Author: Christelle Terreblanche, The Star
Date: January 24, 2007
Source: The Star, SA http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3642232

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Nairobi - South Africa and Zimbabwe's land reform programmes have come under attack at the World Social Forum here, where a Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform was launched.

Activists gathering at the annual leftist world forum said yesterday the market-based land reform policies adopted by the South African government meant that many poor people were not yet free to access livelihoods and that more-radical reforms were necessary. African landless movements were urged by their South American counterparts to follow their successful "attacks" on those who resisted land reform.

The comments arose as a number of grassroots organisations from across the globe launched the Global Campaign at a two-day WSF workshop on food security and "food sovereignty".

The seminar was among more than a thousand events staged at the annual WSF, set up in 2001 in Brazil, to protest over what activists call the anti-poor economic strategies that emerge from the World Economic Forum. This is held every January in Davos, Switzerland, and is attended by the rich multinational companies and finance ministers. This year's WEF was due to start today and will be attended by President Thabo Mbeki.

Food, land and water security was high on this year's WSF agenda, held for the first time in its entirety in Africa.

Through the global campaign, African and Asian activists yesterday linked their struggles for food security with La Via Campesina, a South American social movement that has had considerable success with pressing governments to fast-track land and agrarian reform.

It claims to have the backing of new leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez. Both are proponents of radical land reform.

"In the past two decades we have seen in Southern Africa a massive struggle that embroiled the entire region. Today we find that the situation has not changed for rural people," said Mercia Andrews, Cape Town-based activist of the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE).

"The vast majority remain landless. Those who have land continue to struggle to make a living. Despite (President Robert) Mugabe, little has changed in Zimbabwe for small farmers. In South Africa, the government has no food sovereignty policy.

"Food sovereignty" is a new concept referring to small farmers' ability to control their land, seeds, water and other means of production in the face of efforts by multinational companies to control it.

Eastern Cape TCOE member Mthumthum Bozo said he had not seen any agrarian reform and that he could not plough his fields because of a lack of fencing and equipment.

"We have land. We cannot use it," he told The Star. "We have not ploughed since 2001." He said appeals for help to the provincial government and municipality had been in vain.

The international co-ordinator of Via Campesina ("the peasant way"), Rafael Alegria, said the global campaign was born out of the multi-nationals' increased efforts to control all farming and the trade in production through the World Trade Organisation, "the mother organisation of capitalism".

He said the main focus of the campaign was to help those struggling for land, such as landless people's movements worldwide; to make it heard in international forums such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation; and "to attack organisations such as the World Bank, which has this insane idea that the poor should access land through the market".

In many South American countries, the Via Campesina is moving "from resistance to power. History has showed that real agrarian reform is not possible without the political will to break the strong links to the (undemocratic) past," said Alegria.

"Now we have governments in Latin America who are no longer talking agrarian reform but agrarian revolution. We have basically changed the map to be much more favourable for food security."

He added that in order to win the struggles worldwide, alliances must be build with other sectors such as unions, NGOs and churches, and that governments should be forced to participate.