The rapid EU-wide loss of family and small-scale farms is in part due to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU’s agricultural Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has said, pointing to the policy’s “errors and mistakes”.
Speaking during a recent AGRI-PETI joint committee meeting in the European Parliament, the Commissioner pointed out that between 2005 and 2014, as many as 4 million farms have disappeared in the EU, many of which were small farms.
“They were vanishing to the tune of a thousand a day,” Wojciechowski said, citing the example of his home country of Poland, which according to the latest agricultural census released this month has lost 190,000 of its farms, or 13%, in the past 10 years.
Haris grow food, yet face hunger. Why?
Activists call for ensuring peasants’ food security, empowering women workers
KARACHI:
They work hard all day in scorching heat to produce food. Yet, they survive on little. Deprived, ill-treated and downtrodden, they are your peasants and your haris.
Speakers, during a webinar organised by the Hari Welfare Association (HWA) on Saturday, in connection with the International Day of Peasants’ Struggle that is observed on April 17 every year, lamented this lack of food sovereignty among Pakistan’s peasants.
Food sovereignty is the people’s right to healthy food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and to define their own food and agricultural systems.
A Global Peasants Movement for Sustainable Healthcare
Born in 1993, La Via Campesina has been developing and promoting the vision of food sovereignty as an alternative to the dominant capitalist relations of production, particularly in agriculture.
Photo: Sasin Tipchai/Pixabay
World7 hours ago
Every year, on April 17, La Via Campesina (âthe peasant wayâ), an international organisation dedicated to supporting farmers, peasants and landless workers engaged in agrarian struggles, celebrates the International Day of Peasantâs Struggle. This commemorates the massacre of the landless peasants agitating for comprehensive agrarian reform in Eldorado dos Carajás, Brazil in 1996. During the protest, the Brazilian military police in the Amazonian State of Pará attacked members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) blockading a highway, killing 19 and injuring hundreds of peasants.
Kahaan chalay Mehar!
Itna dukh de jaoge kya
[In this sad night of darkness
For where did you put on your harness
Will you now stand by no longer
Will you leave us with so much distress]
Fahmida Riaz,
Nauha Major Ishaq ke Intiqal Par [Dirge On the Death of Major Ishaq]
Major Ishaq Muhammad was born on April 4, 1921, a hundred years ago today, in a village, Akhara, located 16-17 miles from Jalandhar. As I write this piece remembering the revolutionary founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Party, the ongoing farmers’ protests in neighbouring India have entered their seventh month. And various peasant organisations in Pakistan are planning a ‘tractor march’ to the federal and Punjab capitals if their demands for the support price of wheat, reduced power tariffs for tube-wells and fertiliser rates are not accepted. Later this month, April 17 will also mark the International Day of Peasant Struggle.