La Via Campesina Taiwan, China Special Feature 10: Global Solidarity Starts from the Rural Grassroots

Editor's note: The La Via Campesina Taiwan exchange tour ended last week after five days of rural visits. For related articles and on-site reports, please click the link here. This article is a summary of the exchange tour; follow-up interview articles will be published one by one on Newsmarket.

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Introduction

Taiwan's land grabs and water disputes are heard of from time to time, but looking at the world, these are not isolated phenomena.

In Indonesia, a single development project uses 1.3 million hectares of land, equivalent to one-third of Taiwan. In Indonesia, hundreds of hectares of land are owned by agribusinesses, and last year alone there were 122 land-grab conflicts.

In Cambodia, 50% of the land was sold by the government to sugar companies. In South Korea, the food self-sufficiency rate is only 26%, and excluding rice it is less than 5%. In Europe, one farmer goes under every three minutes; a small farmer in Canada must take on four or five side jobs just to survive. The situation of small farmers is the same all over the world, equally ignored by governments.

The Taiwan Rural Front and the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Villages hosted three representatives of La Via Campesina in late May -- Indonesia representative Yakub (director of the East Asia-Southeast Asia regional youth department of La Via Campesina and director of international policy research at the Indonesian Peasant Union), South Korea representative Haesook (East Asia-Southeast Asia regional secretariat, Korean Women Farmers Association), and Indonesia representative Hadiedi (communications department of La Via Campesina).

Over the five-day itinerary, they visited many rural areas in Taiwan. These included Zhudong Erchongpu and Sanchongpu; the Zhubei Pure Jade project area; Wanbao in Miaoli; Xizhou and Xiangsiliao in Changhua; Meinong in Kaohsiung; and Yilan and the Tucheng ammunition depot, among other places.

Series articles:

• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (9) On-site record from Tucheng -- Farmers stand on their own, reclaim food and agriculture autonomy
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (8) Reclaiming food autonomy -- planting local seeds, practicing local farming methods
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (7) On-site record from Xizhou -- The farmers' path of water and land
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (6) On-site record from Yilan -- Young people returning to farming, connecting globally
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (5) On-site record from Meinong -- Farmers uniting is imperative
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (4) On-site record from Hsinchu -- Sharing the experience of Indonesia's land reoccupation movement
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (3) The myth of land grabbing
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (2) A record of land grabbing in Africa and Europe
• La Via Campesina Taiwan visit special (1) A record of land grabbing in Asia and Latin America