Stop Whitewashing Criminal Agri-Corporate Empires, IMF, WB, and WTO; It’s time for a People’s Food System!

As of today, 5.3 million people in Sri Lanka are food insecure. This proves that what the governments’ have been doing for more than 70 years to this date to feed its people has failed. The governments’ attempt to ensure food security have failed. What the governments have been doing to ensure farmers’ livelihoods have failed. What the governments have been doing to alleviate rural poverty have failed. The laws, bills, policies, international treaties, and Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s) which were brought up to guarantee food security, have left the people hung out to dry; while very few businessmen and their friendly political counterparts have been riding the gravy train for years. At a time when more than millions of people are starving in Sri Lanka; the immeasurable wealth these oligarchs have created and the empires they have built through this injustice should be considered a crime against humanity.
Today, October 16th, the day of struggle for Food Sovereignty for our peoples, we, the Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform, once again stand with the smallholder food producers and the plantation community. We stand with the smallholder farmers, who are feeding us every day while battling the debt and climate crisis, while being chased off of their Land, their Water, and their Seeds. We stand with the plantation community, who are keeping our economy floating even after being robbed of their basic human rights. And we stand with anybody and everybody who has been wronged by the systematic injustice. We stand with anybody and everybody who has been a victim of this planned crime!
It looks like both the World Food Forum and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); the institutions promising to end global hunger, are ‘selectively blind’ to hundreds of millions of people around the world starving. The benefactors who are funding these failed endeavours, such as IMF, World Bank, and Investment Banks, have only made the crisis their cash cow, and now these vultures are circling overhead of more than 50 countries that are crippled with foreign debt.