the past year, state-sponsored human rights violations in Palawan’s rural communities spiked due to the vicious, systematic, and widespread redtagging of organized small fisherfolks and other rural peoples campaigning against development aggression. People’s organizations and their leaders are subjected to constant harassment and intimidation to curb their resistance on the premise of being linked to communist rebels – a baseless and fabricated accusation. Their members were also forced to surrender as rebel returnees.
In solidarity with the people of Iran and West Asia, 16 organizations from 12 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and West Asia issued a unity statement denouncing the warmongering of the US with Iran and its aggression in the whole of West Asia.
We express our solidarity with the Iranian people and the world in denouncing the escalating US aggression against Iran and in the whole of West Asia. We issue these calls in support of the global call to stop the US war on Iran, a step forward toward achieving a just and lasting peace in West Asia.
Participants closed the meeting with high spirits, committing to advance people’s food sovereignty in WANA through the strengthening of the platform.
The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS) hosted a learning exchange program (LEP) in the Philippines in October to November 2019. For more than two weeks, representatives of the Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Communities (CCFC), Cambodia Youth Network (CYN), and Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) met with people’s organizations in the Philippines for the sharing of good practices and experiences in organizing and the strengthening of their respective organizations as a social movement. They also visited two rural communities where they saw firsthand how Filipino peasant organizations claim and practice people’s food sovereignty amid poverty, landgrabbing, and repression.
GM crops like Golden Rice will never be the answer to hunger and malnutrition in the Philippines and in any other country. Governments should first tackle the widespread landlessness and poverty in rural areas. Policies should gear toward strengthening domestic agriculture empowering local farmers, who can produce more than enough of the many vitamin-enriched crops that are cheaper than Golden Rice. In this regard, the Rice Tarrification Law should be revoked in the Philippines to alleviate the situation of local rice farmers.