From Tegucigalpa to Tikrit, municipal markets have traditionally been common spaces to sell local agrarian products. Next to jute sacks of spices you might find scattered gladiola petals dropped by flower sellers; past heaps of tire-soled sandals unhappy goats strain against their tethers. In every corner is the corn, tomatoes and avocadoes from nearby farms.
The public market isn’t only an essential selling space for small farmers and artisans, it is home to social, cultural and political life as well. Voodoo icons are sold alongside the church, bored vendors swat flies and debate community problems, politicians visit the potato section stumping for votes. Municipal governments earn revenue from renting stalls.
What happens, then, when global trade rules suddenly intrude upon local public markets, flooding them with cheap imports? How do displaced local producers and sellers fight for shelf space and win public support for their cause?
In El Salvador’s Tiendona – the capital city’s wholesale produce market – informal vendors of a juicy national tomato were finding themselves squeezed out. Better-capitalized wholesalers traveled to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to truck in large volumes of tomatoes that were cheaper but less tasty (at least from the perspective of Salvadoran pupusa makers). Faced with an over-crowded market, municipal authorities ceded the primo shelf space to powerful wholesalers of imported tomatoes and left the smaller vendors of national tomatoes hidden behind busted crates.
Unemployed vendors were not the only ones hurt. The effects were felt up and down the production chain in Chalatenango where the Salvadoran tomatoes were grown. Farmers reverted to scraping by on subsistence corn farming. Farmers boomed and mostly busted while experimenting with melons for export. Farmers gave up, hired a coyote and migrated to the United States.
Photo by Jake Miller Bene Clerie is a manager at the Lawob coop in Haiti’s Central Plateau. They’ve built a small reservoir to irrigate downstream crops.
Some farmers organized. They enlisted the support of their local mayor to make their “fair trade” case to the politically appointed (and politically vulnerable) Tiendona administrator. They coordinated their advocacy with the small wholesalers in the town, seeing them as necessary allies rather than as rapacious intermediaries. There were other allies as well, for example, a leftist union of vendors that saw an alliance with national tomato producers as a way to embarrass the mayor.
In the end, the farmers and their allies prevailed; a section of the Tiendona market was preserved for selling national tomatoes grown in the Chalatenango hills.
Why Protecting Local Markets Matters
What insights does this story of winning shelf space for local produce offer for preserving the commons? A surprising number, I think.
Perhaps most fundamental is that reliable local markets make all the difference in sustaining rural livelihoods, family life and environmental protection. Family farmers around the world know firsthand how terribly broken our global food system is. For example, it creates perverse incentives for U.S. taxpayers to shore up chemically dependent U.S. rice producers using gobs of fossil fuels to sell their rice below the cost of production in Haiti, a country that until the 1990?s was a net rice exporter. Haiti is both the poorest country in the hemisphere and a country that the U.S. successfully pressured to lower tariffs to the lowest levels in the Caribbean.
When I visited the U.S. Agency for International Development in Port au Prince, their leading agronomist stated that there was no future in agriculture for Haiti’s three-million-plus small farmers. The future is in duty-free manufacturing and assembly plants. Rather than investing generously in building Haiti’s rural infrastructure for a robust agricultural economy, the U.S. response to Haiti’s woes has principally consisted of decades upon decades of food aid. While food aid is essential in acute emergencies (and to buoy U.S. agribusiness), the use of food aid over the long term simply thwarts the emergence of viable agricultural markets. When local markets are allowed to thrive, people are far more likely to have stable livelihoods and the environment is less likely to be abused.
Photo by Louise Bowditch Members of Haiti’s Peasant Movement of Papay working together in a “kombit” – a collective work day.
This is a key reason for talks between the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) on Haiti’s Central Plateau and the UN’s World Food Program. The goal is to have local farmers grow and process peanut butter and manioc cakes for school lunches in Haiti’s Northeast. This food would replace the grain imports currently used in the school feeding programs.
