ISDS Case Map
agriculture | farmers | food
plus livestock, forestry, etc
Interview with Jun Gi-Hoan, General Secretary of Korean Peasants League
Peruvian farmers upset over a free trade deal with the United States blocked rail service to the famous Inca ruins at Machu Picchu on Monday and paralyzed vast swaths of the Andean country by halting traffic on key highways.
Negotiated on the sidelines of the US-Korea FTA, in March 2007.
A group mainly representing Mexican family farmers denounced Monday that imports of white corn from the United States increased 384 percent after last month's NAFTA-mandated end to trade barriers in agriculture.
India finds itself increasingly on the defensive in agricultural trade for permitting field trials across the country in a host of genetically modified food crops -- rice, brinjal, okra, potato, tomato and groundnuts -- and thereby exposing conventional crops to the risk of transgenic contamination. A case in point is a rather dodgy no-contamination certificate that the regulator, Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, was forced to give two months ago in response to a restriction imposed by Russia on import of rice, groundnuts and sesame seeds from India.
Corporate globalization, savagely embodied by NAFTA, is not just a threat to Mexican farmers and rural villagers. The economic, health, and social damage created by industrial agriculture, corporate globalization, and the patenting and gene-splicing of transgenic plants and animals, are inexorably leading to universal "bioserfdom " for farmers, deteriorating health for consumers, a destabilized climate (energy intensive industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation and processing account, directly or indirectly, for 40% of all climate-disrupting greenhouse gases), tropical deforestation, and a rapid depletion of oil supplies.
Thousands of Mexican farmers, some herding cows, flooded into the capital on Thursday and set a tractor on fire to demand government protection against cheap US farm imports under NAFTA.
From 11th to 13th January 2008, 21 delegates and members of Via Campesina, from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, South Korea, Norway, France, Haiti, Mali, Italy, the United States, Mozambique, Turkey, the Basque Country and Nepal, met in Dijon for a strategic seminar on the theme “Food Sovereignty and Free-Trade Agreements” convened and organised by the Via Campesina's Food Sovereignty work committee.
Convened two years before the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 200th anniversary of the 1810 War for Independence, Mexico's latest farmer protest is now gathering force with strong historical and political overtones. Farmers intend to follow the same route that Pancho Villa took on his 1914 march into Mexico City, and on which an anti-NAFTA protest was conducted by protestors on horseback in 1999
The Mexican farmer march against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will enter Sunday the city of Chihuahua on its way to this capital.
