Three Main Obstacles to Food Sovereignty
18.05.2022
The Jugnauth Government pays lip-service to food security, while doing nothing concrete. This is pure folly. The folly of the Jugnauth regime on this issue was amply highlighted by the risks to Mauritian food sovereignty exposed during the Covid pandemic. Now with the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia, the situation could get really dire. And by that time, the MSM-led Government will find it is too late to act. For us, the people, too, it will do little good to “desann dan lari” and denounce the Government in vague terms in the streets: it will not make food come out of the earth ready to eat.
The big sugar cane bosses are allowed to continue to “sit” on the arable land and either produce nothing-but-cane even when it runs at a loss, or alternatively, worse still, they are allowed to sell off the land for building gated-communities for the world’s millionaires looking for an investment abroad or for a second residence or even, if they put in enough cash, for Mauritian nationality. The bosses use the money to pay their sugar-cane debts, and the Government gets a slice of tax. But, the land is, meanwhile, gone. And with it future food sovereignty is gone, too.
That, those two things, the Jugnauth Government does give concrete support for: Jugnauth subsidizes cane production. He supports cane growing in every way imaginable to the tune of millions if not billions of Rupees. And Jugnauth supports the ruination of agricultural land by dishing out permits for the oligarchs to convert good agricultural land into real estate speculation parcellization projects or the construction of concrete shopping malls, and he even passes new laws permitting the barter of residence rights and nationality in exchange for investment in these real estate scams. That is not just words, but deeds.
What we, the people of Mauritius, need is simple.
We need to take, say, one-third of the sugar estates’ land, uproot the cane on it, and plant food crops. Or, alternatively, pass a law that all sugar cane rows be re-organized over the course of the next few years so as to permit the interline cropping of food crops on the totality of cane land. Research shows it can be done. The Government must force the bosses to do this.
Why? So that the people, the working people, can control the decisions about how to use the country’s land. That is an elementary democratic demand.
We in LALIT called, at the time of 2022 Labour Day, for this item – democratic control over what is planted on the country’s land – to be the pillar of the political programs of all political parties: by democratic control over the land, we can assure food security. Without it, we cannot. Workers must, in turn, demand this as a pillar of the program they will support. Without it, they should withhold even their vote.
At the same time, we need to mobilize to force the Government to force the sugar estate oligarchs to use their capital to set up “production units”, factories, near their cane plantations, on their estates. This way they can preserve and transform the food crops. All the infrastructure around old sugar mills, after centralization and mill closures, is still in place. The roads, the electricity, telecom and water supplies, the lot, are all there. Factories must be set up to produce cooking oil from peanuts and sunflower; crops like beans, maize, tomatoes need to be canned, frozen and freeze-dried; potatoes both stored and dried for mash; maize, breadfruit, manioc can all be dried, milled and stored. Niche foods can be preserved, leaning on the superb Mauritian national cuisine. Food that is not used can be exported to nearby neighbours, thus assuring foreign exchange, and if need be further away.
Meanwhile, we must mobilize so that Government phases out the permits given to fishing vessels from abroad. These are at present wrecking our 2.4 million square kilometres of EEZ waters. Instead the Government should build a proper, sustainable fishing industry, that can “fish-tail” in with the agricultural preservation industry – canning and diversified kinds of dishes. All manner of advanced and enhanced products can be developed – from vinnday pwason, to rogay urit, from zasar legim to cakes made from lafarinn friyapin.
This way, there is not just food security, food sovereignty, in these difficult times, Rada Kistnasamy said in his speech that this article is based on, but also stable jobs are created. And with exports organized, more foreign exchange brought in. Our aim in LALIT is to mobilize for the revolutionary change that will make this possible. Working people must take the decisions about the land. Working people must take the decisions about how to use the past surplus created over the centuries of slavery and indenture, as well as in the more recent era of wage slavery. It is as simple as that. That is what democracy means. And something as elementary, something as basic as food sovereignty, is not possible without it challenging the way that the bosses take all the decisions that allow us to stay alive. And take them badly.
