For Food and Energy Sovereignty

There is no doubt that planet Earth is seriously ill due to the destructive action of Capital, the great responsible for environmental devastation, global warming and climate changes, and the privatization of every life form. We confront a crossroad: either we change the current civilization paradigm or humanity and life in this planet will be destroyed.

Our struggle is for a new civilization based on a harmonic relationship among humanity and nature. A civilization in which does not prevail consumerism and the logic of profit and market, that concentrates wealth and power in few hands and generates poverty and social inequality. We struggle for a society based on social and environmental justice, on equality, on the solidarity among peoples, and built on ethical values coherent with the sustainability of every life form.

In the face of this we take position:

1. We defend that land, water, sun, air, underground and biodiversity are conserved and used in a sustainable way to primarily produce food and provide jobs and life quality.
2. We affirm the principle of popular sovereignty over territory and its destiny. Food and energy sovereignty is people’s right to produce and control food and energy to take care of its needs.
3. Energy production cannot, under any circumstance, substitute or risk food production. Agroenergy should only be produced in a diversified way and in complement to food production.
4. Agroenergy production policies cannot continue to be determined by market logic, and by the interests of oil companies, car industry and agribusiness. We fight against the control of foreign capital over the economy, lands, natural resources and energy sources of Brazil.
5. Agroenergy must be produced to guarantee people's energy sovereignty and not, as currently promoted by the government, to be exported with the objective of supplying the rich countries of the north and generate profits to agribusiness, and national and transnational companies.
6. The current model of agroenergy production is pushing the expansion of agriculturist frontiers, menacing brazilian biomes, mainly of the Amazonia and Cerrado. We demand the end of deforestation and of the expulsion of farmers in every brazilian ecosystem. We affirm the sovereignty of traditional peoples and communities over their territories.
7. Food and energy sovereignty must be based on agroecology, and on an economy that simultaneously expresses and integrates nationally, in a democratic way, local and regional economies with their needs and characteristics. We fight the unsustainable and excluding model of agribusiness, one of the main causes of climate changes due to the transformation on the use of land, deforestation, and the massive use of agrotoxics and transgenics, and the mechanization and the transport of commodities on a global scale.
8. We reject and fight every kind of monoculture, and propose to limit the size of rural properties, and a limit to the areas destined to agroenergy production in every establishment, municipality and region.
9. We reaffirm the need for a popular agrarian reform, for the recognition of the territories of traditional peoples and communities, and for a process of democratization of land as the way to guarantee food and energy sovereignty. The current agribusiness model is a process of continuous land concentration.
10. We struggle for a sustainable and diversified energetic model. Agroenergy is only one of the alternatives that should come in hand with efficiency measures and other renewable and sustainable energy sources.
11. We defend a popular and decentralized energetic model that expresses local and regional social needs, characteristics and potentials. We propose the production and management in the form of small cooperative, communitarian or family energetic units, controlled by peasants, traditional communities and workers.
12. The role of peasants and family agriculture must be defined by their sovereignty and autonomy. Therefore, we are against the integration system that ties farmers to agroenergy companies, that only explodes their labour. We defend public policies that guarantee credit, technical assistance and conditions for peasants to produce agroenergy in small units.
13. We struggle for a new transport system that integrates different forms (fluvial, railway, terrestrial) and privileges public and collective transport, contrary to the unsustainable and irrational model that is oil dependant and privileges individual transport.
14. We demand that the Brazilian State stimulates, regulates, and controls an energy sovereignty policy in our country. For that, there is a need for public instruments, policies and institutions with social control, that guarantee the effective role of the State in the process of production and commercialization of agronenergy in Brazil.

We, the 500 participants of the 1^st National and Popular Conference on Agroenergy in Brazil, sign this letter representing the movements of Via Campesina, environmentalists, worker's unions and pastorals.

The following adhere to the proposal:

Leonardo Boff – Theologist

Roberto Requião – Governor of Paraná State

Adriano Beyanon – Professor of the Brasília National University

Pastor Werner Fuchs

1^st National and Popular Conference on Agroenergy.

In Defence of Food and Energy Sovereignty

Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. October 31, 2007