11 January 2012 | News | Peoples’ Summit in Rio+20 | Resisting neoliberalism | Human rights
Another Rio is Possible
A Peoples Summit and Meeting will confront Rio+20 to promote grassroots solutions and to expose green capitalism
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Social movements and organizations from all over the world are calling a “Peoples Summit for social and environmental justice, against the commodification of life and nature and in defense of common goods”, to be held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, from June 15 to 23.
The idea is to hold a Permanent Peoples Assembly and two parallel activities to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) that will take place there to mark 20 years of the first UN meeting on Environment and Development held in the same city.
The call was launched in December under the slogan: “For our rights and nature’s rights, against the commodification of life and green capitalism”
The groups that are behind the proposal are the Alliance of the Peoples of the South Creditors of the Ecological Debt, Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean, the Convergence of the Movements of Peoples of the Americas, the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations, Grassroots Global Justice, the Cry of the Excluded, Jubilee South/Americas, The World March of Women, the World Rainforest Movement, Oilwatch and La Vía Campesina.
Several social organizations have warned that the UN Summit of Rio+20 will seek to strengthen the foundations of “green capitalism” or “green economy” through “market solutions” to the crises that will benefit industrialized countries’ governments and big transnational corporations.
Brazil is willing to get involved in “processes that are able to build the legal architecture to legitimize green capitalism” Lucia Ortiz of NAT-Friends of the Earth Brazil told Real World Radio. “Our country had never had so many environmental bills, which are just a drive to commodify nature and to disguise capitalism as green”.
She mentioned the old demands of “feminist economy based on solidarity, an agrarian reform and agroecology” as the peoples’ solutions. “Our challenge is to mobilize different groups and to create a real confrontation of paradigms at the conference on sustainable development”, said Ortiz.
The call relaunched today considers the current development model is unsustainable by definition and that inhumanity aims to submit every aspect of life to market action, by putting always profit first over the general wellbeing.
The callers of the Summit say that green economy “liberalizes Nature and its access by markets by dividing it in elements - like carbon, biodiversity or environmental services- to generate at the same time financial speculation titles, corporate control, loss of food sovereignty and the emptying of territories.
Social organizations believe it is necessary to turn Rio+20 into a global mobilization process that will strengthen the resistance for survival by building anticapitalist alternatives such as food sovereignty. “The peoples summit will face the challenge of raising awareness about the peoples real solutions”. These peoples solutions “have been built in the countryside, in the forests, factories, in the communities”.
There will be demonstrations and workshops as part of the summit with a strong emphasis on sovereignty, self-determination, equality, human rights and nature rights. “Rio+20 has to mark the beginning of a society based on solidarity and justice”.
