4
Land Call for Participants of Farmers Conference
Free market policies… aggravate starvation… violate farmers’ rights
Land Center for Human Rights is Egyptian NGO that works in the field of social and economic rights. Since its establishment in 1996, it concentrated on the conflict in the Egyptian countryside that reveals the negative aspects of the capital globalization (issuing of law that transforms farms’ relations to be just a product in the market).
Through that conflict, the center chooses to be in the side of poor farmers, who are victims of immoral alliance between market economics and undemocratic researches in governing and legalization. Moreover, it chooses to achieve capacity building of the poor in order to achieve social justice stipulated by all traditions and UN declarations, which protect human rights. According to LCHR experiment with the Egyptian farmers, we see that to defend social and economic rights, we have to protect farmers’ rights and eliminate impoverishment. LCHR calls participants of Farmers Conference in which 84 organizations from 64 countries participate, to face reform policies and globalization to achieve the following rights.
q Increased unemployment:
Implementation of land reform policies in the whole world especially in the developing countries increases the crisis of unemployment. For example, in the third world countries, the percentage reaches 72% in 1978/1995, while it reaches 7.4% in Latin America in 1997 and 12.9% in Indonesia in 1998. Consequently, poverty increases in the world that 3/5 of the world inhabitants enjoy with basic health services in addition to children suffering from malnutrition. Moreover, about 80% of the rural inhabitants live under poverty line.
q Low incomes and deteriorated public services:
Farmers’ incomes decrease in addition to violating their rights especially concerning their right in safety, health insurance, wages, etc. according to implementing these policies, the budgetary allocations to social services decrease that impacts negatively on some rights as:
(a) The right to food: SAPs have put the right to food in jeopardy. There is convincing evidence that shows nutritional levels decrease among poorer segments of the population as a result of removal of food subsidies. Growing unemployment has a
similar result. The switching of agricultural policies, primarily from food production for local consumption to production of coffee, tobacco or cotton to generate foreign exchange, has also resulted in drastic decline in food production and in reduced nutritional levels and malnutrition.
(b) The right to education. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that everyone has the right to education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child has also established the right to early development and education. Thanks
to extraordinary efforts during the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage of children completing at least four years of primary education had reached 50 per cent or more in almost all developing countries. But since the 1980s, increasing debt and
consequent implementation of structural adjustment programmes led many Governments to freeze or cut educational spending. As UNESCO has noted, primary schooling often suffered disproportionately, and there was significant slippage in sub-Saharan Africa. The percentage of 6 to 11-year-olds enrolled in school dropped from a high of 55 per cent in 1979 to 45 per cent in 1995. / UNESCO, Trends and Projections of Enrolment by level of education, by age and by sex, 1960-2025, Paris, UNESCO, 1996./ At risk here can be one of the areas in which sub-Saharan Africa has fared well - the reduction of inequalities between boys and girls in school enrolments. Girl's enrolments grew from 36 per cent in 1960 to 63 per cent in1980. But in the face of increased fees, families may keep their daughters away from school when forced to choose which children to educate. Given the critical correlation between child welfare and the level of mothers' education, this could have important implications for infant and child health in the long term. About Egypt, it pays for education about 11.2% of the public budgetary in 1981 then it increases after 17 years to reach 12.5%.
(c) The right to shelter. When wages are low or when they decrease, or when wage earners are unemployed as a result of structural adjustment programmes - as is more often the case - workers do not have enough resources to meet their basic needs, particularly housing. Furthermore, high interest rates ultimately kill the dream to own a home, and the devaluation of currency also increases the cost of construction materials. With the withdrawal of the State from direct provision of housing or housing subsidies to the poor and the deregulation of the rental market, the poor are exploited by private property owners, often paying over half of their meagre income on rent. Forced evictions are widespread as land values skyrocket due to pressure to build expensive dwellings for high-income groups. The property boom could also increase the cost of basic construction inputs, such as lumber, bricks and cement, also consumed by low-end consumers. On the other hand, the Egyptian countryside witnesses several violations concerning evicting tenants from their houses attached to lands with the virtue of land law No. 96 of 1992. Moreover, hundreds of farmers in the houses possessed by the government live under threatening with imprisonment because of accumulation of rentals because of their hard economic conditions.
