Context and Rationale of the Project

Across the vast countryside of the South, the resounding cries and demands for land, decent livelihoods and safe food have reached a crescendo at the beginning of the new millennium. For millions of small farmers, landless peasants and farm workers, fisherfolk and indigenous communities, WTO’s program of trade and investment liberalization which opened the weak national economies of the South has deprived them of land, water and even threatened the survival of self-sufficient national agriculture. Indeed, globalization effectively reduced people who depend on farming and food production activities to chronic marginalization and poverty.

The process has been deeply exacerbated by indebtedness and depravation resulting from structural adjustment policies and other conditionalities imposed by international instrumentalities of globalization like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and the FAO. Globalization, especially though trade agreements imposed through the GATT and later the WTO stand to make the rich richer, the poor more hungry. The further linkage of agriculture specially of the South to the global market dominated by the rich countries like those from the G-8, does not address the problem of mass poverty and hunger but rather exacerbates it.