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Farmers Encouraged To Fight For Their Rights

Updated: October 30, 2007 05:00 PM GMT
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At a recent World Food Day observance, a priest exhorted farmers to recognize and fight for their rights to land, water, seed, appropriate technology and fair prices for their produce.

"Farmers must continuously fight for these five rights, otherwise they will always lose in the industrial world," Father Aloysius Gonzaga Luhur Prihadi asserted at an Oct. 20 meeting. The priest heads Semarang archdiocese´s socioeconomic development commission.

Two hundred people, mostly farmers of various religious backgrounds, attended the meeting in Klaten, Central Java, 450 kilometers southeast of Jakarta. Semarang archdiocese is based in the provincial capital of the same name, based about 80 kilometers to the northwest.

The Church-sponsored Sari Pratiwi Organic Farmers group organized the event to commemorate World Food Day, an annual observance the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has designated for Oct. 16.

The World Food Day committee of the Indonesian bishops´ conference had published a brochure identifying farmers´ five basic rights and disseminated it among the country´s parishes at the beginning of the month.

Aside from Father Luhur Prihadi, the principal speaker, other presenters were Father Yoseph Suyatno Hadiatmaja of the Fraternal Forum of Religious Believers of Yogyakarta, Fransiskus Xaverius Wagiman, lecturer on the agriculture faculty of state-run Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, and Andreas Gunapradongga, an agribusiness entrepreneur.

Referring to the five rights, Father Luhur Prihadi told UCA News just after the meeting that farmers are generally in a weak position. "Farmers have no strong bargaining power. About the right to land, for example, they cannot defeat the owners of big factories and housing developers," he said, lamenting that some farmers do not own any land at all.

He noted also that even though water is a vital need for plants and crops, farmers have difficulty accessing springs or other sources of clean water and have to rely instead on water from polluted rivers.

The priest went on to explain that farmers cannot easily avoid using government-supplied genetically modified seeds, which need chemical fertilizers that eventually render the soil infertile and hard to cultivate.

"The farmers who are concerned about the conservation of the environment now continuously fight for the right to use their own seeds," which grow with manure, more efficiently and cheaply. To cultivate manure-fertilized land, with its loose soil, he added, farmers can and should use appropriate technology, such as hoes, plows and harrows, not tractors.

Another problem Father Luhur Prihadi lamented is that the government is the one determining prices of agricultural produce. "It is not fair," he insisted, contending that the farmers should be the ones to determine prices for their products, especially rice, based on the calculation of their production costs.

Meanwhile, Father Hadiatmaja urged the farmers to fight for their rights with the spirit of self-reliance.

"If we want a better livelihood, we cannot depend on others, who are more interested in theories and promises. Rather, we have to be self-reliant by creating our own seeds, manure, markets," he advised.

Wagiman talked about organic farming in Indonesia and other countries, while Gunapradongga related his experience in promoting agricultural products in supermarkets.

Aside from the meeting, the farmers, as individuals and in groups, also organized an exhibition on agricultural products, organic fertilizers and non-chemical pesticides.

According to Caecilia Isti Sumiwi of the bishops´ World Food Day committee, farmers have to use government-supplied genetically modified seeds produced by multinational corporations "because at present those are the only seeds available in the country."

Local seeds are "all gone or used," she told UCA News after the meeting, adding that the government makes no effort to grow local seeds.

END

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