La Via Campesina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)
This video is to give my oh-so-numbered readers a brief overview of La Via Campesina. I have talked about the CIW previously, as well.
The first similarity I see between the efforts of these two groups is that they are both challenging the bigger picture. The CIW isn’t challenging the farm owners in Florida, and La Via Campesina isn’t challenging the countries—or companies—that are exporting food to their countries. Let me back up and clarify one thing quickly. Countries do no export; companies, firms, and corporations export their goods and the countries only facilitate those transactions. Ok, good. The CIW has been protesting against the big players in the tomato market, companies like McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell, not the farmers. La Via Campesina is protesting against the WTO to break down trade agreements that allow for easy import and export relationships. They feel that those agreements are flooding poorer countries with cheap food, which in turn puts their local farmers out of business because they cannot compete.
Obviously the fact that they are both protesting is a similarity, but what comes of those protests is how they are similar in terms of disruption. They are both bringing awareness to an otherwise blind or ignorant public. In the clip, one protester mentioned intellectual property rights and the right to seeds of crops. Monsanto. There are always people out against Monsanto. There are always people out against big agriculture, so when the general public hears about such protests, they often shrug it off and go about their lives. If the CIW took on the local farm owners, news wouldn’t spread around the nation as it did because they challenged world-wide fast food chains. When people challenge the WTO, people take note. They may see it on the news, hear what the people are upset about and still forget about it at the next commercial break, but I think more people as a whole pay a little more attention. They do so because the WTO can affect every single person in the world. The general public—world wide—are often taken back by global protests, and protests that challenge the status quo on a global level.Take for instance the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.
These two groups are putting their poverty and personal injustices on the front doorsteps of the people in the “countries in the north” as they are referred to in the video clip. The CIW is making Americans (mostly) think twice before they buy a cheap greasy burger from Burger King or McDonalds. La Via Campesina is making those countries think twice (OK maybe a time and a tenth) about whether or not to export as much or to engage in certain trade agreements, and making the citizens aware of what they are facing.
That leads perfectly into the final question. How are consumers involved? Consumers in the north are picky and want instant gratification. What they want, they get. And if they don’t want something, the corporations are left with one option with the surplus: export. But it isn’t that the consumers are just denying goods, but they are also demanding outside goods: Imports. Corporations (remember, not countries) don’t always want money for goods. Goods for goods means they can sell imported stuff back to the consumers in their original country. So there is why these trade agreements exist. Consumers—not producers—in the southern countries see the availability of cheap goods and take advantage of them. Granted, we cannot blame this all on the consumer. I have talked about the illusion of choice before, and that plays a big role here, too. People have become nearly dependant on cheap imported goods because they have been made available to them by big corporations who have market power over the consumer. So this begs the question, what do we do? Stop demanding imports? Specialization has made that impossible at this point. Some countries are better at producing certain things than others. Trade is done to make two or more parties mutually better off, so we would have to take a huge step backwards. The same can be said for the CIW struggle. The need and use of fast and convenient food has been ingrained into the northern countries to the point where we cannot simply choose not to eat fast food. In this case, however, there are “choices” of which chains to eat at and which to avoid based on their tomato purchasing decisions.
I’m dancing around answering this question because I cannot think of any single, united thing that consumers can do to help—or influence in general—the struggle of La Via Campesina, so I will pose that to you.
The CIW and La Via Campesina are two organizations that are struggling against the bigger players in their situations to reverse injustices imposed upon them. There are definite differences between them, but it is their similarities that are captivating. I guess a start to answering my own question is to say that consumers can act by paying attention and seeing how these issues relate to them personally; spread that awareness of the situation and see what happens.
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