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Since
1996, SANFEC has created various opportunities and spaces for farmers
and the general public to build common ground and to raise their
voices in local, national and regional policy forums. In particular,
SANFEC has worked closely with the Resistance Network, a regional
network against trafficking in women and children, to advocate for
South Asian State level cooperation on food security through the South
Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC). The two networks
jointly organized the SAARC People's Forum, parallel to the SAARC
summits held in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1998 and in Kathmandu in 2002,
to introduce into the SAARC summits the link between the insecurity of
food, migration and trafficking in women and children. The SAARC
People’s Forum played a crucial role in advocating for a convention to
combat trafficking in women and children, latter developed and signed
by the South Asian governments. SANFEC and the Resistance Network
brought out analyses of the trafficking situations in the different
countries of South Asia and formulated recommendations to governments
regarding what they could do to address this problem through food
sovereignty and agricultural policies. In 2003, the Third SAARC
Peoples Forum was held in Tangail, Bangladesh prior the 5th
Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisations. Several National
level Consultations were organised by each SANFEC member organisation
on various Agreements of WTO relating to agriculture and peoples
responses to such agreements.
SANFEC also organized a
forum in 1999 to develop a collective position on Article 27.3(b) of
the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It campaigns against
all forms of Intellectual Property Rights on life forms and is
appealing to governments to keep life forms out of trade agreements by
proposing to the WTO a rephrasing of the text of Article 27.3(b). At a
regional level, SANFEC members also supported national movements
trying to defend their seeds, germplasm and biological resources from
piracy and reintroduced the Statement of Concern on Food, Ecology and
Culture to the World Food Summit plus Five held in Rome in June, 2002.
SANFEC has collaborated with “No Patents on Life Forms” campaign
groups during the Third SAARC Peoples Forum held in August, 2003. In
the light of the WTO Ministerial Conference mention was made of the
IPR Agenda at Cancun: Review, NPoL, Sui Generis, Disclosure of
origin, Geographical Indications and Traditional Knowledge -- issues
that were also brought forward by several country submissions to the
TRIPs Council.
The
SANFEC organised a Public Forum on Genetic Engineering, Agriculture
and Farmers Rights in December 2002 at Hyderabad, India in
collaboration with GRAIN which resulted in a strong statement of the
Civil Society affirming Farmers rights in the context of GE
agriculture
In all of these actions,
members from food producing communities, particularly farmers, played
a direct role. The policy environment is imbued with various
assumptions, beliefs, interests, directions and the logic of various
existing conventions, agreements, treaties and multilateral and
bilateral projects or programmes. These complex scenarios affect the
farming communities, along with other sections of society in various
ways. There is a need both within the NGO community and in the state
bureaucracy to interpret policies to farmers in a language
understandable to them and in a way that triggers responses from them
that can contribute to policy dialogue and policy influence.
The challenge for SANFEC
is to investigate and significantly incorporate farmer perspectives
into the policy-making process and regional discourse on community’s
control and command over food production, distribution and consumption
in the context of the critique of development discourse from the
perspective of agrarian life, ecology and culture. Among many issues
of concern the food insecurity is a major political issue in South
Asia. SANFEC believes that it could be a key area of potential
co-operation between countries in the South Asia Association for
Regional Cooperation (SAARC). However, discussion of the issues and
SAARC policy-making processes seldom take into account the
biodiversity-rich farming practices of the region and their potential
to feed people locally and to create viable local livelihoods.
There is a need to open
up new horizons and options for policy makers and to bring to bear in
policy dialogue the regional experience of farmers with ecological,
biodiversity-based agriculture and collective perspectives on policy
areas of common concern. Unless governments can guarantee significant
new rural and urban livelihoods, there is no reason to sideline
existing biodiversity-based livelihoods created by farming communities
and promoted by many grassroots organisations.
SANFEC has been active
in creating spaces and processes for farmers to generate knowledge and
formulate policy positions that can then be creatively communicated to
policy makers. Our experience to date suggests that a regional process
based on farmer-led research, direct farmer-to-farmer communication
and farmer-based policy dialogue can make it possible for farming
communities to articulate policy actions of regional significance. |
