Workshop: Creating Alternative Modes Of Development Cooperation For Food Sovereignty And Reparatory Justice, Especially For Afro-Descendant Farmers

The Karl Lévêque Cultural Institute and the University of West Indies co-organized two workshops in June 2022 and September 2022 under the theme "Creating Alternative Development Cooperation for Food Sovereignty and Reparatory Justice, especially for Afro-descendant Farmers." The workshops brought together farmers, organizations, students, and stakeholders from Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, and beyond to discuss the impact of colonialism and neoliberal policies on food sovereignty in the Global South. The workshops aimed to build understanding of development challenges, explore alternative South-South cooperation models, and identify reparatory justice principles to reshape development cooperation for food sovereignty. Out of the workshops came a set of 10 commitments around:

1. Create local seed banks, local knowledge banks and data bases for protecting our biodiversity, sharing innovative technology around food sovereignty and supporting philosophical principles and visions supporting ecosystems such as permaculture

2. Fight for agricultural policies that are adapted to the needs of local communities, protective of the environment and promote agriculture as a viable profession

3. Continue our struggle for the implementation of public policies (agricultural, commercial, infrastructural, and fiscal) protecting peasants and family farming by inscribing our actions in the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other peoples working in rural areas; and in a perspective of reconquering the political sovereignty of our peoples in the South

4. Promoting knowledge exchange programmes between farmers and between communities of the Global South to rebuild the capacity of social and popular movements engaged in the project of food sovereignty

5. Promote the marketing of our food ourselves, especially through local networks, new Pan-African agriculture trade and business exchange mechanisms and South-South cooperation

6. Fight for the return of our germplasm extracted under colonial and neocolonial relations, and for equitable relationships in agricultural value chains

7. Constitute a work team to elaborate well documented files on the total debt of the former colonizing countries towards the former colonies, notably in the Caribbean

8. Join existing initiatives on the issue of reparatory justice for Afro-descendant and African peoples

9. Address the issue of reparation both within the framework of international solidarity and by taking into account the specific realities of each country concerned, for example through hosting citizen or popular courts on reparation

10. Organize awareness-raising initiatives among social and popular movements in Western countries on the need for reparation for slavery and the neo-colonial mechanisms of resource plundering in the South

The workshops advanced proposals for alternative, reparative development cooperation centered on food sovereignty priorities of Afro-descendant peoples.