A Food Summit Without Farmers?

I don't know if anyone else has been following the food crisis summit in Rome. Basically it has been the UN's FAO and corporate Ag interests trying to consolidate their interests and make even bigge inroads into developing countries while taking advantage of people who don't have enough to feed their children.Business ethics, the loving hand of the so called free market. Gotta love it, right? But where are the farmers?How can you honestly talk about food and hunger when you don't allow farmers a seat, a voice and a vote?
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original-grain

Farmers bringing message to the Food Crisis Summit in Rome expelled

"Stop corporate control over food!"

Rome, Italy 3 June 2008


Farmer and civil society leaders carrying out a peaceful action today in Rome, Italy at the FAO Summit on the Food Crisis were forcefully removed from the premises. At around 1:30pm farmers and representatives of civil society organisations staged an action at the press room to deliver a message that millions of additional people are joining the ranks of the hungry as the corporations that control the global food system are making record profits.

The issues of corporate control and speculation, which are leading causes of recent spikes in food prices, are not being discussed by the government delegations and the international agencies meeting in Rome to debate solutions to the crisis.

"We are outraged that such fundamental aspects of the food crisis were nowhere on the agenda for the Summit," says Paul Nicholson, member of the International Coordinating Committee of Via Campesina and one of the farmer leaders who was expelled from the Summit.

The 10 people involved in the action carried posters contrasting the record profits of agribusiness corporations during the latest reporting financial quarter of 2008 with the estimated 100 million people in the world who now, alongside 800 million or so others, are hungry because they cannot afford to eat. Profits for Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, were up 108 per cent, while Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands, the world's largest food traders, registered profit increases of 86 and 42 per cent respectively. Profits for Mosaic, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, rose 1,134 per cent.

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