(d) The right to health: Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights encourages the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being. The goal of "Health for all by the year 2000" agreed upon in the Almaty Declaration has been severely undermined by cutbacks in government health budgets as social and development objectives have been superseded by financial imperatives. The failure of the IMF and World Bank to protect health, nutrition and education budgets from general fiscal retrenchment in the design of structural adjustment programmes is a grave policy error. / Heart-wrenching testimonies given at both the Ugandan and Hungarian citizens' forums held under the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) detail the extent of social erosion that has taken place in adjusting countries. Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Network (SAPRIN). "Civil Society Perspective on Structural Adjustment Policies", Kampala, 18-19 June 1998; SAPRIN, "Civil Society Perspectives on Structural Adjustment Policies", Budapest, 6-8 June 1998. SAPRIN review countries include: Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Mali, El Salvador, Ecuador, Mexico, Honduras, Hungary, Philippines ,Bangladesh, Canada./ Drastic cuts inevitably have adverse consequences for social welfare and these in turn impinge on the economic productivity of human resources, generating resentment against Government by marginalized citizens. According to one authoritative source, the drug trade in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia is closely related to the significant social erosion in those countries as a result of the debt crisis and the accompanying policy of structural adjustment. / Susan George, The Debt Boomerang: How the Third World Debt Harms Us All, London, Pluto Press, 1992, pp. 34-62./ about Egypt, it pays about 4% only from the public budgetary in 1999.
q Widening of income disparities:
70. Market-oriented policies, more often than not, strengthen wealthy groups disproportionately because people who are well placed in terms of asset holdings, education and social, ethnic and political contacts are likely to capitalize faster on the unfolding opportunities that market-oriented policies create. There is ample evidence demonstrating the increases in income inequality in IMF-supported countries.
71. While the percentage of poor people has nearly doubled in many countries implementing SAPs the share of national income received by the richest segment of the population has increased sharply over the last 15 years. For example, in Ghana, a country that is held up as the IMF's success story in Africa, agricultural sector reforms have disproportionately benefited cocoa farmers, who comprise only 18 per cent of Ghana's farming population and are concentrated primarily in the south. A 1987 Overseas Development Institute University of Ghana study revealed that 32 per cent of the cocoa farmers in the Ashanti region received 94 per cent of the gross cocoa incomes, while 68 per cent of the farmers received only 6 per cent. / Simon Commander (ed.), Structural Adjustment and Agriculture in Ghana, London, Overseas Development Institute, 1989, p. 109./ Meanwhile, the per capita income of non-cocoa farmers has stagnated. With the exception of 1984, Ghana's rate of food self-sufficiency has been steadily declining because incentives are not available to food producers. Scarce resources such as credit, extension, technology and other necessary inputs have been preempted for the cocoa sector while poor subsistence peasants are left to fend for themselves. / Hamid Tabatabi, "Agricultural decline and access to food in Ghana", International Labour Review, vol. 127, No. 6, 1988, pp. 703-734./ Further, drastic devaluation of the Ghanaian currency (the cedi) has made the costs of inputs such as fertilizers too expensive for ordinary peasants to afford.
In Egypt, about 431 thousands tenants are evicted with the virtue of law No. 96 of 1992. Those farmers lose more than one milliard a year because of the difference in the land rental after law implementation.
q Undermining of local productive capacities:
72. The most visible economic decline, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has been in the agricultural sector. The majority of developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced a negative average annual growth rate in food production per capita between 1979 and 1997. Under the SAPs, farmers have increasingly abandoned traditional crops; in Malawi, which was once a net food exporter, maize production declined by 40 per cent in 1992 while tobacco output doubled between 1986 and 1993. / See "Tobacco, the golden leaf", Southern African Economist, May 1993, pp. 49-51./ Because of the pressure to generate foreign exchange to service debt, government budgets devoted to farm support services such as extension, credit and technology are being pre-empted to support export agriculture while the needs of subsistence farmers in the areas of food security, soil conservation and reforestation are ignored. / Fantu Cheru, "Structural adjustment, primary resource trade and sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa", World Development, vol. 20, No. 4, 1992, pp. 497-512./ These policy decisions have a direct impact on agricultural productivity, and hence on the incidence of food insecurity and malnutrition, and on unsustainable use of natural resources as poor peasants exploit land to eke out a living. The short-term goals of adjustment policies, designed to improve commodity exports to generate foreign exchange to service debts, is therefore, inconsistent with long-term development needs.
