Claimed to be “the largest social movement in the world, with more than 400 million members,” it’s Via Campesina:

Enterremos el sistema alimentario industrial!
La agricultura campesina puede alimentar al mundo!

Bury the corporate food system!
Peasant agriculture can feed the world!

Peasant agriculture as in local agriculture. It’s a global movement of locavores!

They’re planning an International day of Peasant’s Struggles on 17 April 2011:

(Jakarta, 22 February 2011) The dominant corporate food system has failed. The promises of the 1996 World Food Summit, echoed by the Millennium Development goal of reducing hunger by 2015, will not be fulfilled.

Today hunger and food insecurity are increasing. Roughly one billion people currently suffer from hunger, another billion are malnourished — lacking important vitamins and minerals — and yet another billion are over-fed. One global food system = 3 billion victims!

Food policies implemented over the last 20 years have been heavily biased against peasant agriculture, which nevertheless continues to feed more than 70% of the people of the world.

Land, seeds and water have been privatized and handed over to agribusiness. This has pushed members of rural communities off the land and into the cities, leaving fertile land behind for transnational companies to grow agrofuels, biomass or food for export to consumers in wealthy countries.

It’s not like we in the wealthy countries don’t also have ill effects from factory farming, such as that epidemic of obesity and its resulting diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems.

So what is Via Campesina going to do about it?

The time has come to radically change the corporate food system. La Via Campesina, a movement representing more than 200 million farmers around the world – women and men – proposes Food Sovereignty as a effective and fair way to produce and distribute food in every community, every province, and every country.

Implementing food sovereignty means defending small scale farming, agroecology and local production whenever possible.

Locavores worldwide!

-jsq

Short Link: