Vía Campesina Maputo Declaration and Open Letter
| Declaration of Maputo: V International Conference of La Via Campesina |  |
 |
 |
| Thursday, 23 October 2008 | |||||||||
|
Maputo, Mozambique, October 19-22, 2008
Food Sovereignty now! Unity and struggle of the people! We are men and women of the earth, we are those who produce food for the world. We have the right to continue being peasants and family farmers, and to shoulder the responsibility of continuing to feed our peoples. We care for seeds, which are life, and for us the act of producing food is an act of love. Humanity depends on us, and we refuse to disappear. We, La Via Campesina, are a worldwide movement of rural women, peasants and family farmers, farm workers, indigenous peoples, rural youth and afro-descendents from Asia, Europe, America and Africa, gathered together in Maputo, Mozambique from October 19 to 22, 2008, for our V International Conference. We were received in a warm and fraternal fashion by our hosts, the National Union of Peasants (União Nacional de Camponeses/UNAC) of Mozambique. We met to reaffirm our determination to defend peasant and family farm agriculture, our cultures and our right to continue to exist as peoples with our own identity. We are more than 550 people, including more than 325 men and women delegates, from 57 countries, representing hundreds of millions of farming families. We women represent more than half of the people producing food in the world and here we celebrate with energy and determination our Third Worldwide Assembly of Women. We are also celebrating our Second Youth Assembly of La Via Campesina, since only with the decisive participation of youth can a present and a future for rural areas be guaranteed. In this V International Conference we also ratified 41 organizations as new members of La Via Campesina, and we have the participation of many organizations and allied movements from all over the world, in our First Assembly with the Allies of Via Campesina. Four years of struggle and Victories Through our Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, which is the expression of our struggles for land and in defense of territory, we co-organized the World Forum for Agrarian Reform in Valencia, Spain in 2004, and in 2006 we organized the International Meeting of the Landless in Porto Alegre, Brazil, before the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). There we participated in the Brazilian women’s mobilizations against the ‘green deserts’ of Eucalyptus monocultures of the TNC Aracruz, on March 8, and in the Parallel Forum, achieving important advances in the positions of the governments. In 2007 in Nepal we organized the International Conference on Food Sovereignty, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Rights. In 2004 we held an international fair for exchange of local seed varieties, in the context of our IV Conference in Brazil. In 2005 we organized the International Conference on Seeds called “Liberate Diversity,” as part of our global struggle in favor of peasant seeds and against GMOs and terminator technology. Via Campesina Brazil organized powerful mobilizations during the International Conference of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-8) in March, 2006 in Curitiba, Brazil. We had major activities on these same issues in Mysore, India that same year, and in 2008 in Bonn, Germany, and in France where our hunger strike was key to achieving prohibition of Monsanto’s GMO maize. In Brazil in 2007, Keno, a leader of the MST, was assassinated by a gunman hired by Syngenta; but one year later we forced Syngenta to hand illegal areas used for GMO experimentation over to the government. La Via Campesina, together with other social movements, organized the “Solidarity Village” as a parallel event to the Conference on Climate Change that the UN organized in Bali, Indonesia (2007), where we advanced the argument that peasant agriculture cools the planet. In 2008 in Jakarta, Indonesia, we organized an international conference focused on our proposal for an International Declaration of Peasant Rights. Prior to this international conference we held an Assembly of Women on the Rights of Peasants. The commitment to solidarity of La Via Campesina was made evident in 2004 with our global efforts to channel alternative aid to the victims of the Tsunami, in 2007 with three delegations to meetings with the Zapatistas in Mexico, and every year with important actions in solidarity with those who are being victimized by the criminalization of social protest on all continents. The displacement of rural peoples as a result of the neo-liberal model is provoking the mass movement of peoples, turning migration into a critical issue for Via Campesina. Since 2004 we have been developing strategies and actions on migration in our new International Working Group on Migration and Rural Workers. We have undertaken major actions against the ‘wall of shame’ being built in the United