73. In addition, indiscriminate liberalization of trade, which abruptly opened the economy to competition with cheap imports, has resulted in bankruptcy of local small- and medium-sized firms in many adjusting countries.
In Egypt, throughout the last years, the areas cultivated cotton and cane decrease to be replaced with other crops that can be exported in order to attract foreign currency. But, unfortunately, the government can’t achieve its objective.
q Heavier debt burden
74. In virtually all developing countries that have been under the joint IMF-World Bank surveillance since the onset of the third world debt crisis, overall indebtedness has grown and annual debt servicing obligations have eased only marginally despite the claims by Western economists that these policies would reduce debt burdens. A Development Group for Alternative Policies study of 71 countries that have adopted SAPs shows a positive correlation between the number of years that a country has an
adjustment programme in place and an increase in debt as a percentage of GNP. / Marek and Nan Dawkins Scully, Regression Analysis of Structural Adjustment and Indebtedness, Development Group for Alterative Policies Washington, D.C., January
1998./ The World Bank's own figures show that 63 out of 69 countries have experienced an increase in their external debt while implementing SAPs. A series of debt-relief initiatives agreed upon by the G-7 countries since the Venice Economic Summit of 1987 have done little to ease the crisis.
75. The persistence of the debt problem has reduced the amount of resources available to purchase necessary imports, leading to a very severe import strangulation, depriving industry and agriculture of needed inputs, and holding back new investment and even the maintenance of the existing capital stock in many debtor countries. In many African countries, for example, major trunk roads that are necessary for internal trade and the supply of goods and services to rural areas have turned into a "lunar landscape" due to lack of maintenance, further raising the transaction costs of local producers and traders.
In Egypt, despite the decrease of the external debt to $27 milliards, the debt still represents great burden for the Egyptian economy.
q Debt-induced unsustainable use of natural resources:
76. Although determining the precise link between the debt crisis, structural adjustment and environmental degradation is a difficult task, there appear to be several ways in which the emphasis on export diversification to generate more foreign exchange to service debt places a heavy strain on the natural resource base of many poor countries. One of the most evident links is that export of natural resources, including tropical timber, from several LDCs has dramatically increased in order to meet growing debt servicing requirements, setting aside considerations of sustainability. / T. Panayotou and K. Hupe, "Environmental Impacts of Structural Adjustment Programmes: Synthesis and Recommendation", Harvard Institute of International Development, Cambridge, MA, 1995./ The 14 largest debtor countries ($10 billion or more) are also the same countries in which an unprecedented rate of deforestation is occurring. / Norman Myers, Deforestation Rate in Tropical Forests and their Climate Implications, London, Friends of the Earth 1989./
77. In Cameroon, for example, 150 licensed timber operating companies are involved in commercial logging, of which 23 are indigenous. Namibia's department of sea fisheries is involved in the large-scale harvesting of seals to be exported to the Far East. According to the Namibian Animal Action Group, the first-year mortality of seals is as high as 95 per cent. / P. Elabor-Idemudia, J. Mihevc and K. Shettima, "World Bank takes control of UNCED's Environment Fund", Economic Justice Update, vol. 1, No. 4, September 1992./ In Ghana the timber industry is being revived with support from the World Bank to make up for declining foreign exchange from cocoa. Timber output rose from 147,000 cubic metres to 413,000 cubic metres between 1984 and 1987. / Adotey Bing, "Ghana: devaluation brings little gain", Africa Recovery, vol. 5, No. 1, June 1991,p.
14./ This has accelerated the steady destruction of Ghana's forests whose size has decreased considerably as a result of decades of agricultural conversion of forest land. As has happened in other parts of the world, this will likely lead to a disastrous situation of reduced food production, declining soil fertility and water supply problems. / R.D. Mann, "Time running out: The urgent need for tree planting in Africa", The Ecologist, vol. 20, No. 2 (March/April 1990), pp. 48-53./
78. Debt-induced adjustment tends to have a disproportionate impact on the poorest who are forced to exploit the resource base in unsustainable ways. Such survival-oriented activities include spontaneous colonization in tropical forests, small-scale mining, and intensified use of marginal agricultural lands and marine ecosystems. Indiscriminate cutbacks in vital government programmes that fund environmental protection such as soil conservation and reforestation and the downsizing of enforcement agencies further accentuate the pace of resource degradation.
