Running time: 11 mins 47 secs
Powerful march by the Landworkers’ Alliance to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, advocating to put food production back in the hands of the people, rather than the current exploitative system run by huge agribusiness corporations that provides neither cheap, nor healthy, nor sustainable food.
The Landworkers’ Alliance is a rapidly growing organisation of small food growers and farmers who are part of La Via Campesina – the biggest global social movement in the world, with over 200 million members. They are fighting for food sovereignty – the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.
The march showcased the depth of work being done by so many organisations working internationally and on-the-ground here in the UK – and in particular highlighted the brave young latin american women fruitpickers from the “Justice Is Not Seasonal” campaign who are fighting a crucial struggle against modern slavery on our farms.
It was also fantastic to see the LWA making a point of standing up for trans rights, and to declare the struggle for food sovereignty as a struggle against fascism too. As they well know as food growers, monocultures in nature as well as humanity spell disaster and destruction.
The government needs to change course on its food policy – and fast. Because if they don’t, they could find the struggles of La Via Campesina elsewhere in the world being replicated here with, in the spirit of the Diggers, occupations of land to revert it to a common treasury for all rather than a vehicle for profit and exploitation by the few.