States. From town to town and country to country, we have taken up the struggles of La Via Campesina. Our movement is present in almost every place on the Earth, wherever neo-liberalism is being imposed on peasants and rural communities. The struggle of La Via Campesina inspires, stimulates and generates resistance by social movements against neo-liberal policies. The number of countries with progressive governments is on the rise, gaining power as a result of years of popular mobilizations. A good number of local and national governments have accentuated their resistance, and their interest in the agenda of Food Sovereignty, as a result of popular mobilizations and as a response to the global crisis of the food prices. The offensive of capital in the countryside, the multiple crises, and the displacement of peasant and indigenous peoples Declaration of Peasant Rights Food Sovereignty: the solution to the crisis, and for the life of peoples The crisis is causing incalculable suffering among our peoples and has eroded the legitimacy of the neo-liberal model of “free trade,” such that some progressive local, state and national governments have begun to seek alternative solutions. In La Via Campesina we must be capable of taking advantage of these opportunities. We have to develop a working methodology that includes critical and constructive dialog to achieve successful cases of implementation of Food Sovereignty with these governments. We also need to take advantage of international spaces of “alternative integration,” such as ALBA and Petrocaribe, to advance in this terrain. But we must not only bet on governments, but rather build Food Sovereignty from below in the territories and other spaces controlled by popular movements, indigenous peoples, etc. The time has come for Food Sovereignty and we need to take the initiative to make progress in all of our countries. We peasants and family farmers of the world can and want to feed the world, our families and our communities, with healthy and accessible foods. Multinational corporations and free trade The advance of women is the advance of La Via Campesina We recognize the central role of women in agriculture for food self-sufficiency, and the special relationship of women with the land, with life and with seeds. In addition, we women have been and are a guiding part of the construction of Via Campesina from its beginning. If we do not eradicate violence towards women within our movement, we will not advance in our struggles, and if we do not create new gender relations, we will not be able to build a new society. We are not alone: the building of alliances Youth provide our hope for a better future Education to strengthen our movement Diversity and unity in the defense of peasant agriculture Globalize Struggle! Globalize Hope!
|
|||||||||
new food jobs
new food jobs
Regina Schrambling, “Wanted: one cave manager.” Los Angeles Times, April 4. 2007 Food section. [F1]
FIVE years ago, it would be safe to say, not a soul in California woke up each morning to a to-do list starting with: Review a restaurant for Michelin. For the foreseeable future, though, six people will be doing exactly that, producing the first L.A. version of the guide.
Michelin inspector is just the latest new job description in the nation’s rapidly expanding food universe, right behind beer sommelier, cheese affineur, mixologist and culinary philanthropist.
Careers are evolving that were unknown a decade ago, or at least before the Food Network brought out the inner Emeril in so many Americans and food became not just sustenance but entertainment, politics, culture, artisanal opportunity and national obsession. Other industries may face downsizing, but the business of eating and drinking has never seemed more vibrant. Dinner cannot be outsourced to India.
Jobs are opening up with farmers markets, in culinary tourism, in television, with Slow Food-style advocacy groups and especially with anything involving artisanal food and restaurant drinks. Consider the specialty Christina Perozzi has carved out for herself. She calls herself a beer sommelier, doing for microbrews what a traditional sommelier does for Super Tuscans. She says she “geeked out” on beer while working at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, a bar known for its extensive selection of beer, and now her “biggest passion is teaching people how beer pairs with food.” And so she helps restaurants and bars develop beer lists and train their staffs, organizes pairings with chefs at public events and teaches beer classes.
Perozzi has a blog (christinaperozzi.com), is writing a book (”Beer 4 Chx”) and says she would also like to branch out into beer tours, any one of which would have been job enough at one point in time.
Sommeliers galore
BEER sommelier is a natural, given that the first tea sommelier popped up less than a decade ago; now it is not unusual to hear the job envelope being pushed as far as salt sommelier and water sommelier.
