By: John E. Peck
March 5th, 2007
From Feb. 23rd – Feb. 28th I had the exciting opportunity to participate in the Nyélení Food Sovereignty Forum near Sélingué, Mali, in West Africa. I was chosen as one of about 20 invited participants from the U.S. and ended up serving as one of the staff liaisons for the North American delegation (50 people total from the U.S., Canada, Mexico). I think I was mostly chosen for this role because of my African experience and the fact that I could speak French and Portuguese, and understand Spanish. Thankfully, all the formal sessions were simultaneously translated into English, French, Spanish, and Bambara (the local language) and many of the delegations brought their own translators for other languages (Nepalese, Indonesian, Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, etc.)
Alltold, there were over 600 participants from 80+ countries that converged near Sélingué, Mali about a two hour drive from the capital, Bamako, near the border with Guinea. Named after a farmer heroine from West African folklore in order to celebrate the critical role women still play in agriculture today, the Nyélení forum was organized by several international grassroots organizations, including Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth, World Forum of Fisher Peoples, le Reseau des Organisations Paysannes et de Producteurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA – Network of Farmers and Producers Organization of West Africa) and the World March for Women, to name a few.
This was probably one of the most diverse and inclusive international gatherings I’ve ever attended. Over half those involved were women, and besides farmers there were many fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and consumers present. It also included representatives from countries that most folks in the North remain quite ignorant about and have even come to “fear” due to government and media propaganda. For example, there were delegates from Palestine, Libya, Iran, Venezuela, and many other supposed “enemies” of the U.S. according to our current president. Sadly enough, such a meeting could probably not have happened in the U.S. in light of the “war on terror” since the State Dept. would have denied visas to all sorts of invited participants.
Most delegates stayed in a specially constructed ecovillage, though there was some overflow into nearby hotels and people’s homes. I ended up having to stay in the medical clinic dormitory with about two dozen folks from Latin America and South Asia. The ecovillage itself was an amazing feat of construction and coordination. When we first arrived many of the huts were still being completed and the water and electricity had not yet been hooked up, but by the time the bulk of the participants arrived all was ready Between 5-6 people were grouped into each hut with separate toilet and shower blocks. Village women prepared vast amounts of food three times a day for close to a thousand people – standard fare included maize, millet, rice, goat, fish, beef, and lots of fresh fruit: oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas.
Sélingué is actually located next to a large artificial lake (400 sq. km or 154 sq. miles) created in 1980 by a dam on the Sankarani River, a tributary of the Niger River, to produce electricity for the capital. We were able to tour the rice paddies and irrigated vegetable gardens and fruit orchards downstream from the dam site – sadly, this FAO funded project was not a model of sustainable agriculture as we saw farmers using many imported pesticides and fertilizers. Medicins sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) had dispatched a team for the Nyélení forum and were proud to announce that their testing found the drinking water to be better than that in much of Europe. After seeing where our local food came from, though, I was wondering about other contamination.
For those who may not be that familiar with West Africa, I should probably give a little background on Mali itself. Mali is the 24th largest country in the world – with a land area about twice the size of Texas (479,000 sq. miles) - and a population of about 14 million, 90% of which are Sunni Moslem. The name, Mali, is actually the Bambara word for hippo, while the capital, Bamako, is the Bambara word for the place where crocodiles dwell. The legendary Timbuktu is located in Mali and has been a major city, intellectual center, and trading post for centuries under a succession of Sahelian empires. Mali was invaded by France in 1880 and finally gained its independence in 1960.
Mali is among the poorest nations in the world and, being landlocked, must import many essential commodities, including oil and food. Two thirds of the country is semi-desert, so farming is difficult and 10% of the population remain nomadic pastoralists. Besides some gold, Mali’s major export is cotton and in recent years Mali has joined Chad, Burkina Faso, and Benin in strongly challenging the U.S. policy of commodity subsidies and dumping overseas that ends up bankrupting African producers. For instance, under this global free trade system, a typical Malian farmer with just two hectares of cotton generating 150,000 CFA ($400) in annual income must compete with larger U.S. farmers that receive $250 in taxpayer subsidies for each hectare of cotton they plant. Closer to home, dumping of subsidized U.S. corn in Mexican since the passage of NAFTA in 1994 has bankrupted close to a million Mexican peasants, driving many across the border as farmworkers, and left Mexican dangerously dependent upon imports. Now that the U.S. ethanol boom has driven up domestic corn demand and reduced these subsidized exports, the result has been consumer price hikes and urban tortilla riots in Mexico.
Of course, the alternative to this scenario is food sovereignty – a concept first coined by Via Campesina back in 1996. Unlike food security, food sovereignty valorizes the principles of grassroots democracy, cultural diversity, social justice, fair prices, living wages, and local control. It also asserts that healthy food is a basic human right, not just a market commodity. Family Farm Defenders has been working to popularize the concept of food sovereignty in the U.S. for many years now and has been recently joined in this effort by other groups such as the National Family Farm Coalition, Food and Water Watch, and Grassroots International. One action point that came out of the Nyeleni forum is the need to globalize the U.S. farm bill debate by bringing home the concept of food sovereignty. Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing my best to spread the message from this historic international convergence in a remote corner of West Africa through various community presentations, radio shows, magazine articles and other media outlets.
For more background material, check out:
www.nyeleni2007.org www.viacampesina.org www.familyfarmdefenders.org www.nffc.net
