A Women’s Declaration to the G8:

[ensho]

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.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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/

[notesdev]

1. ok you got me here...

How exactly is gender discrimination a threat to global food security?

[ensho]

2. think about it for awhile. who feeds the kids,? who owns the food?

nt

[notesdev]

3. I'm sorry, I don't understand

Both men and women own food, both men and women feed kids. Whatever point you are making here, you will have to be more explicit.

[ensho]

4. stop playing, you know what I meant

there are food Barons. no Baroness that I know of.

[notesdev]

5. Not playing

I've still yet to see anything that points to gender discrimination playing a role in global food security. You've evaded the question twice now, and at this point my best guess is that you can't really substantiate the statement at all, but merely like to attach your favorite pet issue to the hot topics of the day.

[Crowdance]

6. You'll find reading the articles edifying. Your answer was right there,

and not too far from the top of the article, either.

"We emphasize that support for small farmers must include a focus on women, who produce most of the world’s food. Indeed, in much of Africa, where the food crisis is at its worst, women grow and process 80 percent of all food.

However, the capacity of these farmers is badly undermined by laws and customs that discriminate against women. In many countries, women who grow the food that sustains the majority of the population are not even recognized as farmers. They are denied the right to own land and excluded from government programs that facilitate access to credit, seeds, tools, and training.

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."

[notesdev]

7. Objections to the thesis

Objection 1: Global and regional are two different things. The major issue affecting global food security is ethanol, not discrimination.

Objection 2: Food security crises are more closely related to development levels than gender discrimination. Some of the most highly discriminatory cultures on the planet are having no problems whatsoever with food security.

Objection 3: Food security is more closely correlated with population growth than any other factor.

Objection 4: Areas where gender discrimination is a factor are not major food producers to begin with. The #1 problem area is sub-Saharan Africa, whose food security issues are not threat to global food security.