Women of the MPP gather leaves, sawdust and any organic material not already in the compost pile (competition for scarce organic matter is fierce in Haiti), and then soak it, pack it into PVC pipe, and finally slice it into briquettes for cooking fuel. The briquettes are used at home, sold locally and undercut the market for charcoal, a prime culprit in Haiti’s frightening deforestation. With a good market for their products, peasants do not have to leave their children to drive a Boston cab; they can participate in MPP trainings to analyze the economy and environment, and join together to terrace watersheds, plant trees and protect water sources.
This “seeds and tools” community development work is part of an international campaign for food sovereignty – a dynamic global movement for the commons. The MPP joins with other family farmers in the Via Campesina (the “Farmers’ Path”) representing over 100 million farmers in 68 countries. The glue that unites farmers from corners of the globe as distant as Haiti, Mozambique and the United States is a vision of a food system where communities have the sovereign right to decide what they will produce and what they will consume.
A robust version of food sovereignty would be family farms all over the world growing principally for local markets, shielded from free trade rules that encourage the dumping of imports. The viability of local markets would be sustained by national policies that support family farmers.
The foundation for food sovereignty is local markets serving the interests of local producers and consumers. In this sense, food sovereignty crashes into the logic of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture, which, in facilitating a corporate version of free trade, restricts the ability of national governments to protect their rural sectors. Food sovereignty advocates insist that trade and agricultural policies, so critical to the health of billions of families and hectares, should protect these small producers. They also insist that these policies should be forged in public debate, not in closed, riot police-protected meetings in Seattle, Doha and Hong Kong.
The Economics of the Commons
One reason that local markets tend to be more socially constructive and environmentally sustainable is because they are embedded in the social commons. All sorts of community resources and values help make the local marketplace work. The community’s role in organizing the marketplace enables farmers to sell their produce through local networks. In turn, local markets invigorate the town’s development because it re-circulates money among community producers, sellers, and truckers; it is not exported elsewhere. In development lingo, these are called forward and backwards linkages – sustainable development’s holy grail.
The price of an agricultural commodity does not begin to capture such values. Although the big producers empowered by global trade rules may “sell for less,” their prices do not reflect the actual social and ecological costs of their production methods. Their tomatoes require taxpayer subsidies, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Transporting them to market requires more energy (producing more pollution in the process) and displaces local jobs (adding to social costs and robbing communities of those much-desired linkages). The “selling for less” strategy of global trade, in short, often disguises the actual costs of production and marketing.
By bringing the commons into our analysis of the market, we can begin to get a more holistic picture. We can more clearly see that the monetary benefits of “cheap” production does not take into account all sorts of hidden subsidies and “externalized costs” (pollution, social ills) that are otherwise shouldered by the commons and taxpayers.
The idea of reserving shelf-space for commons-friendly food reverses this pathology. It means employing local farmers, vendors and intermediaries, which contributes to the overall economy. It means using less energy, which reduces pollution. It means better tasting, fresher and more nutritious food. Like cholesterol counts, it means more “good” economic growth and less “bad” unsustainable economic growth. It means the preservation of community.
The Via Campesina Movement
It is perhaps ironic that family farmers, a purportedly “redundant” economic actor in the global economy, are some of today’s most influential activists seeking to rein in corporate globalization and restore democratic process.
Of course they can’t do it alone; they’ve cast a broad net for allies. Success is mixed. Not all environmentalists, for example, are convinced that they are working in common cause. Some argue that small farmers are environmentally careless, felling trees in slash and burn desperation and planting on steep, eroded hillsides that slide away in hurricane season.
There is no question that in the short term, impoverished farmers will resort to unsustainable techniques; they may resort to anything to provide for hungry children. But perhaps it’s a more interesting question to ask how family farmers act environmentally when land tenure and markets are secure, the cornerstone demands of the Via Campesina?s global agrarian reform platform.
Photo by Andy Lin Via Campesina members in Hong Kong advocating to support small farmers and thwart the World Trade Organization pro-agribusiness policies.
