Cultural rice festival a resounding success

Hong Kong (Dec 17) — Rice farmers from across Asia who came to protest the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) 6th Ministerial conference also came to celebrate the culture of rice.

Today, the week-long ‘Save Our Rice Festival’ was declared a resounding success amidst the failure of the WTO talks to further agreements on agriculture. “We thank all the people’s movements who played a big role in the failure of the WTO talks on agriculture. We will continue to resolutely fight against WTO. Long live international solidarity!” called out Danilo Ramos, secretary general of the Asian Peasant Coalition and Peasant Movement of the Philippines during the Rice Festival’s closing ceremonies.

During the rice festival, groups went around various events to promote the culture of rice through song and dance; rice exhibitions were displayed, traditional seeds were exchanged among farmers, and discussions on the impact of globalisation on rice farmers were held.

The WTO is seen as a threat to people’s rights to food, and especially to the Asian staple food, rice. Rice farming communities all over Asia are driven to bankruptcy under tremendous pressure by rice dumping from the North, enforced through the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). Rice wisdom or knowledge about locally adapted rice cultivation has disappeared with the introduction of commercial seeds and chemical inputs controlled by transnational corporations. Meanwhile, the enforcement of patent laws via the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement has handed over indigenous seed knowledge to TNCs.

In Central Luzon, considered the Philippines’ ‘Rice Granary’, rice farmers are getting poorer and hungrier than ever because of the WTO’s neo-liberal policies, according to Lita “Ka Lita” Mariano, secretary general of Alyansa ng Magbubukid sa Gitnang Luzon (Central Luzon Peasants Alliance).

The average Filipino-lease farmer now spends 41,000 Filipino pesos (Ps) on one hectare for the whole cropping season of four months (from land preparation to harvest). This includes the 30 per cent interest on the capital they loan and 12 cavans of rice they give as payment to landlords. In the Philippines, most farmers do not own their land and because of poverty they are dependent on money lenders for capital.

During harvest, Filipino farmers are only able to sell rice at Ps 7.50 per kilo as the farmgate price dictated by the “free market.” Local rice has to compete head-on with cheap imports from developed countries. The government offers no form of subsidy or protection to rice farmers, following the dictates of the WTO.

According to Ka Lita, farmers are only able to get Ps 36,000 for 90 cavans of rice, the average produce from a good harvest (meaning, crops that are not destroyed by typhoons or pest outbreaks). Thus, on a good harvest, farmers are still shortchanged by Ps 5,000!

She says that three years ago, the average capital for one cropping season was only Ps 26,000, so farmers were still able to earn a little. But since then, the prices of chemical fertilisers have doubled, and so has the cost of production. Filipino farmers, most of them planting high-yielding varieties promoted by the government’s 1980s Green Revolution package, have no choice but to rely on high-priced chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides produced by transnational agrochemical companies.

Most Filipino rice farmers are buried in debt, Ka Lita says. The difficulty in surviving on income from rice farming thus forces many of them into agricultural labour for rich farmers or landlords, receiving depressed wages. Some women farmers try to earn money by washing laundry. And farmers’ children mostly go to the cities to work as construction workers or at an early age, are forced to drop out of school and help in the rice fields.

“Life in our country is really hard, that’s why many farmers don’t want to farm anymore,” says Ka Lita.

Meanwhile, in the state of Kerala in India, rice farmers are committing suicide because of their inability to cope with the harsh effects of globalisation.

According to R. Sathish, a rice farmer and a member of Thanal Conservation Action and Information Network in Kerala, since the Indian government signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1991, rice farmers’ conditions have gotten worse. The selling price of farmers’ local rice produce, he said, has remained unchanged for the past ten years while the cost of production have gone up.

Per cropping season, farmers spend about 3,000 Indian rupees (Rp) for commercial seeds, Rp1,500 for pesticides, and Rp5,000 for fertilisers per hectare. In the end, they only earn about Rp10,000, which their families cannot live on given the high price of basic commodities. Most farmers are buried in debt and become mentally troubled because of their despair over the slow destruction of their livelihoods, and many have resorted to suicide.

Sathish also complained that the forced use of high-yielding varieties of rice and pesticides has left farmers’ lands infertile and killed off indigenous rice varieties.

Ka Lita and Sathish both vow to continue to struggle against neo-colonialism of the WTO, to resist exploitation by TNCs, and reclaim people’s rice cultivation.

The rice festival was held from December 11 to 17 and was organised by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Asia Pacific and the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty. It was part of the People’s Camp on Food Sovereignty during the collective People’s Action Week against the WTO.