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http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=25969
Mali: Farmers mobilise to find solutions against land grabbing
Summary & Comment: This is an article about a conference of some 250 delegates from 30 countries, meeting in Nyeleni, Mali. It was the first on the theme of land-grabbing. Their governments lease to powerful international investors, including governments, huge tracts of land that the people need, and will need. This leads also to struggle also against control of seeds, inputs, and marketing by outside interests. JK
Author: Via Campesina
Date Written: 17 November 2011
Primary Category: Food and Land
Document Origin: Grain
Secondary Category: Economic Justice
Source URL: http://www.grain.org/
Today, more than 250 participants, mainly representatives of farmers’ organisations, from thirty different countries gathered in Nyéléni Village, a centre for agro-ecology training built in a rural area near Sélingué, in Mali, to participate into the first International farmers’ conference to stop land grabbing. The Nyéléni village is a symbolic place, where the first international conference on Food Sovereignty was held in 2007. For three days, from the 17 to the 20 of November, participants are exchanging their experiences and creating alliances to stop the global land grab.
Land grabbing is happening everywhere, making the daily struggle of rural communities worldwide for survival even more difficult. Rights of family farmers, as well as pastoralists, artisanal fishers and indigenous communities, are violated constantly and their territories are being increasingly militarised. Small scale food production is replaced by large monoculture plantations for export and local farmers are left without land, without jobs, without food. This is why peasant organisations decided to mobilise together against this problem and create a space for exchanging experiences and finding common solutions.
At the opening ceremony Ibrahima Coulibaly, president of the CNOP (National Confederation of Peasant Organisations) of Mali, said: “The land belongs to local communities and it has been like that for generations. Now, governments are pushing farmers off their lands. This is not acceptable. It is a denial of historic rights, rights that exist since hundreds of years, while many states exist only since the 1960s. This shows how politicians are not connected to the people. The situation is very serious, and that is why we are here. We have the possibility in these three days to sit together, find a common understanding and find the solutions.”
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