Two Billion Peasants Ignored By UNCED

In a statement to the fourth UNCED Preparatory Committee, activists from rural and environmental groups have demanded that peasants be recognized as one of the "Major Groups" to implement Agenda 21. The activists claim that Agenda 21, the UNCED "action plan for the 1990s and beyond", ignores the rights and needs of the nearly two billion peasants of the developing world.

Recognizing the strong links between landlessness, rural poverty and tropical deforestation, the activists call on UNCED to acknowledge the need for agrarian reform. "The UNCED notion of sustainable development must recognize as its central goal the sustaining of the livelihoods of the people based on their own control of their lands and resources," the statement to the PrepCom declares.

The statement was written at the first World Rainforest Movement workshop on 'Agrarian Reform and Tropical Deforestation', held in New York at the beginning of March. The workshop brought together indigenous, pastoralist, peasant and environmental activists and researchers from 16 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

The causes of tropical deforestation include logging, roads, dams, mines, resorts, land speculation, ranches and export agriculture. Most of the trees, however, are felled by migrant farmers driven into the forests by their inability to acquire or hold onto land elsewhere.

The participants at the workshop agreed that land insecurity was the direct result of the model of development promoted by transnational corporations and the World Bank and other development agencies. The workshop statement declares that the Northern-inspired development programmes implemented by governments around the Third World are "depriving people of their means of survival by expropriating and degrading their basic resource -- land." These programmes include the commercialization of agriculture, industrial development, the privatization of lands and tree plantations.

By creating a situation of international debt bondage, the participants agreed, the dominant development model induces governments into violence against their own people. This violence can be overt, as when states try to impose by force the "political stability" demanded by international capital, or covert, as when industrialization, mining and export agriculture lead to dispossession, malnutrition and impoverishment.

"To ensure the survival of rural peoples and the resources they depend on, and to restore their creative potential," the statement to UNCED declares, "alternative development models are urgently needed. The rural peoples themselves have the right and ability to define their own lives and manage the resources basic to their livelihoods. They must be assured the means to express their initiatives, at local, regional, national and international levels, based on their own experience."

The participants proposed that "development for human survival" could only occur if agrarian reforms guaranteed rural peoples control over their land and other resources. Models of "development for human survival" would ensure that food security does not take second place to profits and capital accumulation. At the same time they would foster social justice, respect for human rights and an agriculture that works in harmony with natural conditions.

Several participants at the New York workshop stressed that the victims of modern development are not only the majority of people in the South -- the industrialized countries also have their unemployed, their expendable, their rural landless and those who suffer from environmental destruction. For the North, too, new models of development are necessary that ensure that all are involved in decisions concerning trade, finance, production, technology, structural adjustment and political freedom.

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