Affineur — refiner — is another position with a French name and origin that is sounding very American as cheese becomes a national obsession. It refers to the person who improves the flavor of a cheese through aging for a few months or enhancing by some method such as washing in brandy. As director of affinage at the Artisanal Cheese Center in New York City, which sells cheese and gives classes on how to appreciate it, Alex Garcia chooses which types to import and to buy from American farmsteads, then decides how to handle them. Affinage, he says, “is 50% art and 50% technique.”
At any one time, the refrigerated “caves” at the center hold 160 to 180 different kinds of cheese, some destined to be sold right away and many more in the affinage line. Garcia set out to be an artist and was seduced by “the handmade and artistic aspect of cheese” while working at Artisanal Fromagerie and Bistro, which is also owned by his boss at the center, Terrance Brennan. Garcia now oversees a cave manager and a couple of interns who do the tasks such as turning cheeses as they age.
Other new culinary jobs have evolved from traditional ones. Karen Beverlin of Fresh Point, a California produce distributor, used to be a buyer who dealt only with wholesalers. Now she spends every Wednesday at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, hand-picking the best beets and lettuces and peaches to truck to restaurants nationwide.
“My role has morphed into more of a forager,” she says, “someone who gets out to look for something exceptional.” Her title changed, from general manager to vice president for special sales, as her duties did. “I have no administrative chores anymore,” she says. “I’ve eliminated all the nonfood, nonfun parts.”
If Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in Manhattan wants perfect carrots, Beverlin will go vendor to vendor to taste every possibility. While many Los Angeles-area restaurants send staff to the market to shop, she said, “I want chefs in Orlando to have access.”
Then there is Jing Tio, owner of Le Sanctuaire, a “culinary boutique” in Santa Monica and San Francisco, who spends most of his time out-of-state peddling exotic spices to chefs looking for the next hot flavor. He and his sister Fanny also give seminars to other chefs on how to use the right equipment with hydrocolloids such as xanthan gum, the thickeners of choice for discerning cooks who have outgrown gelatin.
The Internet has created scores of food jobs, and not just for bloggers who earn income from advertising. It would be hard to imagine a business such as Heritage Foods USA, to take one example, employing directors, a staff and contract farmers raising rare-breed hogs and turkeys if online shopping did not provide it with a national customer base.
Culinary activism is another whole new field, and Ann Cooper of Moss Beach, Calif., has built a national reputation as the “renegade lunch lady,” appalled at the obesity epidemic and determined to change the way America’s schoolchildren eat. In the last 17 months, she says she has completely transformed the food in the cafeterias of the Berkeley public school system, from “100% processed” to a kid-enticing mix of seasonal and organic, with an emphasis on whole grains and salads.
Cooper was a white-tablecloth chef for years, wrote books, learned about sustainable food and made a name for herself as executive chef at the Putney Inn in Vermont. In 1999 she was hired to revamp the food program at the Ross School in East Hampton, N.Y., and that led to the job in Berkeley, with help from the Chez Panisse Foundation.
“I run it all, 90 employees in 17 locations, doing all the food in all the cafeterias,” Cooper says. “I also oversee all the cooking and gardening classes.”
She didn’t even have a stove in the central kitchen when she started, she says, but she now has four trained chefs working for her and is getting an increasing number of requests for externships from cooking schools. The job appeals to chefs who want “to do something different and make a difference,” she said. Cooper has been a consultant to other school systems, expanding opportunities for chefs who want regular hours and nights and weekends off.
Cooper points out that some supermarkets have had professional chefs on staff for at least the last 10 years, but trained culinarians in schools is a new concept.
Irena Chalmers, who teaches food writing at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., is collecting job descriptions like that for a forthcoming book. Hers, of course, is a good example — she also teaches a required course on “food in the news” to aspiring chefs and is starting a class on gastronomy next month.
Among the positions she has documented are wedding cake designers who can charge hundreds of thousands for their sugary handiwork, boutique farmers who grow crops to order for restaurants and culinary historians who hire out as consultants on movies “because you can’t have a Jane Austen character eating a cheeseburger.”
