Radio Mundo Real

MST’s Roberto Baggio’s presentation at the Forum Against Agribusiness organized by La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth and the World March of Women

The terrible impacts of the expansion of agribusiness are discriminatory.

They displace peasant communities and native peoples from their lands to the city’s slums, destroying the biological and cultural diversity and promoting the slow death of family farming until it is replaced with large scale agro-industrial monoculture for export.

Besides hunger, our region suffers illnesses in our crops, animals and people, most of them women and children who are affected by the indiscriminate use of agrotoxics.

While millions of people are affected by hunger and poverty, the profits of big agribusiness translational corporations increase.

These were some of the issues of debate in Asuncion, Paraguay, as part of the First Regional Forum Against Agribusiness held from August 21 through 23.

MST member Roberto Baggio also analyzed the strong control of agribusiness on non-productive phases of the business, such as the financial phase and even the influence on multilateral credit agencies and global trade regulation.

Lastly, he called the attention on the uniformization of food at an international level as part of a standardization strategy of production and consumer markets.