Introducing the seminar on food sovereignty
Talks2010sAlan Thornett opening a day seminar organised by Socialist Resistance and Green Left as part of a speaking tour by Maria Neri Pampilo, of CONZARRD, an NGO working on agrarian reform in Mindanao, the Philippines. The other speakers were Rehad Desai, Graciela Romero (War on Want) and Pierre Rousset (NPA). The recording, uploaded as “intord.wmv” on Peter Murry's YouTube channel, begins partway through his first sentence; his introduction is the first six minutes, and Rehad Desai follows. Transcript corrected from the automatic captions, 10 Oct 2026. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Alan Thornett: [...] do this seminar on food sovereignty, which is organised by Socialist Resistance and [Green Left]. In fact, [we've been] working closely with Green Left for a long time. I think this is the third or the fourth such seminar that we've jointly organised over the last few years, so we're very, very pleased to do that. From our point of view, in Socialist Resistance, I think since we started
00:30 to organise this tour, with Maria going around the country, about six months ago, the whole issue of food sovereignty has been something of a steep learning curve for us. I think originally we tended to see food sovereignty as coming at it from climate change. But what we've been confronted with, as we've done this work, is that in fact it's a
01:00 gigantic issue, which involves not only climate change but the [nature of] the capitalist system, the economic crisis, peak oil, the operation of the markets. It's an absolutely huge issue, and of course it affects everybody on the planet to a huge degree. So we're increasingly pleased that we've organised
01:30 this. I was trying to think of a way of summarising what is meant by food sovereignty, and then I realised that this fantastic photograph that we've got on the front of the leaflet, with the banner in front of the demonstration, actually summarises it incredibly well. It says: food sovereignty is for the farmers to have control over the
02:00 seeds, the land, the technology, the knowledge and everything necessary for food production. So it's a very key subject, and I think we can have a very interesting perspective here in the course of the day. We've got an excellent panel of speakers. The first speaker on will be Rehad Desai, who is
02:30 a South African climate change activist, who's here doing a tour, actually doing a tour over the next week, in preparation for the climate change events at the beginning of December. And we've got Graciela Romero, who is the programme director for War on Want.
03:00 And what we've also realised in the course of organising this is that War on Want have an absolutely excellent track record on this, and lots of excellent material, which we would encourage people to have a look at. And in fact I think that Graciela has actually written the [main] report on food sovereignty for War on Want.
03:30 And we've got Pierre Rousset, who has come here this morning from Paris, and who is a member of the NPA, has written extensively on Asia over a long period of time, and in fact has had a very close relationship over a long period of time with Maria and her comrades in the Philippines. And then of course we have Maria.
04:00 I'm particularly pleased to be able to [welcome her], because I've known Maria for quite a long time, through the international connections of Socialist Resistance. Maria has more than one role. On the one hand she's an activist in an NGO,
04:30 CONZARRD, which campaigns on agricultural rights, land rights and so on, and which has a very good record in all that. But also she's a political activist, who has been involved in a struggle against various repressive regimes in the Philippines over a very long period of time, which has resulted in a situation where her comrades have actually
05:00 a zone which they control, and which has meant that they've been able to practically apply food sovereignty and ecological policies. It's not something which is very much known on the left, but it is absolutely fascinating. And so it's excellent that we have Maria here.
05:30 So Rehad is going to speak first, because he's involved in another meeting in the building, or in the area, on the climate change campaign, and he's going to have to juggle between this meeting and that meeting in the course of the day. So we have [Rehad] going to speak first, for 15 minutes.
05:55 [Rehad Desai's talk follows; the rest of the recording is not transcribed here.]