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Kuala Lumpur, Monday: Delegates to the Third International Women's Conference Against APEC at Kuala Lumpur today called for active resistance to globalisation in agriculture - calling on the development of alternatives, including alternative strategies, vision and leadership, which will provide food security at the household and community levels for all.

At the workshop on Land, Food Security and Agriculture, they said globalisation that is being driven by APEC and other free-trade caucuses, has destroyed food security in Asian countries, hitting women the hardest.

As national and transnational agri-business corporations take over food production and distribution, this has further marginalised women's role in agriculture, and destroyed their knowledge and skills. Women are now much worse off as farm workers: where once they were decision-makers and active participants, women are now being increasingly pushed into the informal sector undertaking jobs such as weeding, etc, stated Sarojeni V. Rengam of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Asia and the Pacific.

To develop sustainable agriculture and provide food security, the workshop demanded that women have better access to land, seeds, water and other resources. But the struggle for food security, and sustainable agriculture, needs to confront not only the interests and institutions involved in the new globalised agriculture, but also patriarchal systems. Systems represented in its extreme form in some countries by militarisation of the State, which dominates all levels of society. Which means, the workshop noted, women should develop alternative leadership to reflect the whole range of problems that women faced, and to work towards building a better, more egalitarian and gender-just society.

Several delegates discussed the problems of food security in their own countries, and how alternatives are being developed. In the Philippines, where landlessness is a major problem, globalisation has worsened the situation. Large tracks of land are being converted to 'high-value' export crops, industrial zones, tourist resorts, golf courses, mining projects, etc. Land conversion is eroding the capacity of the farmers to produce their own food. And food security at the household level, and national food security, is being met with food imports.

"The Estrada administration had vowed to give priority to food security, but the directive in which it is actually going is alarming," said Carmen Buena of AMIHAN. "Peasants have lost their land, and the cry for land remains a dream; there is massive starvation and poverty among peasants because of increasing landlessness.

" In India, "the new colonialism in the form of structural adjustment programmes is further undermining the already fragile livelihoods of Dalit (a community of women belonging to 'untouchable low castes who are extremely impoverished) and tribal women. The current rhetoric of women's rights are women's emancipation, economic as well as social, promoted by government officials and political leaders hides the dismal conditions in which Dalit women continue to live," stated Dr Rukmini Rao, of the Deccan Development Society, Hyderabad, India. Oppressed and exploited, these women are now beginning to fight back to regain their livelihoods and dignity.

Dr Rao cited an example of how Dalit women in one of the districts (Medak in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh) in India were organising themselves into women's 'sanghas' (groups) to carry out their struggles.

"The women oppose the ethic of competition and individualism and, collectively, they are demonstrating the power of sharing one caring," she said. "To ensure immediate food security for themselves, they have set up grain banks and also taken several steps to create sustainable life-styles."

These steps include setting up seed banks to confront multinational seed companies; social forestry programmes to revive degraded lands (creating also employment and additional resources such as fuel wood and fodder); alternative health care system; promotion of organic agriculture; and values of democracy and gender equity.

"Through their actions, Dalit women have demonstrated an alternative path to development and self-reliance in opposition to the values and strategies promoted by world elite through international organisations and multi-national corporations.

"The erosion of community power in the face of encroaching and centralising forces beyond the control of the peasantry is, in fact, a political issue to the farmers," according to Farhad Mazhar of UBINIG, Bangladesh.

The Nayakrishi Andolan (New Agricultural Movement) is therefore challenging conventional centralised agricultural practices with the promotion of alternatives, as an initiative of the peasants of Bangladesh. Their alternative and integrated agricultural practices do away with chemical pesticides, and involve agro-forestry, livestock and poultry, fish culture and conservation of water, seeds and genetic resources at the household and community levels.

"But Nayakrishi is not just a matter of introducing new agricultural technology based on nature-friendly organic methods," says Farhad. "Neither is it an ecological or an environmental movement in a narrow, elitist and 'official' sense ... its objective is to transform and reconstruct the community on new relations and values. It is an effort to create new visions for a mode of living". In this, the experiential knowledge of farmers is critical, he says.

Meanwhile, agro-chemical companies are adapting new strategies to promote chemical-based food production as the sole solution to meet the world's food needs - without considering how food is distributed. This by itself cannot solve the problem, and "we must continue to assert the importance of access to and distribution of food," said Barbara Dinham of the Pesticide Trust, United Kingdom.

"Top pesticide companies now control 80% of the agro-chemical sales, and there is growing integration with seed companies, particularly by Novartis, Monsanto, Zeneca and Du Pont. These agro-chemical companies assert that they can feed the world, insist that pesticides can be used safely, and promote pesticide management as integrated pest management (IPM)." These strategies need to be challenged and countered.

The workshop recommended that every country should develop a national plan for food security that incorporates commitment to growing certain healthy percentage of national food production needs. Governments should also be pressed to implement national plans for food security.

Other recommendations included:

• Campaigns to remove the Agreement on Agriculture from the WTOÕs purview; these campaigns should also push for the removal of subsidies in U.S. and European agriculture.
• Promotion of national food security debates and campaigns.
• Demonstration of the "multi-functional nature of agriculture".
• Campaigns to encourage people to eat local and to develop and support the local economy.
• Campaigns against the loss of agricultural biodiversity.
• Revival of indigenous knowledge, and its protection from TNCs.
• Development of hunger maps as recommended at the World Food Summit.
• Assertion of the practise of sustainable agriculture as a resistance to the globalisation of agriculture.
• Documentation of the effects of liberalisation, as being pushed by trade blocks like APEC, including the impact of structural adjustment on agriculture and rural livelihoods.

By Suria Prakash and Jennifer Mourin