Interestingly, the Via Campesina’s agrarian reform platform doesn’t end at land and markets; it advocates for agroecology as the guiding farming method. Responsibly managed land, water and biodiversity are, they suggest, a shared patrimony for future generations of farmers. Many societies actually recognize the public value of this management and pay farmers for their environmental stewardship. By contrast, agribusiness has a dismal track record in keeping shared natural resources healthy.
But if you listen to the World Bank and general anti-government rhetoric, you’d think that agrarian reform is a self-evident failure. According to the Bank, inequities in land tenure – in some cases dating back to the colonial period – are best resolved by robust land markets. Government-led land reform is anachronistic, smells of class struggle, and belongs in the junkyard of other well-intentioned but ineffectual “safety net” policies. To fulfill the needs of a hungry and exploding world population, says the World Bank and other development agencies, it is the large, technologically-sophisticated farms planting genetically modified seeds that are best suited to meet demand. Free market forces will pull land and agricultural markets towards more efficient concentration.
Hogwash, says Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), a leading member of Via Campesina. Consider the state of the commons when a constitution enshrines the notion that land should have productive value rather than simply serve as an asset for wealth accumulation. Imagine a social movement that has supported millions of landless workers in occupying idle land to pressure for legal title and supports those newly settled farmers with agro-ecological training.
This describes Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, the MST, a leading member of the Via Campesina. Since 1985, the MST has settled 300,000 people on land roughly the size of Massachusetts. It takes tremendous resolve for landless families to put up with what can be years of squatting in black-plastic shelters while land disputes are resolved. Some 1,500 MST activists have been killed over the movement’s twenty-one year history.
Photo by Andy Lin Along with developing productive agricultural cooperatives, Brazil’s MST (Landless Workers Movement) pressures the government for policies that support rural livelihoods.
Squatting, political training and agroecology define the MST’s method. It finds that organizing and production are complementary strategies for winning market share. The MST settlements insert themselves into local economies, offering healthy food through farmers markets. They offer, negotiate, and cajole municipal governments to source food for schools and municipal workers from their cooperatives. They knit settlements together into marketing cooperatives, for example, pooling their cashew harvest and grinding the nuts together into oils and butters. Bionatur is their seed business, preserving native seed stock, raising awareness of the dangers of genetically modified seeds, and generating revenue.
The MST seeks to enter not just economic life, but to help community life and protect the environment. They build schools and offer enrollment to non-MST children. They celebrate rural life and culture, and seek to reverse rural-to-urban migration by drawing people back from the favelas to which they’ve migrated. The MST settlements enjoy high family retention and good marks on sustainable land and water management, far in excess of the World Bank’s market-based programs. As the MST revives stagnant towns once dominated by plantation economies that did little for local economies, it builds political support for their broad social justice and environmental agenda.
Alarmingly, new global rules that regulate intellectual property rights (encouraging seed patents) and public procurement (forcing global bidding on municipal contracts) may threaten the MST’s creative marketing.
In mainstream development circles, a frequent myth has it that U.S. farmers are pitted against their overseas competitors in the search for scarce markets. To survive and thrive, U.S. farmers must export into their counterparts’ markets. Using this logic, perhaps it’s a good thing that U.S. farmers bid on school food contracts in Brazil.
The National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), the leading U.S. affiliate of the Via Campesina, finds the claim disingenuous and divisive. George Naylor, an Iowa farmer and president of the NFFC points out that it is only the very large farms that export and asks: Who benefits from public subsidies to giant-scale commodity exporters? Who benefits from the export credits that grease the flow of grains into foreign markets? Not family farmers.
From the NFFC’s perspective, U.S. family farmers don’t compete against Mexican or Brazilian farming families. Rather, all farming families suffer from domination by a small number of politically powerful transnational agribusiness giants. The NFFC is sponsoring legislation entitled the Food from Family Farms Act, an alternative Farm Bill. It would pave the way for local markets to be stocked with local products.
