FINAL DECLARATION OF THE FORUM ON AGRO ECOLOGY AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY

Port-au-Prince, Saturday, October 16, 2021

Having taken part in the forum on agroecology and food sovereignty on October 14, 15, and 16, 2021, as part of the International Day of Rural Women (October 15), we, ICKL, KJM, MPP, MPNKP, PAPDA, SOFA, Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (TK), and other organizations throughout the country, as well as dozens of organizations in Haiti, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Africa joining through Zoom, salute the courage and determination of farmers who work tirelessly to ensure the food sovereignty of our peoples. We seize the opportunity of the forum on agroecology and food sovereignty to denounce the approach of the United Nations Summit on World Food Systems held in New York on September 23, 2021, which took place under the control of transnational agribusiness capitalists, who are ultimately responsible for the situation of famine and misery facing the planet.

We denounce public policies in the field of agriculture and food, economic policies oriented towards extractive industries and agricultural land grabs, as well as strategies of violence and fear, applied by the Haitian state for decades, which contribute to the destruction of the country’s productive capacities. These practices destroy the foundation of agroecological family farming, destroy the environment and reinforce the country’s dependence on imported products, accentuating food insecurity and unemployment, while encouraging foreign migration to the benefit of large multinational companies and their local acolytes.

We denounce and categorically reject scurrilous, anti-popular, anti-peasant decrees passed by the PHTK regime aimed at accelerating land grabbing of peasants’ land for the benefit of national and international mafias in order to develop agribusiness, mining, industrial free trade zones, and tourist free zones. The implementation of this vision of a colonial economy contributes to the exploitation and marginalization of the  peasants, as in Prévoyance, Savane Diane, Plaine de Maribahoux, Terrier-Rouge, in the Northwest, the Plateau Central, in Artibonite, Ile-à-Vache, Côte des Arcadins, among other regions.

We firmly believe that the gangsterization of the country today is part of a political strategy and represents a tool of the bourgeoisie, multinationals and the current political regime, intended to break popular resistance to the economic policies being implemented in the country, and to prevent the masses from continuing to influence political dynamics. In this sense, we, the signatory organizations of this declaration, commit ourselves to:

• • 1. Coming together to build a strong and well-articulated social and popular movement and to define strategies of struggle to defend peasant family-based agroecological agriculture, in order to build real foundations for food sovereignty in the country;
    2. Show more determination in defending agricultural land benefitting peasants, water, the model of agroecological family farming and the environment, against the exploitation of metal mines and the establishment of industrial, agro-industrial and tourist free trade zones;
    3. Show determination and fight alongside peasants and communities against all land grabs and all threats to the country’s food sovereignty. We oppose and will continue to oppose those projects of death today and beyond;
    4. Establish and carry out a national campaign of training, sensitization and awareness-raising on the model of agroecological family farming and the consumption of local products at all levels: gastronomy, clothing, housing, entertainment, music, dance and all other elements characteristic of the culture and traditions of the Haitian people;
    5. Work on the establishment of strategies for the production, transformation, and marketing of agricultural products from rural areas, through a strategy of social and solidarity-based economy, while developing mechanisms to regulate transport and distribution networks;
    6. Defend local (Creole) seeds and advocate for investments that can respond to the challenges faced by peasants in strengthening peasant agroecological agriculture;
    7. Value the historical and contemporary contributions of the peasant family economy and defend the demands of the exploited and marginalized classes in the context of the emancipatory struggles of the working classes and masses (“classes populaires”);
    8. Participate in dissemination and reflection on the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People working in Rural Areas”, adopted at the end of 2018, after several decades of struggle by global peasant movements, such as La Via Campesina;
    9. Build a leftist political front in order to deconstruct the current model of state and governance, so as to build a sovereign Haitian state capable of carrying out true agrarian and popular reform, whose main objective will be to ensure the food sovereignty of the country;
    10. Advocate for a land use policy that gives priority to the development of agroecological family farming;
    11. Build organizational and structural tools and create alliances to monitor and block all decisions at the national and international levels that are likely to have negative impacts on the living conditions of the Haitian population;
    12. Build global and abroad alliances, develop articulations and synergies with all the international anticapitalist networks, respecting the main orientations defined by the CLOC^[1]-Via Campesina, the ALBA^[2] social movement, Jubilee South America (JSA), and the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples (APC);
    13. Struggle without respite for the elaboration and implementation of public policies aimed at rebuilding the country’s environment, devastated by more than five (5) centuries of colonial and neo-colonial plunder;
    14. Continue to oppose and fight against trade liberalization policies and all forms of neoliberal policies promoted and imposed on the country by the IMF and other international organizations control by imperialism. Block through our struggles all projects of neoliberal inspiration;
    15. Promote and defend the experience of the feminist agroecological Farm-School led by the SOFA in Savane Diane while reinforcing our struggles for the annulling of the unjustifiable decree of February 8, 2021, taken by the illegal de facto government of former president Jovenel Moïse, granting to an anti-national entrepreneur more than 8,600 hectares of land for the establishment of an export free trade zone;
    16. Prioritize the issue of education to develop an alternative education system linked to history, culture and our identity as a people;
    17. Participate in all the struggles for the emancipation of the country in order to build a system that prioritizes life instead of capitalist profit;
    18. Set up, throughout the country, local structures to defend peasant and family agroecological agriculture, while insisting on the realization of spaces of debate, forums, training sessions to strengthen the capacities of communities in struggles against agribusiness projects, metal mining, the establishment of industrial and tourist free trade zones etc.

Against imported food products!

Against food dependency!

Against neoliberal policies, sources of food insecurity, misery and despair!

Against land grabbing for the benefit of big business and transnational corporations!

Against all metal mining!

For an agro-ecological family peasant agriculture!

Long live the struggles of peasant women, motors of the peasant economy!

Long live peasant and popular mobilization in favor of the integral and popular agrarian reform!

Long live food sovereignty of the country!

Long live the contribution of the peasant movement in the liberation of Haiti,

towards the construction of our 2nd independence!

For authentication:

Camille CHALMERS, PAPDA 
Sharma AURELIEN, SOFA
Chavannes JEAN-BAPTISTE, MPP / MPNKP

[1] Latin-American coordination of peasant organizations
[2] Bolivian alternative for the Americas

Signatories Organizations