79. The recent tragedy in the Central American countries of Honduras and Nicaragua is a good illustration of the problem. Even before Hurricane Mitch, Honduras and Nicaragua were among the poorest nations in the hemisphere, with nearly half of their populations living below the poverty line. Nicaragua owes creditors $6.1 billion, the highest per capita debt in the world. Debt service payments of $254 million in 1997 absorbed 52 per cent of the Government's revenue and was two and a half times the country's spending on health and education combined. Similarly, Honduras owes $4.1 billion and the amount of money it spent paying back that debt accounted for one third of the Government's revenue last year. Adjustment-mandated cuts in government budgets and the downsizing of enforcement agencies had already crippled the capacity of both Governments to protect the natural resource base long before Hurricane Mitch hit with devastating force. Had public investment gone towards maintaining important programmes that assist small farmers, such as extension, soil conservation, reforestation and sustainable agricultural production, damage from the Hurricane would have been minimized.
80. The bottom line is that development cannot subsist upon a deteriorating environmental resource base. Environmental and developmental goals need to be pursued simultaneously since the well-being of both are inexorably linked.
In Egypt, lacks that are the income resource for many fishermen are changed to be arable lands. Moreover, more than one million arches are used for building. Consequently, we need to protect our natural resources to sustain development.
q Growing rift between State and society
81. Many third world Governments have more and more become accountable to external creditors (the IMF and the World Bank in particular) than to their own citizens. Across the third world, Governments are being pressed from above by invisible forces of globalization and from below by social forces that are losing out in the process of economic restructuring. The right of citizens to participate fully in framing national development policy is severely curtailed. This conflict between State and society undermines the possibilities of democratic consolidation in many countries - and hence, the prospect for solidifying the protection of human rights.
82. In the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular, the social impact of SAP policies are reflected in a growing number of indicators showing that social cohesion and personal safety are under serious threat. Crime and homicide rates of frightening magnitude in all countries are signs of a weakening social fabric and widespread perceptions of growing income and wealth gaps, higher unemployment and greater alcohol consumption. / UNICEF, Crisis in Mortality, Health and Nutrition, Florence, UNICEF International Child Development Centre, 1994./ Despite increasing unreported and undetected crimes, the number of youths sentenced has risen dramatically in most countries.
83. Recent scholarly research has also begun to shed new light on the links between SAPs and the incidence of conflict and disorder. Although the crisis in Somalia and the genocide in Rwanda were largely attributed by the international media to "clanism" and "ethnicity", Michel Chossudovsky (1996) puts part of the blame on the draconian economic policies of the IMF and the World Bank which removed all official economic safety nets and left the Rwandan economy in shambles after the collapse of the international coffee market in the late 1980s. With the price of coffee plummeting and the Rwandan franc repeatedly devalued, the general population was left destitute and impoverished. This, according to Chossudovsky, created conditions in which power hungry officials and leaders could sow the seeds of civil war and genocide. Hatred, which in a prospering economy could not and would not have surfaced, soon became apparent and was followed by the collapse of civil society. / Supra note 28. See chapter 5, "Economic Genocide in Rwanda", pp. 111-132./ It should be obvious by now that it is
often the absence of justice that is the principal cause for the absence of peace. Any economic reform programme that denies human dignity is likely to be resisted by those who are being victimized. It is also likely to lead to further conflict and human misery.
In the Egyptian countryside, implementing law No 96 of 1992 increases violent activities between farmers that new disputes concerning possessions and water appear. Moreover, the government intervention through applying the law destroys the tenants trust on the government neutrality.
q The Palestinian farmers ask for your intervention for their protection:
We haven’t to forget the situation of the Palestinian farmer, who suffers from the worst conditions under occupation policies with its numerous violations concerning human rights in life and security. Until March 29, 2002, the Palestinian farmers lose about $545 millions that the occupation forces destroy about 33 thousands donams of fertile arable land in addition to subverting 151 wills. Regards the Palestinian agricultural export, they lose about $300 millions.
We are invited to face strictly these policies to overcome the human rights violations that destroy the human civilization. We ask you to stop against the unjust policies emerged by WTO in order to achieve more humanistic world which comprise justice, freedom and non-discrimination.