UN-masking Climate Smart Agriculture (Via Campesina)

Press release by Via Campesina ahead of the UN Climate Summit convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in September 2014

Founded in 1993 La Via Campesina brings together “millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world.”.

Selected extracts from the press release:

“As women, men, peasants, smallholder family farmers, migrant, rural workers, indigenous, and youth of La Via Campesina, we denounce climate smart agriculture which is presented to us as a solution to climate change and as a mechanism for sustainable development.”

“Climate smart agriculture begins with deception by not making a differentiation between the negative effects of industrialized agriculture and the real solutions offered by traditional sustainable peasant agriculture which has contributed to alleviating poverty, hunger and remediation of climate change.”

Land grabs

“Climate smart agriculture will lead to further consolidation of land, pushing peasant and family farmers towards World Bank Projects, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other institutions, creating dependency on so-called new technologies through their complete packages that include prescriptions of “climate smart varieties”, inputs, and credit, while ignoring traditional tried and true adaptive farming techniques and stewardship of seed varieties in practice by farmers.”

Productivity and large-scale industrial agriculture

“The idea of increasing agricultural productivity in a sustainable way, or what is now called “sustainable intensification”, is false. Even more so, when one considers that raising yield per hectare through production intensification only increases the income for corporations, financial market speculators, and large landholding farmers. So called “sustainable intensification” is not really about increasing yield per acre, it is more about green-washing large scale industrialized production following the old adage “get big or get out”.”

Unequal land ownership

“Ultimately, climate smart agriculture tries to cover-up and hide the need for genuine agriculture and land reform. It also hides, and lies about, the issue of scarcity of land and natural resources.  Land and natural resources are only scarce for peasant and small holding farmers. Poverty exists as a result of lack of access to land, land tenure and use, the unfair treatment and wages of workers and an unrelenting exploitation of their labor in order to meet the needs of capitalism, all of which is shaping the madness we are facing today.

Criticism of carbon markets

“In addition, climate smart agriculture, like the Reduction for Emission on Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), will expand the carbon market and its use for financial speculation. The possibility of big profits with investments in carbon credits generated from farmlands involved in climate smart agriculture projects will increase speculation in the carbon market, leading to further “carbon land grabs” by large-scale investors and producers, and the further displacement of peasant and smallholder farmers, just as REDD displaces indigenous people.”

“Today, just as in the past, we are ready to fight against the false solutions of the capitalist “green economy” and for real solutions to climate change and poverty, through our demands for climate and environmental justice.”

Agroecology and food sovereignty:

“We continue to propose and put into practice wherever we can agroecological production and the construction of people’s food sovereignty. We consciously do this as another space to bring about the structural changes that we really need to deal with the issues of poverty, climate change and peoples’ inability to feed themselves.”

Read press release

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This summary was prepared by Why Green Economy?. The views expressed have been paraphrased. See the original source for more information.