We, farmers and activists from Canada, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, have visited Canadian farms together and discussed the issues that affect the lives of farming communities all over the world. We are participating with our concerns in the World Organic Congress in Victoria, British Colombia and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johanesburg,

South Africa.

We want to share our concerns and our determined will to develop and defend ecological and biodiversity-based agriculture all over the world. We oppose the policies of multi-lateral and bilateral agencies and practices of transnational corporations that undermine the culture and systems of production of agrarian communities.

We want to reassert, along with many other groups making the same call, that food sovereignty is not negotiable. This means respecting and protecting the sovereignty of individual farmers, farming households, communities and nations to decide what seeds to plant in their soils and to localize agriculture in accordance with their cultures. We cannot let our sovereignty be willingly surrendered to corporations by national governments anywhere. Despite government commitments to protect and enhance local and indigenous lifestyles made during the previous Earth Summit in the Convention on Biological Diversity, little has actually been done.

Consumer movements for safe and healthy food, movements against Genetically Modified Organisms, movements to rebuild local communities and movements for a new form of urbanization have made it clear that non-farmers also want to re-establish an authentic relationship to food and community. Around the world they are defying the notion of food constructed for them by transnational corporations and their media allies. They are also building a consensus that control over food security must lie in the hands of the local people and not be decided by remote governments and transnational corporations.

We invite the farmers, development workers, activists, researchers and academics to stand by our side on these issues and support this document by signing and discussing it with your communities and translating the ideas into your own farming practice and work with communities.

Let us become one voice in our struggle. Enter, come in and rejoice.

The role of farmers as caretakers of the land, water and biodiversity and as stewards of the Earth must be acknowledged and rewarded. This stewardship is the life-line of all human communities, present and future.

We reaffirm that farming is not simply an economic activity. Farming is a way of life, both ethical and concrete. Food is produced in a cyclical and nurturing process of birth, growth, maturity and regeneration. This is a life-affirming process with its own inherent value.

The Earth sustains us, and is truly our mother. Yet we bury her under a toxic layer of urban sprawl, spoil her with destructive farming practices and give her over to those who have no interest in her life giving capacities. Land should be free from transnational corporate control and placed in the hands of local farmers servicing their communities.

We want an immediate end to the abuse of land, in urban and rural settings. The destruction of land through misguided forms of land use not only takes food from our mouths, it also removes land from the hands of young people and women. Conditions should be created for youth and women to take leadership in farming by ensuring their access to land. A new form of urbanization is needed to ensure access to farmland, to integrate food producers in the urban landscape, and to build equitable relationships between rural, peri-urban and urban areas.

The development of the art and skill of farming over thousands of years has been cast aside by so-called modern agricultural technologies. Many of the technologies support monocultures that fail to regenerate the soil, the biodiversity, and the water we all depend upon, and therefore are not really agricultural technologies at all.

The corporations that produce pesticides, fertilizers and seed technologies have appropriated the skills of food production and taken control of the food system. The propaganda machine in turn relentlessly bombards farmers with advertising of their products and methods. Appreciation and respect is lost for the intimate knowledge of the soil, plants, and animals developed through a genuine relationship to farming practice.

Through these processes the genuine thirst for farming knowledge is replaced by a lifeless profit motive. This destroys the status of women as seed savers in their communities and disheartens the young people who see no art and craft remaining in the farming profession of their fathers and mothers.

The modern education system has sidelined rural life and failed to develop the capacity of young people to enjoy and develop agrarian cultures. Youth should be encouraged to recognize and respect the possibilities of different lifestyles emerging from different ecological and cultural contexts

Many farmers in the North have already lost control over their seeds. This devastation is coming hard and fast to the South. Seed that is purchased, not saved, is vulnerable not only to ever increasing seed prices but to an ever narrowing range of choices for farmers. Varieties that farmers use for particular purposes can simply be withheld by corporate seed suppliers through patent control, technology contracts, genomic control through genetic engineering and marketing contracts. Heritage varieties of food crops that maintain our living biodiversity, broaden our diet and provide nutritious food are being lost forever. The evolution of plants in different kinds of farmers’ lands is blocked by corporate seed systems. These developments have very serious implications for the future of agriculture and the survival of humanity.

We reject biotechnology and genetically modified organisms in agriculture because these technologies concentrate control of the food system and compromise farming ecologies. Opposition to GMOs must begin with seed saving, and protecting the rights of farmers to save seed. Farming communities can draw inspiration from the farming women of South Asia who retain a rich knowledge and practice of seed saving. To nurture this knowledge, there must be no patenting of seeds and lifeforms.