La Via Campesina, the international peasant's movement, representing more than 200 million small farmers around the world, said about the Doha debacle that, "The inaction in the climate negotiations is a reflection of the corporate capture of governments by big business. While governments play silly games - debating blank pages and creating loopholes to escape responsibility - peasants and small farmers, who are among the most affected by the climate crisis, are the ones implementing real solutions on the ground to adapt to climate conditions and realize food sovereignty. Studies have shown that small farmers still produce the majority of the world’s food. We are not only feeding the people but also adapting to new climate conditions using agroecology and peasant seed varieties."La Via Campesina also reminds us that the peasants' tradition, everywhere, is to save their own seed. By saving seed we all, everywhere, can do our part in the battle against corporate agriculture's attempt to monopolize our food supply with lies like the one about increased food production with GMO seed which has been dis-proven in all the international studies. As Vandana Shiva says, "The most effective road to reducing hunger and malnutrition is to intensify land use in terms of biodiversity and ecological processes of renewal of soil fertility. Biodiverse ecological farms increase food and nutrition output per acre."
The world's peasant farmers are helping to cool a warming planet, cool eh. And, world-wide there are well over 2 billion people who still live self-sufficiently with kids and chickens running around everywhere, still grow and trade for their own everything, bucolic bliss. just like humans have been doin for awhile now. Save the planet, become a peasant, eh.
Today is an especially good day to find a positive spin for the Doha disaster. Living here in the empire it's easy to forget that half the world's people are still sane. Remembering John Lennon, who was shot and killed 32 years ago today, i wonder what this genius would be asking us to 'Imagine' now?
