On the dusty shores of Lake Sélingué, Mali, West Africa, amid mud brick huts and donkey carts, peasants, family farmers, fisherfolk, nomads, pastoralists, indigenous and forest peoples, rural and migrant workers, consumers and environmentalists from across the world laid down a challenge. From their many languages and regions emerged a global call for food sovereignty.

The World Forum for Food Sovereignty (named 'Nyéléni' after a legendary Malian woman farmer) is held here in rural Mali, because this is the reality of rural life for much of the world. As the sun slowly sinks, a shimmering disc suspended in the dusty sky, silhouetted fisherfolk punt their pirogues across Lake Sélingué, checking their nets.

If you follow the road towards the lake, you'll come to rice paddies, banana groves and vegetable gardens, stretching away down the river valley. While irrigated by a hulking dam that contains the lake, the fields and paddies are gravity-fed, the levels constantly readjusted with mattocks and shovels to regulate the flow. The plots are leased by families, ploughed by oxen and cultivated by hand. Water is scooped onto rows of pumpkins, lemongrass, amaranth and onions from gourd bowls.

Beyond, you cross the river, a tributary of the Niger, to where pirogues are moored and the fisherfolk unload their catch. There's a village here of mud huts. No photos are permitted; the villagers have beliefs about the power of cameras and a fierce sense of privacy. After receiving permission to enter the village from the village elder you walk among the huts, thatched granaries raised on wooden legs, donkeys and cattle chewing contentedly in the shade of an open straw barn and groves of mango and papaya trees.

Even back in Mali's capital, Bamako, vacant lots, roadsides and the banks of the Niger and its tributaries are given over to food production through meticulous grids of vegetables and herbs. Like rural Sélingué, it is dominated by human scale technologies: hand tools, donkey carts, bicycles; the urban gardens are irrigated by water hoisted from wells. Mango trees grow along the streets and papayas flourish behind compound walls.

The Significance of an African World Forum

For Nnimmo Bassey, from Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria) there was great significance in talking about food sovereignty in Africa,

"Because in today's world," he said, "when you talk about food, when you talk about hunger, the pictures that flash across people's television screens across the world is of people starving in Africa.

"In fact, governments and the national agencies that work on food issues would not readily give a thought to food sovereignty. All they talk about is food security. People don't want us to care about what we eat; they only want us to worry about having something on the table. This directly affects our dignity as human beings because you are forced to eat whatever you are given. You are not given the space to meet your own needs: to decide what you want to eat, to decide what you want to grow and to cultivate.

"People can see that Africans may be hungry, but not because there is no food. Rather because the food is not in the right place at the right time, and because of issues like a lack of rural infrastructure, because of denied access to credit and because of twisted policies that want people to follow a failed pattern. For example, rather than pursuing organic agriculture, rather than using principles developed over centuries, our farmers are being encouraged to use genetically engineered seed, to rely on artificial fertilisers and to follow the failed patterns of the 'green revolution'.

"It's very important that we're here in Mali, because Mali is emblematic of the continent of Africa. It is a place of rich diversity, it's a huge landmass and it has been a prominent trade centre over the centuries ... a country where you have a rich agricultural heritage, and although a vast part of the country is covered by the Sahara desert, the people are still able to meet their food needs. It shows a spirit of resilience and what Africa can achieve. It is a land of potentials, and of course, a land of very beautiful music and people," Bassey said.

A movement under construction

International peasants' network La Via Campesina, together with Malian peasant network Coordination Nationale des Organisations Paysannes du Mali (CNOP) and the other groups involved in the development of Nyéléni chose to build an entire village to host the forum. It lies on the outskirts of Sélingué town, the lone paved road to Bamako stretching past, buzzing with motor-scooters, bicycles and donkey carts.

With two days to go, the site is crowded with workers, some are digging trenches for plumbing, their picks and mattocks tethered with old inner-tubes to the backs of bicycles. The site is almost treeless but for a few persistent stumps and a jacaranda. The hot winds pick up clouds of fine pale dust, sprinkling it over the thatched rooves, the gleaming white walls of newly built mud huts and the faces of the workers. There are clusters of women, luminous in swathes of wax-printed cloth sweeping out the huts, others are nonchalantly painting designs in black and ochre on hut walls, others are pouring concrete, and others sit chatting under the shade of new thatch.

