Cancun, Quintana Roo.- The total refusal to include the subject of agriculture in the negotiations of the 5th Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) [and the rejection of] the submission of resolutions from the International Famers Forum (Foro Internacional Campesino) to the chairman of the round of talks and the commissioner of the Mexican delegation, Luis Ernesto Derbez Basutista, will be part of the main actions that will be taken on September 10th next by around 15,000 people from all over the world who are taking part in the big famers march.

"We're not going to answer for any negotiation that doesn't take the interests of the producers into account" said Olegario Carrillo Meza, of the National Union of Independent Regional Farmers' Organizations (UNORCA), one of the organizations taking part in the first day of the Farmers' Forum workshops, which are taking place between 8th and 11th September in the area around the Casa de la Cultura in this city.

He added that a commercial agreement on agriculture affects Mexcian farm worker because the terms in which this agreement are set out by the WTO work only to the benefit of big multinationals "in conspiracy with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, Japan and the United States".

In the area of agriculture, one of the main demands set out by the famers movement is that maize (corn, in U.S. English) and beans remain outside any commercial agreement because current conditions in this trade are unequal, putting small to medium producers at a great disadvantage compared their counterparts in the U.S.

Likewise, the farmers' forum is to make a statement to refute what the recently nominated Secretary for the Environment and National Resources (Semarnat), Alberto Cardenas Jimenez, said recently about genetically modified maize being safe to eat, for the environment and for native maize crops.

In Carrillo Meza's view, the struggle will not end with the actions in Cancun, but in any case he considers it an advance to have achieved unity amonf so many social, indigenous and farmers organizations in Mexico such as the Movimiento de El Campo No aguanta Mas ("the land can't take anymore") which brings together 13 producers organizations, the CAP ("Permanent Agrarian Congress"), made up of 12 farming organizations, El Barzon and the National Workers Union, among others.

The farmers' organizers agree that this will be a long-term struggle, in which they hope to revise their strategies in order to be able to have an influence in other key issues for this country such as food sovereignty, agricultural reform, the privatization of natural resources and the introduction of genetically modified crops, among others.

During the farmers' meeting, Dena Hoff, from a farmers' association in the United States, said that the current crisis in agriculture is a world crisis because we were dealing with a model that affected familiy farming on a planetary scale as a result of neoliberal agricultural policies that had reached a dimension that had no precendent in the history of humanity.

The increase in hunger worldwide and the fact that there were a thousand million undernourished people in the world who suffered cardiovascular diseases as a consequence, is an example of that.

The results of these economic globalization policies were casuing "more hunger, destruction of the local economy, a change in the identities of peoples everywhere and an enormous process of migration", the US representative maintained.

In this respect, she said that the rural world was becoming depopulated with a notable absence of young people and besides, as she underlined, the of the total world farming population, 70% were women.

On another note, she drew attention to the fact that the ministerial summit was going to negotiate a immigration agreement by which, for example, an industry in Chicago could hire immigrants in their places of origin under the labour conditions that prevailed in their countries, which she considered would be slavery conditions.

Additionally, she said that according to the same neoliberal scheme, privatized natural resources such as water, land and seeds could take on a speculative value, which would greatly affect country people.

She criticized the role of big transnational companies and their intrusion into daily life, such as Nestle which controls production of coffee, tea, milk and cereals and which was also the fourth largest water owner on the planet and, linking with another agrochemical giant, Bayer, dominated practically the entire human food chain.

The WTO imposes a model of intensive production for export and the use of chemicals and also imposes a consumer model which destroys the very health of the consumers, she said.

Taking part in the international forum "For farmers and food sovereignty", are many indigenous and farmers' associations from Oaxaca, Guerrero, Yucatan, Zacatecas, Sinaloa and the Distrito Federal, among other bodies, the organizations from Chiapas standing out with about 400 delegates.

The presence of several farmers delegations have turned the camps into real street meetings full of colour where the main feeling is the need to save the countryside and its riches.