At a February 2006 conference entitled Family Farmers and Food Sovereignty: Global Struggles for the Future of Food and Family Farming, farmers from the U.S., Mali, Brazil and Bangladesh swapped war stories of surviving the global agricultural marketplace. They discussed strategies for reversing agribusiness’ modern welfare program, the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture that hurts small farmers equally, everywhere. The international farmers present at the conference were less interested in how to export their products into U.S. markets – their own national markets hold plenty of promise – and more interested in how they could lend solidarity to the U.S. farmers in radically transforming the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill. What is called U.S. domestic policy, they said, feels a lot to them like U.S. foreign policy. If U.S. dumping of agricultural commodities doesn’t cease, their own food sovereignty efforts won?t add up to a hill of beans.
As a legal and philosophical anchor, as well as practical organizing handle, family farmers around the world increasingly couch these struggles in human rights terms. They point out for example, that the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states, “The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses.”
The situation regarding land rights is more complex. The notion of land as a commodity is so enshrined in our conception of “civilization” that the idea of a universal right to land makes some people very nervous. Much of the international architecture of human rights, however, does recognize a right to food, a commonly shared value more difficult to bicker with. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 25) establishes, for example, that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being, including food.”
Of course successfully using an international human rights framework – a framework that is in and of itself sacred product and property of the commons – depends on the power relations between those demanding and those denying such rights at the local, national and international level. The Via Campesina seeks to address these power imbalances by putting tools and resources into the hand of organized groups marginalized from their land, water and food rights.
A New Vision of Global Food Sovereignty
In the best scenario, winning global food sovereignty will bring together human rights activists, environmentalists, foodies, faith communities, women and indigenous rights supporters, fair traders and of course small farmers. Non-governmental and solidarity organizations like U.S.-based Grassroots International offer resources for this “trabajo de hormiga” (work of ants) organizing.
The support might come through a grant to Chinanteco farmers in the cloud forest above Oaxaca to pressure for rural roads to get to local markets. It might be for a learning exchange on biological pest control between Haitians and Cubans, or perhaps as help with travel costs so that Via Campesina farmers can march on Hong Kong streets to pressure for pro-commons WTO policies. This solidarity can include sparking the U.S. public’s global citizen sensibilities, as expressed in campaigns like ending cotton subsidies that undermine African farmers.
Where to start? In many parts of the United States today, the idea of shelf space for commons-friendly food might seem Utopian in a marketplace dominated by Stop & Shops and Walmarts. But take a look in the back of those same shopping center parking lots some weekend, and you might find that citizens had successfully advocated for a Saturday morning farmer?s market. Or that inside, they’d pressured the manager to stock watermelons from African American-owned cooperatives recovering from Katrina.
Or that in front of the nearby Starbuck’s, folks are passing out fliers, exhorting and embarrassing the chain to brew more fair trade coffee grown on struggling cooperatives in Tanzania. We might draw inspiration from the Maine legislators who are considering food policy to encourage Maine farmers to be able to produce 80% of the calories consumed by its citizens by the year 2020.
The polarization between the commons and the market might just be narrowed if we can restore a common character to markets. With enough persistent organizing, shelf space for healthy local foods can be won and sustainable, agroecological farming can gain a helping hand. And if local markets can be opened through public advocacy and confrontation, why stop there? What about national and international markets?
Campaigns to rein in Fast Track Authority, to modify or kill NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO – these are fundamentally struggles for publicly defined shelf space. These campaigns have a vision of national and international markets responsive to the interests of the vast majority of the world’s producers and consumers.
It’s a powerful vision. We’re sick and tired of shrinking numbers of farmers, the hegemony of unhealthy corporate-chosen products in our stores, the thousands of miles our food travels, the outrageous cost to society in wealth inequality and environmental destruction of this broken food system.
Give us a corner shop with local color and variety, a U.S. aid program that is not just about penetrating new markets. Give us a USDA not beholden to agribusiness.
A slow shift is underway. Look, out on the horizon, can one see the monotonous homogeneity of the industrial food supply breaking up? Can one imagine a bio-diverse mosaic of food supplies emerging from below? Markets of the world, diversify!
_Daniel Moss is Director of Development with Grassroots International