The forum site embodies the emphasis on the local that permeates food sovereignty. Over the three months it has taken to build, it has been constructed entirely by hand using local materials and local, traditional methods. The straw, the bricks, the bamboo are all from Sélingué. When the food is prepared in the following days, it is prepared exclusively from locally grown produce by a local women's cooperative (GMO-free, we are enthusiastically reminded). The meat is slaughtered daily on a bed of leaves only a few metres from where we eat. No companies are contracted in the construction or running of the site; rather, local people are employed. "As we build this place, we also build the future," announces one of the coordinators. And like the site, food sovereignty is a movement under construction.

Beyond food security

As he rushes around the site advising on the progress of the work, I ask Paul Nicholson, from La Via Campesina and the Basque Farmers Union to define 'food sovereignty':

"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to determine what they eat, who produces it, and how it's produced," he tells me.

"And it is a very important right now, because we are losing that right. We don't know what we are eating. We don't know who produces our food and how it's produced.

"Food is the major problem in the world: there are 800 million people who go hungry every day, and the tendency is to increase this number, not decrease it. Today, for the first time in history, it is also basically the rural people, peasants, who go hungry."

The main threat to food sovereignty, says Nicholson, is "the whole free trade logic". This, he says, destroys local economies, cultures and knowledge of sustainable land use to expand industrialise, multinational agribusiness. He offers Mali as an example:

"Mali is basically an agricultural country. Historically it is self-sufficient. Today they've had to open up the markets … When the milk industry was privatised, suddenly the import of European milk was far cheaper than milk production in Mali. Now, the Malian industry only buys milk from Europe. It has destroyed the whole fabric of milk production.

"Rice is a staple food here. Mali is self-sufficient in food production, yet rice coming from Asia or from the United States has invaded the local market, making it impossible for local rice production [to compete]."

As concepts like 'food security' have been co-opted by institutions like the World Trade Organisation into forms that support free trade and corporate globalism and ignore the social and environmental impacts of such a system, it has become necessary to develop alternative principles. In response, in 1996 La Via Campesina articulated the concept of 'food sovereignty'. This concept not only ensures communities have access to adequate food, but also emphasises self-determination, environmentally sustainable food cultivation and trade that guarantees community well-being over corporate profit.

Packed agendas

The forum's days are full, beginning when the sun begins to warm the inside of the huts. There are queues of people lining up beside the taps outside, washing their faces and cleaning their teeth. After a breakfast of millet fritters, mangoes and goat stew, the day's activities begin. There are layers of complexity: regional discussions deal with logistics; sectorial discussions representing peasants and farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, workers, migrants, urban movements and consumers ensure each sector's interests are represented; interest groups ensure that the voices of women, youth and the environment are heard; and combined thematic working groups draw together these perspectives to discuss food sovereignty in the context of everything from trade policy to conflict and disaster to forced migration to the preservation of traditional knowledge.

There's a lull in the heat of the afternoon and delegates drift from dusty shadow to dusty shadow, returning to their huts for sweaty siestas. By 4.00pm, the silence is broken again by conversation and the trademark chants of different regions.

"Down! Down! WTO!" explodes from a regional meeting of East and Southeast Asians. La Via Campesina's chant, "Globalise struggle!" "Globalise hope!" is called and answered, first in Spanish, then English, then French.

Night is filled with music. Drums are beaten in trenches dug for mud bricks and here and there, transistor radios wheeze out Malian classics through the kazoo of their tiny speakers.

Throughout the five days of the forum, amid celebrations, plates of millet and peanut sauce and performances from the stars of West African music, discussions further defined the concept of food sovereignty and how it can be strengthened locally, regionally and globally. The final day was dedicated to working with politicians from across the world to integrate food sovereignty into government policy.

