

FAO director-general José
Graziano da Silva.
(Photo: FAO/Ozan Kose)






Da Silva and Chakrabarti said “that the private sector is efficient,” and, at the same time, they “dismiss peasants and those few remaining policies that protect them as burdens ‘holding back’ agricultural development that should be eliminated,” according to the civil society organizations.

In their article, the two officers had mentioned the case of Turkey, a country that “can do much more” if it addressed “issues that are holding it back”, such as “relatively high levels of protection, lack of proper irrigation, small and uneconomically sized farms and limited access to capital for modern production inputs.”

“Their article was published in the context of a joint FAO and EBRD conference in Istanbul on September 13th, which they describe as the largest and most important gathering of companies and decision-makers in agribusiness. Graziano da Silva and Chakrabarti make a number of biased claims […] that obscure the reality when it comes to agriculture and food. They point to Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan as successful examples of agribusiness that have transformed these countries from ‘the agricultural wastelands of the 1990s’ into ‘leading grain exporters.’ But at no time do they mention that the official statistics from all three countries show that small farmers and peasants are more productive than big agribusiness,” stated the organizations.

According to their evaluation, “peasants and small farmers, especially women, account for over half of Russia’s agricultural production but occupy only a quarter of the agricultural lands,” and “in Ukraine, they produce 55% of the agricultural output on only 16% of the land, while in Kazakhstan, where they occupy half of the land, they account for 73% of agricultural production. The fact is that these countries are fed by their peasants and small farmers.”


“Contrary to what is claimed by the director-general of the FAO, those who really have the capacity to feed the world are the world's men and women farmers and peasants. The expansion of agribusiness has only exacerbated poverty, destroyed the potential for dignified rural livelihoods, increased pollution and environmental destruction, and brought back the scourge of slave labor and a series of recent food and climate crises,” warned the organizations..

“For social movements and the peasants and small farmers of the world, it is unacceptable and even incomprehensible for a director-general of the FAO to be promoting the destruction of peasant farming and an increase in land grabbing. It is particularly troubling for this to occur after three years of careful, hard work by La Via Campesina and other organizations in constructing the FAO's voluntary guidelines to protect communities against land grabs,” they added.

The groups remembered that “Da Silva had repeatedly assured farmers’ organizations during his campaign” to head the FAO “that he would promote and validate the importance of peasant agriculture and the critical role small farmers must play in food production.”

“The language used by Graziano da Silva and Chakrabarti” in their article “is offensive,” they said, and remarked “phrases like ‘fertilize this land with money’ or ‘make life easier for the world's hungry’.” Those appeals “call into question the FAO's ability to do its job with the necessary rigor and independence from large agribusiness companies and fulfill the UN mandate to eradicate hunger and improve the living conditions of rural people.”

When Da Silva agreed that the main obstacles to improve agricultural production are the “relatively high levels of protection,” the “lack of proper irrigation” and the “small and uneconomically sized farms,” he unveiled “the FAO's subservience to the demands and interests of greedy investors”, that “undermines all the work at conciliation that has taken place in recent years between farmers’ organizations” and the agency.

“Where, we wonder, will peasant families go if these plans to transform their lands into industrial megafarms are successful?” the groups asked.


“What is needed for agriculture and the planet is just the opposite of what Chakrabarti and Graziano da Silva propose,” said the organizations. “Humanity and those suffering from hunger need the ‘agri-cultures’ of rural areas, which represent half the world’s population and make peasant farming possible, to be protected and promoted -- because peasant farming is more efficient and productive, because it produces at least half of the global food supply and most of the employment in rural areas, and because it can cool the planet,” added the groups.


Hungry for Investment (The Wall Street Journal): http://on.wsj.com/Spb9ti.
GRAIN: http://bit.ly/Rb4yBO