A Women’s Declaration to the G8: Support Real Solutions to the Global Food Crisis
To:
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (Japan)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Canada)
President Nicolas Sarkozy (France)
Chancellor Angela Merkel (Germany)
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (Italy)
President Dmitry Medvedev (Russia)
Prime Minister Gordon Brown (United Kingdom)
President George Bush (United States)
This year, the world’s eight richest governments (the G8) meet against the backdrop of a global food crisis. With prices for all major food commodities at a 50-year-high, world leaders are discussing pervasive “food shortages” that threaten to destabilize dozens of countries. But worsening hunger is the result of cost inflation, not any absolute food shortage. In fact, the world produces more food than the global population can consume.
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We call on the G8 to:
Recognize gender discrimination as a threat to global food security;
Uphold the rights of agricultural workers under the International Labor Organization’s Conventions;
Support national policies that provide small-scale farmers with access to land, seeds, water, credit and other inputs and that uphold the rights of farmers to make informed decisions about land use and food production.
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We call on the G8 to:
Move beyond the partial commitment it made to debt cancellation at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland and enact immediate and unconditional debt cancellation for all developing countries;
Allow governments to determine their own agricultural policies in consultation with citizens;
Institute international mechanisms for market stabilization that protect the livelihoods of farmers and guarantee affordable food for all people;
Endorse the call of Jacques Diouf, Secretary General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, for developing countries to be enabled to achieve food self-sufficiency.
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We call on the G8 to:
Recognize that food is first and foremost a human right and only secondarily a tradable commodity;
Support a process for an international Convention to replace the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture. Such a Convention must uphold the full range of human rights standards and should implement the concept of food sovereignty, whereby communities control their own food systems;
Respect the rights of small farmers to save and exchange seeds between communities and internationally;
Initiate a conversion of national agricultural subsidies from support for agribusiness to incentives for sustainable farming, including small-scale and organic farms.
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We urge the G8 to ground integrated solutions to the food crisis in the framework of human rights. That framework, rather than further pursuit of corporate profits, has the strongest potential to yield policies that can resolve the global food crisis in tandem with the other urgent issues of climate change and development being addressed by the G8.
Sincerely,
Vivian Stromberg
MADRE
USA
Rose Cunningham
Wangki Tangni Women’s Center
Nicaragua
Adriana Gonzalez
LIMPAL
Colombia
Sandra Gonzalez Maldonado
Comité de Trabajadoras de la Maquila Bárcenas; Women Workers’ Committee
Guatemala
Anne Sosin
KOFAVIV - Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim; The Commission of Women Victims for Victims
Haiti
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YES
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/08/10212/