La Vía Campesina held a protest outside the headquarters of a company that is looking for investment funds to buy lands in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Javier Sánchez, of La Via Campesina, said in an interview with Real World Radio that the G20 makes the population believe that they are “worried about the volatility of prices” and that they want to end with tax havens, although all that they do is to “destroy food sovereignty even more”.

“We have to clearly state that people are more important than markets”, said Sánchez, and demanded public policies regarding access to water, land, seeds, and credit.

“They are incompetent”, he added. One of the peasants´ demands is to end land grabbing and an urgent implementation of the commitments made by the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development of the FAO , according to a statement issued by La Via Campesina.

Sánchez said that there are millions of hectares of land in Africa that are now in the hands of rich governments and investment funds, for instance the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Governments have to prevent land grabbing, which is displacing millions of farmers”, said Sanchez. He also pointed out that agrofuels in countries such as Argentina and Brazil are replacing “thousands of hectares previously used for agriculture”. “We need to reverse this model”, he concluded.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iankaren/