VFriday, June 30, European and African agriculture ministers will meet in Rome For “thinking about the future of agricultural cooperation between the African Union and the European Union”. Despite a stated desire to promote sustainable value chains, this summit risks completely missing out on its ambition. And for good reason, it ignores the catastrophic impacts of unregulated international trade on agricultural development and food sovereignty, especially for African countries.
On a global scale, we produce enough, and even too much, and yet we still fail to feed the planet: for the sixth year in a row, hunger continues to increase. Indeed, by encouraging the specialization of territories rather than their diversification, and by exposing agricultural commodities to financializationwe let the deregulated market decide for the populations and move us away from our food sovereignty.
Far from taking the measure of these issues, the next conference between the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) on agriculture risks opening up a avenue for the excessive liberalization of agri-food trade between the two continents. .
Talking about regulation should no longer be a taboo: food sovereignty should guide the rules of international trade. Far from the myth of pure and perfect competition, we too often forget that the market puts into competition in a distorted and unfair way agricultures subject to very heterogeneous standards and constraints, having very unequal technical and financial means. In doing so, it limits the development of local and sustainable agricultural and food systems in the countries of the South, and precipitates export-oriented agricultural models into a frantic race for the least social and environmental.
Unfair agreements
This race for the cheapest raw material has actually a very significant cost to society, and far from solving the problem of hunger in the world, it aggravates it by accentuating the precariousness and vulnerability of the vast majority of farmers. The externalities of this model are largely under-counted, while they threaten the very lives of present and future African generations.
This is why we reaffirm that to feed the populations of all countries in a healthy, equitable and sustainable way, and to achieve food sovereignty at all levels, the rules of international trade must be changed.
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