The Platform Earth-Farmer-Consumer consists of two sectoral farmers’ unions that were founded in the early nineties be cause they were not too happy with the all-in-one mainstream union (LTO): the NAV (Dutch Arable Farmers’ Union) and the NMV (Dutch Dairy Farmers’ Union). They were joined by the working group ‘Farmers and Income’, and by ‘ X minus Y Solidarity Group’ and the ‘Boerengroep Wageningen’, a students group at Wageningen University, and by Afrika-europa Netwerk, (AEN), a development organisation. Members of the political parties SP and GroenLinks support the ABC platform.
Our objective is a different Dutch and European and international agricultural policy. In countries in and/or outside Europe the current EU and WTO agricultural policy, characterised by liberalisation (free trade), leads to overproduction and to dumping and problems with foodsecurity, too low prices for products from small and middle-sized farms, degradation of nature and the environment and less animale welfare, and dubious food quality. There are alternatives for this policy We are lobbying for these alternative policies within the Netherlands, but also together with platforms in other countries see www.europeanfooddeclaration.org for the food declaration they drew up together. See ‘documents’ on that website for proposalos for a better Common Agricultural Policy. See also www.nyelenieurope.net for info about the Forum for food and agriculture held in August 2011 in Krems, Austria (400 participants form 34 countries). There is a newsletter you can subsribe to.
In the Netherlands we cooperate in lobbying with the Coalition for Fair Trade (www.eerlijkehandel.nl) which unites many Dutch NGOs. On Food sovereignty issues we cooperate with different organisations such as Friends of the Earth Netherlands, Greenpeace, development organisation ICCO and others. On 8 October 2010 we organised a day where 45 people form 25 organisations discussed food and agriculture, which yielded the ‘declaration of Utrecht; agriculture 2013′. Core words: regionalisation, food sovereignty, market regulation and healthy soils. We call this wider group ‘Platform for Another Agriculture’. We hope to achieve further cooperation in the Netherlands on the above issues, and also on the issue of the European Agricultural Policy.