A starting point for broader change

A journalist tells me how the World Forum for Food Sovereignty has very consciously tried to build on the lessons of the World Social Forum, while establishing itself as a major movement in its own right. This is evident in the careful selection of participants, ensuring the involvement of those whose daily lives are part of the struggle for food sovereignty. Farmers, peasants, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and rural workers make up the overwhelming majority of delegates. Latin America, Africa, South Asia and Southeast and East Asia were the regions best represented. There were a handful of Europeans and North Americans, more from Central Asia and the Middle East and as the only person from Oceania, I was temporarily adopted by Southeast Asia.

I quickly realise that food sovereignty is not just about food. Rather it acknowledges food as the common ground for all peoples and identifies it as a starting point and guiding theme for broader change. Food sovereignty suggests that it is impossible to explore how food is produced, traded and consumed without questioning the whole fabric of global economics and society. This includes everything from resource-intensive industrial production of crops and livestock, to the emergence of technologies like genetic modification and nanotechnology, to the patenting of traditional knowledge, and the increasing corporate control of food production and trade.

The contexts of the struggle for food sovereignty vary across the world. In many cases, like for Paul Nicholson’s Basque companions, or the peasants and indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan, or traditional farmers throughout Latin America and Africa, it is a struggle to protect and maintain resilient local economies in the face of corporate incursions, Free Trade Agreements and food aid programs that do not support local markets. In North America and Europe, the focus is not only on protecting the remaining small, traditional food producers but also on rebuilding links between consumers and producers.

For countries like Australia, where corporate food production and retail already has a strong foothold, part of the challenge is to cultivate and rebuild local economies and to support environmentally sound agricultural production.

Australia has already established free trade agreements with the US, Thailand, Singapore and New Zealand and is determined to develop further agreements throughout the region with China, Japan and Korea and others. It is urgent for Australians to also understand the impacts of these agreements and to work to support farmers, peasants and food producers throughout the region to defend their local economies and cultures.

Beneath all of this, I realise, food sovereignty is intrinsically about connection to land and connection to place. Food sovereignty places those from food production traditions that have been maintained within the boundaries of specific environments over time at the centre of its discussions and action.

By acknowledging the wisdom of those who have been feeding their communities for centuries, the peasants, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and others, it recognises that those who still maintain living traditions of closeness to the earth are best placed to make decisions and advise on how land should be used and how food can continue to be cultivated, traded and consumed in their communities and beyond.

More information:
* Nyéléni 2007 – World Forum for Food Sovereignty: <www.nyeleni2007.org>
* Real World Radio: <www.realworldradio.fm>
* Friends of the Earth, Real Food Campaign, <www.foe.org.au/campaigns/sustainable-food>

Joel Catchlove is a member of Friends of the Earth, Adelaide and a member of the Chain Reaction editorial team. <joel.catchlove@foe.org.au>

Declaration of Nyéléni

27 February 2007
World Forum for Food Sovereignty

Sélingué, Mali

We, more than 500 representatives from more than 80 countries, of organisations of peasants and family farmers, artisanal fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers and environmental and urban movements have gathered together in the village of Nyéléni in Sélingué, Mali to strengthen a global movement for food sovereignty.

We are doing this, brick by brick as we live here in huts constructed by hand in the local tradition and eat food that is produced and prepared by the Sélingué community. We give our collective endeavour the name "Nyéléni" as a tribute to and inspiration from a legendary Malian peasant woman who farmed and fed her peoples well.

Most of us are food producers and are ready, able and willing to feed the world’s peoples. Our heritage as food producers is critical to the future of humanity. This is especially so in the case of women and indigenous peoples who are historical creators of knowledge about food and agriculture. But this heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined by neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Food sovereignty gives us the hope and power to preserve, recover and build on our food producing knowledge and capacity.

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and offers directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers and users.

Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability.

Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just incomes to all peoples as well as the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food.

Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social and economic classes and generations.

In Nyéléni, through numerous debates and interactions, we are deepening our collective understanding of food sovereignty and learning about the realities of the struggles of our respective movements to retain autonomy and regain our powers. We now understand better the tools we need to build our movement and advance our collective vision.

(The full text of the Declaration is posted at: <www.nyeleni2007.org/spip.php?article290>.)