Transcript

Let's build a Food Sovereignty Now! movement: Carlos Marentes at TEDxElPaso

[Music] when I start this. I was born in across the river but I have been living all my life here in United States. So I am a border native. Uh this is our symbol for border native. It's a coyote facing the moon but with a mask with one of those mask widely used during the occupy wall street movement. We border natives appreciate the border region and because for us it's a unique place, a very important place. And for all of you who are not from the border, let me just very quickly tell you about three very important factors that makes this region special. One is that this place was part of Mexico more than 100 years ago. This was Mexican land, Mexican territory, part of the Republic of the Mexico. So, uh that is very important to always remember. But there is also very important to remember that fact because there's another way to see immigration. When you see us crossing the border, just think that we are only coming back to our homeland. So another very important feature of the border is that we have the largest concentration of Spanish speaking people. By the way, in the background is a photo and I realized that in the beginning slide of TEX El Paso, you have a landscape of El Paso of the city of El Paso. And in both this photo and that landscape is still you can see the city hall. The city hall no longer exist. And don't be optimistic. We don't not got rid of the city government. We just demolish the city building. We are also a very poor city. We in the state are the second poorest city and nationally we are the third city. So here also the border is the largest concentration of poor people. But we have a very expensive wall. Thanks, federal government. 3.9 billion dollars for each mile of wolf. And soon we going to have a very expensive baseball stadium. We're going to have a very lousy baseball team, but we're going to have a very expensive baseball stadium. I don't know if this go like this. Can you hear me? Did I told you that I was a political cartoonist? I had much fun when I was a political cartoonist because I can I was able to criticize bad governments, politicians and exploitation of people. Unfortunately, political cartoonist don't have a future in this world because bad government, politicians and exploiters don't have a sense of humor. So all political cartoonist advice is that they become a labor organizers. That's even better because you will be able to hit those people directly. So I became a foreign labor organizer in 1983. In 1983, we founded here in El Paso in Fonta's organizing project with the idea of pushing the workers, the farm workers to fight the abuses, the exploitation and to the struggle to improve their conditions. But in order to understand, you know, farm labor, you need to understand one of the most important elements in our lives. And I'm not talking about the smartphones. I'm talking about food. Food is very important. You can live without smartphones but you cannot live with without food. Food is the most important elements in our life. And very two very important feature that I like to highlight is that food is what keep us connected to nature which is very important these days as we uh get more and more concerned about climate change or the climate crisis. Food is very important for US economy. The food fruit and vegetable production in in America represent annually a value of $40 billion. So it's a very important sector of our economy. And yes here in the border area we have agriculture production. We grow everything. Onion, lettuce, watermelons and chili. Yes. Lots of lots of chili. You know, especially in New Mexico, we grow lots of lots of chili. Chile in New Mexico in last year was se more than 70 77,000 tons of chile and the value was $64.4 million. Chile from New Mexico also brings $400 million to the economy of the state. These days, everybody love chili. Used to be a Mexican thing, but now everybody eat chili. Too bad that we got late with this bucket, but we were hoping to be here on time during the lunch because now if you eat with a chili, you know, you are eating the incorrect way. So chili was started chili production in this area was started in 1906 by Fabian Garcia from Chihuahua. He started in New Mexico in Las Cruuses. He started to work to do research to improve the chili and but that was the local for local consumption. 100 years later, chil is the most important ingredient of the Mexic of the US nutrition of everybody more than ketchup. Katchup used to be the most important. So who harvest the chili? Erh, every night at midnight, the farm workers wake up and go outside to a place near El Paso North International Bridge to look for work in the Chile fields. They start leaving to the fields around 2:00 in the morning and they will arrive to the fields at 5:00. Sometime they go as far as Lordsburg, New Mexico. As soon as it's clear enough to see, they start picking chili. This is actually a bucket of chili of the famous hash chili. Don't at the end of the El Paso. Don't forget to take some of the chili with you. They pick chilies every day until they complete the amount requested by the food processing companies. For each bucket of this chili, they get a plastic ship like this. Each bucket you get a plastic ship and at the end of the day you cash this plastic plastic ship for monies. Today each plastic ship represents 65 cents. So imagine how many buckets you need to make in order to at least make the minimum wage. So but chili is you know very important for our region. It creates prosperity. The problem is that chili pickers don't enjoy of this prosperity. They have an on average an income of $6,687 a year. not even close to the federal poverty income guidelines. So they are the poorest of the poor. Talking about poor city, the farm workers, no matter how hard they work every day, no matter how early they have to wake up to be in the streets to look for work, they don't they don't afford to either be to even be at official port. They are the ports of the port. The mechanization of agriculture has intensified oppression to the point that 72% now suffer unemployment. Uh by the way a third of the farm labor force in this area are woman single mothers head of households and woman female farm workers get lowest wages and are the ones that hired the last. So low wages and and unemployment. No wonder 25% of them don't have a place to live. They have to rely on shelters in order to spend the night. 