the duchy of hetkettle trophish

one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant’s Path). Via not only seeks to get “WTO out of agriculture” and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative — food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all,

• the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO.

It also means

• consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports;
• remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk;
• abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and
• the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.

Via’s platform also

• calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds;
• opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and
• demands land reform.

In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class for itself,” contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage — and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers’ movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital’s vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

fools!

by farming your own food you forfeit your chance to be a ferrari fatality.

consume nothing but marketing; cultivate nothing but your boss’s love.

trees are for high-speed suicide.

do not hug them.

via