Crisis in capitalism will be solved by the peasants uniting; only the peasants can save humanity-- but the first step is to create conflict by occupying land.

International conference organised by La Via Campesina in Mozambique -- report by Jo Chandler.

In an article entitled The Chain Gang (The Age, October 27, 2008) the plight of the millions of the world's poorest farmers is described in a sympathetic way. "They may be at the bottom of the international food chain, but when hundreds of the world's poorest farmers gathered in Mozambique last week, helping save humanity was on their minds."  The deliberate creation of conflict was also on their minds, it seems.

The recipe of La Via Campesina (the peasant-political organisation behind the conference ) involves "occupying land [as] a way of creating a conflict to try and arrive at a solution. And the solution is to give everyone a right to work the land". It has led to land being found for half a million families in Brazil, it is claimed in the article, but also the loss in life of 1500 activists over 25 years.

Chandler touches on several places where there is a tragic misallocation of land resources -- in Brazil were 1% of the population owned 46% of the land, and in South Africa where the expectations with the fall of Apartheid were an equitable re-distribution of land but the reality was still millions of frustrated landless poor and little change in land ownership.

The article next sketches the contrast between food sovereignty on the one hand -- which according to La Via Campesina allows farmers to use their knowledge, their seeds, to grow what is best for their communities -- and food security on the other hand, which according to the article courts a hijack by "big agriculture" or distant governments delivering foreign seeds, foreign technologies, or when that fails sacks of foreign grain as emergency aid. So the conclusion of La Via Campesina it seems, is that food security must be sacrificed in order to get the more important objective of food sovereignty.

Chandler realises that higher food prices disadvantage the landless poor -- and mentions the plight of the Africans facing dramatic rises in prices of their staple mealie maize grain, recently going to 112 rand ($A15.600 a bag) from 69 rand. She mentions that this is a dynamic that feeds the country's crime epidemic, but doesn't discuss whether this is a fairer price for  smallholder farmers to get for their arduous efforts after enduring years of low prices driven down by international trade.

At the conference last week Joao Pedro Stedile is quoted as saying "Capitalism is in crisis, and this will bring serious consequences for agriculture... The problems of industrial agriculture are not just a problem for peasants, but for the whole of humanity. But it is the peasants who have the answer... it's only peasant farmers and small farmers who can do three things -- look after the environment, protect human health, and prevent the exodus from the countryside to the cities."

There is no mention by Chandler of the tragedy being played out under Robert Mugabe where the actual consequences of radical solutions to land equity issues were, unfortunately, extreme and inhumane erosion of food security for hundreds of thousands of people.