65% don't have a decent roof to live. Erh but this is the nature of US agriculture, American agriculture. And this nature is not only affecting farm workers but is but this the nature of agriculture is affecting all of us especially with the use of these technologies. So what we have today is an agriculture system that you know is finding the ways to produce every time more and more and cheaper but not cheaper so you can go to the market and find good prices. cheaper so they can are able to compete in the global market and they are using new technologies new technologies like genetic modified foods because the only purpose of US agriculture is to make profits is not their purpose to satisfy nutritional needs. They don't grow food thinking about us. They grow food thinking about the profits they can make. and and in that drive for more profits they now use you know technologies that are not only affecting the human beings but nature 34% of the greenhouse emissions today are caused by agriculture and I'm talking about largecale agriculture I'm not referring to small farmers to campinos that continue to to to grow food in the traditional ways. We have a farm worker center where we are trying to fight against this model of agriculture that poses a danger to farm workers but also to all of us. We have a farm worker center is not far from here. Actually, if you go Oregon street south at the end of the street, you will find the farm workers center. Here at the farm worker center, we have been working for many years created an alternative, a new system, a new way of doing agriculture, of producing food that ends with the exploitation of workers and exploitation of nature. This alternative is what we call the food sovereignty alternative. The food sovereignty is a concept that that first was released by Lavia Campina in 1996. Lavia Campina is in an international movement of peasants, woman, indigenous people, fisher folks, rural workers, migrants who have decided to create a new way of producing food, a new way of practicing agriculture to benefit not corporations but everybody. Food sovereignty means three rights. The first is the right of people to grow food. You have the right, you should have the right to grow food. Today you don't have that right. If you want to buy a piece of land to produce your own food, you will not be able to do it because the the logic of the system today is only allow production for export large scale production. You know, for these the people in charge of the food system, having somebody to produce food for their own family is a nonsense. You should be producing for the big market. That's what the system is telling everybody. So, you should feed have the right to produce your own food to be compina and compino. You as a consumer should have the right to to good food. And I'm not talking about, you know, about cheap food. I'm talking about the food that you need to satisfy your nutritional needs to keep you healthy, to keep you happy. And not only that, but food according to your own culture, to your history, to your origins. You know, nobody should give you food that is not for you. And the third right is the right of everybody to have their own food policies. Nobody should dictate why somebody that a nation has to for example eat junk food. You know the example is Bolivia that finally they got rid of McDonald's and some of those junk food. So everybody should have their own policy. So my proposal today is to build a food sovereignty now movement. A food sovereignty that brings a model of production and consumption that respects human dignity that satisfy the nutritional needs of everybody and that respects and strengthen communities and nature. So I'm here to propose that we start actually a movement, a mass movement with many actions with a lot of us doing many things from growing food to starting consumer co-ops, production co-ops, family orchards. We need to occupy all those bacon lot and convert it into farm production spaces. We need to become active. This is a moment to call that call that calls everybody to go beyond washing fruits and vegetables to eat chemical free food. Everybody all of us do that. All of us do wash our food to eat. But that's only an individualistic factor actually. It's like praying for ourselves and forgiving about it. We need to do something more than that. When we are eating chemical free foods, we forgot we forget that somebody picked those foods in the field. We forgot that somebody, you know, took that food to the supermarket. There were many people before us. And by you know by making sure that we eat chemical free food we are doing nothing to resolve the problem which is a society problem. So this movement basically is a call for everybody to eat operation free food is what we should strive for to eat oppression free food. No oppression to human beings, no oppression to nature, no oppression to nothing. If you want to join our movement, feel free to join us on Facebook Centro. Much gracias. [Applause]