AGRI-SETA AND COOPERATIVES SPEECH BY SANACO PRESIDENTBALE 20-21SEPTEMBER 2012

Transcription

1 AGRI-SETA AND COOPERATIVES SPEECH BY SANACO PRESIDENTBALE 20-21SEPTEMBER 2012 Programme Facilitator CEO Madiba Professor Mayende Chairperson of Agri-SETA Presidency DrNgomane From SEDA Madam Ndaba Other Board Members from AgriSETA All the people on the programme All Protocol Observed Most of our registered cooperatives are in agriculture, according to the statistics from the register of cooperatives, 70% of cooperatives are in this sector.most of them are struggling and are not functional, and this can be attributed to various challenges that they are confronted with.

2 Due the above, SANACO proposes that Agri-SETA and SANACO must drive training and education for the people and cooperatives who have interest on agriculture and farming. It is imperative for SANACO, department of Land and Rural Development and the department of Agriculture to sit around a table and come up with a formidable programme to assist those who need land for agricultural purposes. Our people need support, monitoring, training and access to markets. As SANACO we have facilitated market in China on Maize meal we have signed MOU s to trade with other countries. That is why we want our agencies, institutions and government to come on board so that we can help. Due to drought a number of schemes, fields plot and farms are not utilized but our people are on the streets.food prizes is going high and high day to day, beef meat is not affordable because it is being

3 imported, fruit that are healthier cannot be affordable by majority. Given all these reasons and others not given, we propose SANACO is here to play a leading role to revive the times of our ancestors where people live by themself on a cooperative way that is a genesis,that is humanity, UBUNTU. Like many family who have land they were not buying food instead they were feeding themselves, their neighbours and other families. Together we can come up with coordinated plans and teach our people, holding them by hand to ensure that we provide required support to them to enable them to play a role on what they know. Let us take this gathering as a working session, let us have a timeframe, let us attach individual people, let us mobilize resources, let us go to people at the rural areas, let us touch their lives. SANACO wants to be part of a revolutionary solution rather than to perpetuate the problem created by the monopolistic dominance of agribusiness which claims to fame is to feed the nation and make huge profits.

4 One of the sad realities of such a model of industrial agriculture based on commodity monocultural production is that it has totally marginalized the African small holder farmer, reduced to subsistence, poverty, hunger and struggle and in addition has created a rural proletariat made out of diligent and obedient unskilled farm workers. We also have to admit once and for all and not deny all the timethat the green Revolution based on the use of toxicagri-chemicals, capital intensive Equipment and infrastructure, and abusive irrigation is now declared to be the direct producer of 30% of the world Green House Gases emission. It is therefore a major responsible sector for climate change and global warming, which is now visible and happening, and whom the victims are the poor, who have not contributed to it. Climate change is only but the tip of the iceberg as it is known thatthe agri-business ideology has also brought serious environmental damages such as water pollution and scarcity, soil erosion and

5 desertification, and massive loss of biodiversity and ecology. SANACO proposes a new approach towards food sovereignty which uses the Brown revolution as the way to empower agrarian cooperatives to regain a prominent and critical role in the transformation of a people s driven agriculture. To turnaround this situation, agri-seta must focus its attention on intense and priority skilling of all rural, peri-urban and even urban community farmers in sustainable, climate smart, carbon friendly, communally and cooperatively engineered organic production and agroecology practices. Cooperatives are the ideal recipient and vehicles to promote such green and clean transformation of agriculture and set up new norms and standards for sustainability as driven by people, for people, with people. In conclusion, SANACO supports and champions the creation of a new generation of enabled and effective agroecology farming cooperatives, encouraging local produce beneficiation and community fresh produce markets, and where

6 communities are fed first before food is supplied to retailers or exporters. Agri-SETA must partner with SANACO in this endeavor to ensure that the country becomes a model of agrarian local sustainable development towards community s food, fibre, seed, medicinals and cellulose full value chains production and beneficiation through the appropriate agroecologicalartisan skilling and apprenticeship of our farmers. This is not a pipe dream, because this has been done before, by all successful civilizations, and must be done again for us to show the way out of the multiple crises brought along by capital intensive market driven corporate and multinational businesses, at the expense of the small local enterprises. We should never forget that the reality is that 550 millions of small scale producers are nourishing silently 2/3 of the world population, when giant agri-businesses are failing to feed the remaining third Sources given by la Via Campesina the

7 world movement of peasants organizations at the last Rio + 20, world summit of sustainable Development in June What I said today is brilliantly illustrated by the opening declaration of Nobel Peace prize Mikhail Gorbachev at the Rio + 20 Summit who said: With just three years to go, the goals set at that Millennium Summit in 2000 are little more than pious wishes for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, particularly in Africa. Everything bears the stamp "too little too late." I can't qualify this failure as being anything other than one of leadership and vision. Yet it is clear to me that the efforts of politicians alone will not be enough to respond to the challenges that we face. What we need is the interaction of politics, business and civil society. The world finds itself at an important inflection point. The choice is between a perfect storm of progressively deepening set of crises or expanding perspectives of unprecedented opportunities. The economic, environmental, political and, most important, moral crisis we face has shown that the

8 currently dominant model of economic growth is unsustainable. This model engenders crises, social injustice and the danger of environmental catastrophe. There is a clear need for a rapid transition to a different model. We need to rethink the goals of economic development. Consumption must not remain the only or the principal driver of growth. Growth should be seen as a tool of societal development. The economy needs to be reoriented to goals that include public goods such as a sustainable environment, people's health in the broadest sense of the word, education, culture and social cohesion, including absence of glaring gaps between the rich and the poor.

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