However, civil society organizations have harshly criticized Graziano Da Silva, as well as the head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Suma Chakrabarti, who have made a public call to the international community to “embrace” the private sector to lead global food, while they discredited family and peasant farming.

In a story published on the Wall Street Journal on September 6, Da Silva and Chakrabarti praised the role of private investments in agriculture and made a call to double investments in land, that would further land grabbing. Meanwhile, they point at the peasant sector and the very few policies to protect their agriculture as an obstacle to agriculture development that should be eliminated.

As a result of this, organizations like La Via Campesina International, the World March of Women, the ALBA social movements, Friends of the Earth, GRAIN and the ETC Group criticized these definitions by the top representatives of these key global governance organizations for food and agriculture.

They denied several of their claims, which intentionally conceal the importance of peasant farming in feeding the global population.

For example, they said that when Da Silva and Chakrabarti present Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan as examples of the success of agribusiness, which has enabled these countries to go from being ’wasteland in the 90s’ to being the ’largest cereal exporters’ in the world, they fail to mention, though, that official figures show that in the three countries the productivity is much higher in peasant lands that in lands managed by agribusiness.

“Nor do they mention that when official figures are available, as for example in the European Union, Colombia or Brazil, they show that peasant farming is more efficient and productive than business production, which has also been confirmed by different studies carried out in Asia, Africa and Latin America”.

Instead, agribusiness defended by these top directors “has only increased poverty and destroyed agriculture’s ability of creating employment. It has furthered contamination and environmental destruction, it has brought back slave work and it has caused the food and climate crises over the past decades”.

“Social movements and peasants of the world believe this is unacceptable and even unjustified that the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization would promote the elimination of peasant farming and the advance of land grabbing. We find it especially concerning that this happens after three years of hard work, when the organizations put all their capacities and will available for the writing of Voluntary Guidelines that would protect peasants from land grabbing. In his campaign to become the FAO’s head, Mr. Graziano da Silva expressed many times his commitment to promote peasant agriculture and the necessary role it plays on food production”, said a press release issued last week.

The movements claim that the FAO has abandoned its original goal and it is now a space captured by companies, and it is now focused on profit instead of on fighting hunger and malnutrition. When he learned about the civil society’s dissatisfaction, Da Silva sent messages through his advisors in Rome to try to calm them down saying that he had not written the article in which he was quoted.

This would show how Da Silva relates with the civil society and the business interests and the countries that defend those interests. However, he has not publicly denied the statements.

The organizations expressed their surprise at the language used in the article (like when they talk about “fertilizing lands with money” or “making life easier for the hungry of the world”). They cast serious doubts over the possibility that the FAO will fulfill its role “rigorously and independently from agribusiness corporations, therefore fulfilling the United Nations mandate of eradicating hunger and improving the rural people’s living conditions”.

“What agriculture and the planet need is precisely the opposite of what Da Silva and Chakrabarti are proposing. What humanity and those who are hungry need is peasant agriculture, which represents the livelihood of half of the world’s population”, said LVC, the WMW, FoEI, ETC, Grain and ALBA.

“Peasant agriculture is more efficient and productive. It is responsible for at least half of the food produced in the world, it provides work to the countryside, and it also helps cool off the planet. Peasant agriculture should be strengthened and protected”, they concluded.

Photo: grain.org