Chalmers says most of her students at the nation’s premier cooking school “don’t want to go into restaurants after spending all that money” and are increasingly open to jobs “with a better quality of life” — meaning anything that does not involve “days being shouted at by mean chefs.”
Post-grads’ new paths
NO wonder culinary schools are scattering graduates into many other places young chefs never used to tread. Rebecca Marrs of the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena says that “boutique event planning” is a growing business for graduates, but some go on to work as demonstration chefs for companies such as Sur La Table and as mixologists, and “a lot of students are starting their own businesses making meals that are easy to heat up.”
“Meals ready to cook,” with the ingredients all prepped for dinners that can be delivered or picked up by short-cutting home cooks, are also providing opportunities for more and more graduates of the French Culinary Institute in New York City, according to Erik Murnighan, director of career services.
And Murnighan says there are also more jobs in culinary tourism (such as leading trips organized by Viking Range company) and he knows of at least one restaurant group that employs a “director of culinary philanthropy” just to handle requests for donations of food or money.
Another graduate recently started combining philanthropy and culinary tourism by forming an organization called CulinaryCorps, which takes chefs to New Orleans to donate time cooking at relief centers (and inject money into the local economy).
As celebrity chefs build restaurant empires, other jobs have been created: Thomas Keller, for instance, employs a human resources director who trained as a chef, Murnighan says. Chefs with just one restaurant typically handle the hiring themselves.
These days, the most prominent chefs often have staff to rival a small country’s. Ten or 15 years ago, it was possible for a food writer to reach almost any chef directly by calling the kitchen around 3 in the afternoon, after lunch service and before dinner; today it usually takes a call to a main office and burrowing through layers of bureaucracy just to reach the authorized spokesperson, rarely the chef.
Which partially explains what Anthony Hoy Fong does for a living. His title is culinary director for Tyler Florence, a Food Network chef now based outside San Francisco who produces cookbooks and is in constant demand for promotional appearances around the country. Unlike most celebrity chefs, Florence has no restaurants with cooks who can prep and plan for him.
Hoy Fong describes his job as half cooking, half managerial and shopping. He works on recipes, buys ingredients, preps them and even gauges the audience at tapings or events for Florence so that “when he shows, everything is ready and he can just walk onstage and he’s good to go.”
“Whether it’s in a restaurant or in the media,” Hoy Fong said, “you need a sous chef.”
Coming soon: media sommelier.
edible landscaping is happening, at last
Up on the Farm
Vancouver, British Columbia, hatches a program that brings food cultivation into town.
By Linda Baker
Locally grown food has become a mantra among urban dwellers, fueling farmer’s markets, community-supported agriculture services, and, in select cities, backyard chickens. Now Vancouver, British Columbia, is raising the bar. Under the city’s ground-breaking new “urban agriculture” program, developers of an emerging downtown neighborhood, Southeast False Creek, will be required to include edible landscaping and food-producing garden plots for rooftops and courtyards. Planners have also crafted a set of voluntary guidelines for all-new multifamily projects in Vancouver (the city council was scheduled to vote on them in April)—possibly the first city in North America to launch such an initiative.
“If we can make this happen—and make it successful—this is going to be big,” Devorah Kahn, Vancouver’s food-policy coordinator, says of the urban-agriculture plan, which is part of a broader city effort to strengthen green-building standards in private developments. An 80-acre mixed-use community, Southeast False Creek will help illuminate the way forward by modeling high-density food gardening and other practices, such as rainwater management and neighborhood energy generation. The first phase, Millennium Water, is under construction and will also house Olympic athletes during the 2010 Winter Games.
Using somewhat convoluted rule-making, the Southeast False Creek urban-agriculture conditions delineate shared garden plots for 30 percent of the neighborhood’s residential units that lack access to balconies or patios of at least 100 square feet. The actual landscaping for Millennium Water is dazzling: 4,000-square-foot rooftops support espaliered fruit trees and raised vegetable beds, courtyards feature edible designs such as blueberry and raspberry bushes, and ubiquitous trellises anchor fruit-bearing vines. Tool sheds, potting benches, and hose bins provide the necessary accoutrements, while adjacent amenity rooms and play areas for children encourage a multiuse gardening environment.
