification” of Sariaya landholdings to non-agricultural lands done through the 1982 ordinance. The provincial council of Quezon approved the 2018 municipal ordinance through a resolution it issued on April 2, 2020.  

Court ruling: A 'regressive measure' jeopardizing farmers and people's right to food, nutrition  

The 36 groups said the Philippine high court’s anti-peasant decision based on the obscure and outdated 1982 zoning ordinance “not only…constitutes a breach of the state obligation under international human rights law” but also “embodies a regressive measure, which jeopardizes the realization of Sariaya peasants’ right to food and nutrition and the millions of Filipinos, who benefit from Sariaya’s agricultural production.” 

“This decision is also ill-timed, considering that more than 5.2 million or 20.9 percent of Filipinos suffered starvation due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the groups said.

The Sariaya farmers are among the top producers and suppliers of affordable vegetables in the regions of Southern Tagalog, Bicol, and Metro Manila. Even amid the threats of eviction, hunger, and poverty, following the high court’s ruling, the farmers still manage to regularly give away portions of their produce to hungry Filipinos via community pantries that sprouted in the Philippines amid the pandemic.   

Land redistribution and the provision of government support services and infrastructure such as farm-to-market roads, warehouses, solar dryers, a trading post, and agricultural trainings via the CARP has transformed Sariaya into one of the country’s food baskets, catering to the diversified and nutritious food requirements of millions of Filipinos.  

Within 10 years of redistribution, the poverty rate in the town drastically dropped, and Sariaya became a success story, giving hope and encouragement to many who continued to struggle for their access to land. 

Philippine gov't urged: Respect right to land, uphold int'l human rights obligations  

Finally, the 36 groups called on the Philippine government “to respect” the farmers’ “right to land,” which is recognized in Articles 5 and 17 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP).  

The groups said the Philippines, which voted for and signed the UNDROP in 2018 along with 120 other countries, is duty-bound to uphold the said U.N. General Assembly resolution on human rights, particularly, Article 17 (6).  

The said UNDROP provision reaffirms the importance of states to carry out agrarian reform to “facilitate broad and equitable access to land and other natural resources necessary to ensure that peasants and other people working in rural areas enjoy adequate living conditions, and to limit excessive concentration and control of land taking into account its social function.” -30- 

Read the STATEMENT OF SUPPORT TO SARIAYA FARMERS

CONTACT PERSONS: Danny Caranza (Katarungan) – 0920-904-4301 | Yifang Slot Tang (FIAN International) +49 -176-2409-6245 (via WhatsApp)

 

 

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