17 April: international day of peasants, AMP to demonstrate in Lahore

Anjaman Mozareen Punjab (Tenant Association Punjab) will organize a protest demonstration in Lahore on 17 April at Shimla Pehari Lahore. 17 April is an international day of peasants and the call to organize this date came from Via Campesina, an international network of peasants. The AMP will demand the land rights from Government of Punjab and an end of corporate control over food and agriculture system. Peasants and tenants and their representatives from Lahore, Okara, Depalpur, Renala Khurd, Kala Shah Kakoo, Pakpattan, Rahim Yar Khan, Khanewal Sarghoda and other districts will participate in the demonstration.

To commemorate the International Day of Peasant Struggle on April 17^th 2010, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina has called upon member organizations, allies and supporters to unite against transnational corporations (TNCs), which seek complete control over food and agriculture systems around the world.

On April 17^th 1996, nineteen landless Brazilian peasants who were defending their right to produce food by demanding access to land were massacred by the military police. Since the massacre at El Dorado dos Carajás in Brazil, every year on this date, actions are organised around the world by farmers’ organisations, communities, student groups, non-governmental organizations and activists, in order to demand food sovereignty and peasants’ rights to produce food and land rights.

The year 2009 ended with three international summits: the Food and Agriculture Organization World Summit on Food Security in Rome, the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Geneva and the United Nations’ Climate Summit in Copenhagen. At each event, TNCs displayed their intention to control food and agriculture systems, markets, lands, seeds and water—indeed all of nature—worldwide. TNCs such as Monsanto Company, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Nestlé deployed armies of lobbyists at these events to shape policies to their benefit. 

The reality is that Monsanto and other TNCs are some of the primary contributors to climate change and other environmental crises, because they promote an unsustainable model of industrial agriculture.

Additionally, TNCs exacerbate poverty and economic recession, worldwide. As they consolidate their control over lands and agricultural markets, TNCs expel small farmers and peasants from their lands and reduce employment opportunities in rural areas, thereby swelling urban slums with even more desperate and unemployed families.

TNCs are making huge profits while hunger and poverty are on the rise. Our movement envisions a world in which TNCs such as Monsanto, Cargill, Carrefour and Walmart, and their destruction of nature and humanity, will cease to exist. To replace them will be billions of peasants on small and medium-sized farms, producing healthy food for local and regional markets, preserving biodiversity, protecting water aquifers, sequestering carbon and revitalizing rural economies.

We call upon all the social organizations, trade unions, political activists and youth to participate in our struggle for land rights and against the multi national companies in agriculture business.