LALIT has mobilized for this kind of change for years. In 1984, we ran a nation-wide campaign called “Disik, ki Lavenir?” We were met with repression. We were charged in the Courts, and when we were about to win, our slide shows were banned by new laws. We have been relentless in this campaign: how to mobilize to impose what is done with the country’s land, our collective land, and with the country’s capital, our collectively produced capital.
We have to look at the major obstacles to what we are fighting for.
Our 40-year campaign has been pedagogical. It has made the obstacles clear. The bosses have the land. We want the people to control how the land is used in the interests of all: for food, for job creation, for housing, for foreign exchange. The bosses control the capital, and we the people want to control it. And this has become a question of life-or-death in these times of pandemics and wars.
So, what are the obstacles we have met, and will continue to meet? Let us make it clear:
“Everyone” seems to agree that we need food security. That is the strange thing. The Government, the Opposition parties, every thinking person interviewed in any newspaper or on any radio, they all agree on the need for food production and for food security. So, why do we continue to import 75% to 80%, including almost all, repeat “all”, our staples? Why? Other than that the land is in the control of the bosses?
Rada Kistnasamy explained that there are three main obstacles:
Obstacle Number One: The Government
First, the Government is too cowardly to force the land-owners to do anything. The Government is too lily-livered to force the capitalists to do anything. Instead it just gives out bits of paper granting the land-owners permission to sell off their land for a one-time gain. Instead, it just shares out the MIC capital it created, in secret agreements with cow-towing bosses. So, we need to mobilize to force the government to act, and in turn to force the land-owners and capitalists to act.
Obstacle Number Two: The Media
Then, we have the media – the MBC and the Press, including Radio. The media, too, seem unable to pronounce the very words “force the sugar estate owners” to do anything, including invest in agriculture and fishing for food.
The media is even too scared even to call for the land-owners to stop doing anything, including to stop selling off the best agricultural land for rich peoples’ villas in gated communities around swimming pools and golf-courses. In addition to the Press bowing down to the big land-owners for ideological reasons, we note with horror that one of the two big press conglomerates actually sells land (L’Express Property is run by La Sentinelle) and is thus part of the problem. The other press group (Defi Deals) sells “holidays” in hotels and is also actually part of the tourism industry. Talk about vested interests and conflicting interests! While selling land and selling holidays is not “in the peoples’ interests”, food sovereignty is. And for that, you need to force the sugar cane bosses to open up their land and resources for food production.
Obstacle Number Three: Trade union Bureaucratic Leadership
And the third obstacle is the trade union leadership. While many of the leaders can and do sign up to documents like our shared Charter for Food Security, which is good, they leave their signature on it, and do not, in their press conferences, on their work sites, or in their ongoing work, manage to integrate the issue that they sign up to. They do not mobilize their members for food security, let alone, mobilize them to force Government to force land-owners to produce food on their land and in their buildings, and to invest in fishing. Instead, they come up with lists of unrelated points of a sectorial nature, pasted together roughly, in the style of a “shopping list”. They do this even for Labour Day when it is a moment for trade union leaders to look through a broad lens in the name of the working class, as a class, a class that the union leaders potentially represent.
So, we in LALIT continue this struggle – even as the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia continue to threaten food security world-wide. And the situation worsens every day. This past week, India, the world’s second largest producer of wheat, has blocked the export of any of this wheat. Many other countries have already done this. Many have blocked the export of all grains, for fear that their own food security be threatened by the continuation of the war.
So, we call on all working class leaders to adopt as the first pillar of their programs: food security based on three things:
- Government forcing the sugar cane bosses to plant food crops on a third of their land (or alternatively to arrange their cane plantations so that there is inter-line food-cropping between every alternate row of cane in 100% of their land), and to stop all parcellization of arable sugar estate land for real estate business.
- Government forcing sugar estate bosses to use their infrastructure around mills and former mills for food preservation and transformation factories.
- Government either force capitalists to invest in fishing, or itself invest in a fishing fleet, like Seychelles government, and stop giving away permits.
*This article is based on Rada Kistnasamy speech on food sovereignty at LALIT’s May Day members’ assembly, and Ram Seegobin’s comments at a recent party meeting.
