UN Backs Seed Sovereignty in Landmark Peasants’ Rights Declaration

By Timothy A. Wise

Cross-posted at Food Tank.

On December 17, the United Nations General Assembly took a quiet but historic vote, approving the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, by a vote of 121-8 with 52 abstentions. The declaration, which was the product of some 17 years of diplomatic work led by the international peasant alliance La Via Campesina, formally extends human rights protections to farmers whose “seed sovereignty” is threatened by government and corporate practices.

“As peasants we need the protection and respect for our values and for our role in society in achieving food sovereignty,” said Via Campesina coordinator Elizabeth Mpofu after the vote. Most developing countries voted in favor of the resolution, while many developed country representatives abstained. The only “no” votes came from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, Israel, and Sweden.

“To have an internationally recognized instrument at the highest level of governance that was written by and for peasants from every continent is a tremendous achievement,” said Jessie MacInnis of Canada’s National Farmers Union. The challenge now, of course, is to mobilize small-scale farmers to claim those rights, which are threatened by efforts to impose rich-country crop breeding regulations onto less developed countries, where the vast majority of food is grown by peasant farmers using seeds they save and exchange.

Taking Away the Ladder

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury

Cross-posted at Inter Press Service.

The notion of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later, South Africa) was concocted by Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill. His 2001 acronym was initially seen as a timely, if not belated acknowledgement of the rise of the South.

But if one takes China out of the BRICS, one is left with little more than RIBS. While the RIBS have undoubtedly grown in recent decades, their expansion has been quite uneven and much more modest than China’s, while the post-Soviet Russian economy contracted by half during Boris Yeltsin’s first three years of ‘shock therapy’ during 1992-1994.

Unsurprisingly, Goldman Sachs quietly shut down its BRICS investment fund in October 2015 after years of losses, marking “the end of an era”, according to Bloomberg.

Growth spurts in South America’s southern cone and sub-Saharan Africa lasted over a decade until the Saudi-induced commodity price collapse from 2014. But the recently celebrated rise of the South and developing country convergence with the OECD has largely remained an East Asian story.

A Blueprint for Linking Trade to Full Employment and Domestic Industrialization

Second part of a series, 2018 TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT: Interview with UNCTAD’s Richard Kozul-Wright, from the Real News Network.

RICHARD KOZUL-WRIGHT: Here’s a big question that I think needs to be honestly and frankly addressed. If state ownership, technology transfer agreements and subsidies work to sustain growth and eliminate poverty and these policies have taken 500 million people out of poverty in China, and by implication, because of China’s connections to other developing countries, another 100 million people out of poverty in other parts of the developing world: Why do advanced economies want to deny their use to other developing countries? Given their success, given what they have achieved in terms of economic performance and social performance, why would you want, why would you want to eliminate these options from the policy toolkit of developing countries? It’s a very serious question that needs to be, I think, asked in a more frank and honest way than has so far been the case.

Obviously, for us least in terms of the TDR, it’s about rethinking multilateralism in progressive ways. It’s a plague on both your houses This is not an issue of do we support regressive nationalism, which we’ve already seen in various formations. Nor is it a support for the kind of corporate cosmopolitanism that has dominated the multilateral discussion for the last…We need some kind of alternative that is neither of these options. And I’ll finish here. We, in the Trade and Development Report this year, have gone back to the Havana Charter, which as many of you know, was the forerunner of the GATT, indeed more ambitious of the multilateral discussions in 1947 and 1948 than the GATT, that was signed up to by 50 odd countries, both developed and developing. Indeed, the majority of countries that signed up the Havana Charter were from the developing world. It was eventually rejected by the U.S. Congress and was shelved, but it is a remarkable document.

Multilateralism Undermined by Globalization’s Discontents

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Cross-posted with Inter Press Service. 
On 24 October 1945, the world’s most inclusive multilateral institution, the United Nations, was born to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, … establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” (UN Charter: Preamble).
Thus, one major purpose of the UN is to foster international cooperation to resolve the world’s socio-economic problems and to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms (UN Charter: Article 1.3).
Hence, all Members are obliged to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” (Article 1.4), and to give the UN “every assistance in any action it takes in accordance with [its] Charter” (Article 1.5).
For many, however, the world today is increasingly at odds with the ideals of the UN Charter. Wars and conflicts are causing unprecedented humanitarian crises, worsened by rising intolerance and xenophobia.
Important international organizations and treaties are being threatened by unilateral withdrawals, non-payment of dues, virtual vetoes and threats of worse. Meanwhile, bilateral and plurilateral trade and other agreements are undermining crucial features of the post-Second World War order.