“The city wants False Creek to function like a single-family residence with a backyard,” says Jennifer Stamp, a landscape architect with Durante Kreuk who is working on Millennium Water. “You walk through the garden, eat some currants, get to know your neighbor.” All of the buildings in the Olympic village have a maximum height of 12 stories, and during the design phase, “shadow studies” helped ensure that garden areas would receive at least six hours of sun.
Hardwiring residential buildings to sustain food gardens is one challenge, says Janine de la Salle, a planner with Holland Barrs Planning Group and the author of a report on urban agriculture at Southeast False Creek. The human factor is another: “The question of who is going to manage the program and care for that apple tree—that’s always a stumbling block,” she says. The city’s intention is to have residents manage the plots, and a demonstration garden will help people living in the neighborhood learn about planting and harvesting.
Urban agriculture aids Mayor Sam Sullivan’s new “eco-density” policy, whereby housing developments will be reshaped to limit environmental impacts. Councillor Peter Ladner has also called for new gardens by 2010 as an Olympic legacy. (So far 740 have come on board.) High-density food gardening provides wildlife habitats, mitigates the urban-heat-island effect, and encourages awareness of locally grown food. As Stamp says, “It ties into sustainability on so many levels.”
Genetically Modified Animals
The FDA’s just released the final version of guidelines for genetically engineered animals. And surprise, surprise, they are not requiring that they be labeled.
Interesting NYTimes editorial
It looks like Nicholas Kristof took on our 2nd Assignment as well. Here’s an op-ed where he critiques our food system and calls for a new ‘ Secretary of Food’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/opinion/11kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
feedback on assignment 2
Some things I hoped to see in this assignment:
- explanation of HOW the WTO, IMF, WB affect farmers (tariffs, dumping, etc.)
- food sovereignty
- commodification of food, is it appropriate for food to be in a global marketplace?
- impacts on hunger
- loss of agricultural base (Jamaica movie), dependency, recolonization
- precautionary principle
- democracy
- vertical integration
- overproduction
- growth (only one person mentioned Daly!)
local/slow stuff & objects
This SUnday Dec 7 the extremely indie hip and affordable:
http://www.bazaarbizarre.org/boston.html
(Don’t forget to visit Lionette’s Market for some meat ed and great snacks — veggie too!)
Sunday Dec 13 & 14 Sowa Holiday Market
http://www.sowaholidaymarket.com/
Open studios in artists communities:
(particularly check out the Fort Point artists community! it’s huge)
And don’t forget to sign the Handmade Pledge for 2008!
dec 1 readings
Corby Kummer, “The Movement” 16-30 in The Pleasures of Slow Food. 2008.
This is a brand new book, not yet in BC libraries. You can read pages 17-27 online by going to
http://books.google.com
search “the pleasures of slow food”
there’s a “preview” of the book and you can scroll to read these pages. unfortunately, you can’t download.
amazing social justice speaker THIS SUNDAY!
This Sunday, Dennis Brutus, one of the most famous anti-apartheid activists from South Africa, will come to E5 for a special presentation on Global Apartheid and Global Justice.
Dennis was imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. He is a well known South African poet as well as an activist. Over the last decade he has been active in the global justice movement.
This is an event not to miss, Dennis is an important elder in the struggles for global justice.
He will speak at E5 at 630pm this Sunday 23 November.
E5 is in downtown Boston, convenient to all T lines.
for directions go to: http://encuentro5.org/
(this event does not seem to be on their calendar, but I just received the announcement from the organizer of E5.
Briefings to the President-elect
I was just working on my paper and realized that we actually can write to the President-elect about these issues if we want to. Obama’s new website, www.change.gov is accepting “ideas” from anyone who cares to submit them. If you just go to “Agenda” and click on Economy (or Foreign Policy, etc.), there’s a big button you can click to “Submit your ideas.” So if anybody is really pleased with the way their paper turned out…
