B. The Land and Resource Grabs Team is monitoring land struggles. In Honduras, over 40 peasants in the Lower Aguan region have been killed in the past year because they are refusing to give up their land to giant plantations growing African palm oil to produce agro-fuel. Stand with these Honduran peasants. And in Vallecito, Honduras, the Garifunas are struggling to recover their ancestral land, so raise your voice in solidarity with them.
C. Tell Land O Fakes (Lakes) to pay a fair price to its own member dairy farmers and to stop pushing GM. Download the postcard.
The following Call to Action is adapted from the Call to Action to End the Food Crisis issued by the US Working Group on the Food Crisis in 2008 and endorsed by several thousand organizations and individuals. It is included here as a springboard for future action of the Alliance, with the understanding that it will evolve to reflect new ideas, voices, and perspectives as the Alliance develops.
We call on people across the United States to use our political power and actions to fight poverty by rebuilding local food economies, and specifically for food system changes that:
1) Stabilize prices for farmers and consumers locally, nationally and globally by:
Ending rampant financial speculation in food;
Establishing and strengthening publicly-owned domestic, regional, and international strategic food reserves;
Suspending international trade and investments in industrial-scale biofuels (a.k.a. agrofuels);
Transforming corporate-oriented food aid;
Ensuring fair prices to farmers, fishers, pastoralists and other food providers;
Establishing equitable regional and global trade arrangements that enable countries, communities, and all farmers, fishers, pastoralists and other food providers to meet food and livelihood needs.
2) Balance power in the food system by:
Reducing the political influence of agrifood corporations on public policy, e.g., by strengthening antitrust enforcement on those corporations and reducing their unregulated market power;
Convening multi-stakeholder, representative food policy councils at state and local levels.
3) Make agriculture environmentally sustainable by:
Supporting family farms’ transition to agroecological practices through incentives, purchasing and procurement;
Halting expansion of government-supported agrofuels (biofuels) and transgenic seeds programs, mandates, and tax incentives and other subsidies
Directing state and national farm policy, R&D, education and investment toward agroecological farming and sustainable food businesses.
4) Guarantee the right to healthy food by building local and regional food systems and fostering social, ecological and economic justice by:
Calling on the US to join the community of nations to support the human right to food;
Supporting domestic food production and independent, community-based food cooperatives and businesses in the United States and around the world;
Establishing living wages, so that everyone can afford healthy food;
Implementing full workers’ rights for farm workers and other food system workers;
Implementing agrarian reform that takes land out of the hands of large corporations and puts it in the hands of communities for local food production.
Strengthening the social safety net for low-income people across the US;
Creating a solidarity economy that puts people before corporate profit in the US and around the world.
Through food sovereignty, the Earth can feed all living things.
The US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system. We believe all people have the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound manner. As a US-based alliance of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based, and food producer groups, we uphold the right to food as a basic human right and work to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty.
