Transnational corporations (TNCs) are driving and benefiting from globalisation. The top agrochemical companies are building strategic, dominant monopolies in the agrochemical, seed, and food industries. This will push the sales of unnecessary and dangerous agricultural inputs, undermine local food production, and increase ‘food dumping’, particularly in poorer countries.

With the increasing industrialisation of agriculture and the focus on export-crop production, more pesticides are used perpetuating the poisoning of our farmers, agricultural workers and consumers; contaminating our foods; and polluting our land, air and water.

TNCs are developing and marketing genetically engineered organisms, seeds and food, presenting new threats to people’s health, biodiversity, the environment, and livelihoods. This technology, underpinned by misleading and unethical marketing practices, will consolidate corporate control over agriculture and food production. Genetic engineering technologies and attendant patent laws will prevent seed saving—crucial for the food security of communities. The advent of genetically engineered rice is a serious threat to regional food security.

Land is the source of livelihood, survival, food security and culture. Large-scale and unscrupulous landowners and TNCs, facilitated by governmental support of trade liberalisation policies, produce for export or divert land from food production—intensifying landgrabbing and the massive displacement of millions of small farmers, peasants and their families from their lands.

We are deeply concerned at the resultant loss of self-sufficiency in food; local and indigenous knowledge systems, seeds and biodiversity; displacement of farming and fishing livelihoods; demise of rural communities; increased indebtedness and militarisation; forced human migration; greater misery for women; hunger and malnutrition; growing landlessness and land concentration; and the marginalisation of sustainable agriculture.

To ensure our call for land and food without poisons, for the immediate, we demand:

1. Genuine agrarian reform that provides land to landless small farmers and peasants–women and men who work the land and for those who have been previously dispossessed–with sufficient support for sustainable rural livelihoods, economies and futures independent of TNC control. Genuine agrarian reform is the foundation of food security, land and food without poisons and social justice.
2. The restriction, reduction and elimination of pesticide dependence, and the phase out and ban of synthetic chemical pesticides that cause acute, chronic and endocrine disrupting effects.
3. The cessation of corporate and government harassment of anti-pesticide activists and the indemnification of victims of pesticide poisoning.
4. As consumers and producers, a total ban on the release, use, and trade of genetically modified seeds and organisms in food and agriculture. We especially protest and reject the development of genetically engineered rice!
5. Corporate and government accountability and an end to injustices perpetuated by agrochemical and food transnational corporations.