CAMPAIGNERS marked the International Day of Peasants’ and Farmers’ Struggle today by calling for an immediate end to the persecution of peasant movements and their leaders.

La Via Campesina, a global movement of peasants, small and medium-sized producers, landless, women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers, highlighted the importance of food sovereignty in ensuring a future for humanity.

“Governments are choosing capitalism at all costs,” the group warned.

“The industrial food system continues to make super-profits while trampling upon the lives and livelihoods of farming families and rural people, whose lands, water and territories are being grabbed for export land uses amid a worsening global food and economic crises.”

Graciela Stornini de Almeida of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) said: “Our territories are being constantly threatened by the growth of agribusiness and by the indiscriminate increase in the use of pesticides.”

Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe warned that the European Union’s proposed free trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay would empower agribusiness interests and endanger peasants, local communities and the environment.

“The current food and farming system is broken,” the environmental campaign group said.

“Public policies should support a just transition to small-scale sustainable farming, where local communities, farmers and farmworkers are respected and given the power and resources to produce and distribute food sustainably.

“This is the future we need to feed our societies, prevent ecological collapse and build vibrant rural economies. Food sovereignty is the future.”

The International Day of Peasants’ and Farmers’ Struggle is marked every April 17, which is the anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre in Brazil.

On that day in 1996, 19 landless farmers taking part in an MST protest in the northern state of Para were murdered by military police acting in cahoots with agribusiness interests.