Stop corporate control in food and agriculture!
Calls regarding plantations and industrial crops
1. Stop land grabbing and land use conversion. Support and recognize collective cultivation and initiatives of peasants to attain food security and food sovereignty.
Stop the expansion of for-export monocrop plantations.
2. Put an end to the excessive use of toxic chemicals in plantations. Poisonous chemicals are detrimental to the health of agricultural workers and communities near the plantation.
Agroecology should instead be practiced based on indigenous cultures and knowledge, and farmer-developed and adapted technologies.
Foreign agrochemical corporations should be held accountable for the continuous marketing and sale of dangerous chemicals despite the danger they pose to farmers.
3. Support agricultural workers. Increase wages of agricultural workers in plantations. Enact and implement the P750 national minimum wage. Ensure the provision of benefits and just wages for workers. Promote safe and humane conditions of work and security of tenure. End contractualization.
Allow and capacitate, by allotting food lots, agricultural workers to produce their own food.
4. Provide appropriate aid to workers during the pandemic. Monthly financial aid of Php10,000 should be given to the toiling masses who are experiencing extreme poverty, and those who lost their source of income or are experiencing a reduction in their income amid the health crisis.
5. Reject Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). GMOs are not scientifically proven to be safe, both for producers and consumers. Foreign agrocorporations patent seeds that were once free and shared among communities and sell harmful chemicals that poison farmers and their families. The monopoly of agrochemical corporations, who are the leading proponents of GMOs, leads to the growing cost of farming for the farmers resulting in deeper debt-bondage.
6. Implement genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization. Follow the principle of land to the tillers and free land distribution. Haciendas and foreign plantations should be dismantled and distributed equitably to peasants who do not have their own land and those who do not have enough land. #