50 years of solidarity with farmers and food movements

For 50 years, food has been at the heart of Inter Pares’ work with counterparts. Food is a basic human need, yet hunger persists. And this is due mostly to socio-economic and political reasons. Reasons that can be addressed through social justice.  

Over time, we have called this work by many names—ecological agriculture, food security, food justice, food sovereignty and agroecology—but our values have stayed consistent. We are in solidarity with the people who grow our food. We recognize that diversity—cultural, biological—enriches food systems. We honour the ancestral agricultural knowledge of rural women and farming communities. We also confront the power of corporations that seek to control seeds, land and markets. And we work alongside movements in Canada and globally to resist exploitation and build food systems and policies for the common good, not corporate greed.

Looking Back

The 1970s: The start of a food movement

In 1977, Inter Pares joined allies to launch the People’s Food Commission. The Commission travelled across Canada, posing pressing questions to thousands of community members like Why are family farms disappearing? And, why do countries export food when they cannot feed their own populations? Why do we need so many chemicals in our food? 

“The Commission gave ordinary people a voice in shaping the national conversation on food. It showed that food was political, and that communities could organize to change the system,” recalls the late Cathleen Kneen, one of the Commission’s early organizers. 

The result was The Land of Milk and Money, a landmark report exposing how corporations are gaining control over our food and influencing government policies to favour large companies over family farms and local businesses. Just as vital as the report was the process: it knit together rural and urban communities, growers and eaters, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities—building critical awareness and politicizing food for a generation. A food movement was born.

Around the same time, Inter Pares published a book that was to have a profound effect on our work: Seeds of the Earth: A Private or Public Resource?, written by activist Pat Mooney. The book sounded one of the first alarms about the corporate takeover of the world’s seeds and the rapid decline of genetic diversity in food crops due to the expansion of chemical intensive monocultures. It helped spark international organizing and laid the foundation for groups like the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), then Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and GRAIN—organizations we continue to collaborate with today.

The 1980s: Making international connections

Inter Pares began to support ACORD in the Sahel region of West Africa in the early 1980s. The organization grew to eventually operate in 17 countries across Africa, supporting agricultural development, farmers organizing, women’s rights and association building.  In India, Inter Pares started working with ASSEFA to strengthen farmers’ cooperatives and associations. These organizations also helped thousands of landless people access land, training and tools for farming. We also worked alongside the National Farmers Union in Canada to defend family farms.

The 1990s: Supporting alternatives

In the 1990s, Inter Pares became a vocal critic of conventional food aid, advocating for the untying of food aid from donor countries to avoid creating further dependency on imported food and avoid undermining local farming livelihoods and economies. The critique was informed by practice, where in Mali, working with ACORD, we supported the procurement of food from local food secure Dogon communities to displaced peoples. Or along the Thai-Burma border where we provided funding for the purchase of locally grown rice and vegetables for refugees. 

In collaboration with ETC Group (RAFI), Inter Pares published practical booklets on community seed saving which were distributed far and wide and supported policy work to protect agrobiodiversity.  A key argument was that farmers save seeds and should be the custodians of this common heritage. Inter Pares furthered this work by supporting farmers’ own seed systems and the development of community seed banks. With support from the Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada) and international donors, we were later able to help leverage more funds and deepen our support to farmers across Africa, Asia and Latin America.  

Inter Pares also began working with leading organizations in sustainable agriculture to increase community food security in South Asia. In Bangladesh, we worked with local organizations to promote ecological farming practices that improved soil health, reduced reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and restored biodiversity. In India, we began a long-term collaboration with the Deccan Development Society (DDS), a women-led movement of mostly Dalit caste farmers who reclaimed land and created resilient, autonomous community food systems relying on a large diversity of local varieties of crops. 

The 2000s: Resisting corporate control

As genetically modified crops spread in the early 2000s, Inter Pares joined allies to push back against Northern governments—including the US and Canada—promoting genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We co-convened policy dialogues that amplified the voices of farmers, Indigenous leaders and scientists warning of the risks GMOs posed to biodiversity and farmer livelihoods. The message was clear: GMOs and the intellectual property rights they come with are a direct threat to farmers’ livelihoods, seed-saving and agricultural biodiversity.

When Canada attempted to lift a global moratorium on Terminator seed technology— a technology that renders seeds sterile after first harvest—we supported the launch of the international Ban Terminator campaign. The moratorium was not only preserved but strengthened, a major victory for civil society and farmers worldwide. The campaign revealed the influence multinational agrochemical companies have on the Canadian government. With this in mind, Inter Pares helped gather activists working against GMOs in 2006 and we pooled resources to eventually create the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN). CBAN continues to challenge the corporate capture of food and agriculture with its sister and member organization in Quebec, Vigilance OGM, another counterpart of Inter Pares. 

In 2007, Inter Pares joined Nyéléni, a global food sovereignty gathering in Mali. Organized by La Via Campesina and allies, the international forum articulated food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to define their own food systems and agriculture systems, ensuring healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound methods” (source: Nyéléni Declaration).

At the core of food sovereignty is a call for people to reclaim power over food systems: for countries, communities, families, to be able to make food choices without these being dictated by markets or corporations. 

The experience was transformative. It made clear that food security alone could not address the root causes of hunger. Inspired by Nyéléni and building on the legacy of the People’s Food Commission, Inter Pares helped launch the People’s Food Policy Project in Canada. The premise was that rather than react to bad policy, or the absence of policy, citizens would generate their own food sovereignty policy. From 2008 to 2011, more than 3,500 people contributed their vision of a food system rooted in justice, sustainability and Indigenous knowledge. The process culminated in Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada, which shaped Food Secure Canada’s advocacy and directly contributed to the federal government’s creation of a National Food Policy in 2019 and more recently, its National School Food Program.

The 2010s: Connecting farmers across borders

Building on decades of relationships, Inter Pares coordinated a series of farmer-to-farmer exchanges between rural women in West Africa, India and Canada. Farmers learned directly from each other’s struggles and innovations—from millet-based agroecology in India to the devastating impacts of genetically modified cotton in Burkina Faso. These exchanges sparked critical farmer-led research, and eventually led Inter Pares to secure funding from Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to deepen and expand our work with counterparts to support our women-led agroecology work in West Africa. 

At the same time, Inter Pares worked with COPAGEN and the Université de Montréal to research large-scale land acquisitions in West Africa. Spurred by the 2008 financial crisis, investors were buying land in West Africa as a safe investment, often in secret and without communities’ consent. With support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), we studied this landgrabbing in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to understand its drivers and strengthen resistance so land remains in the hands of local communities.

Where we are today

Today, Inter Pares continues to work hand in hand with farmers’ movements, rural women and community organizations in Canada and internationally to defend control over land, seeds, water and food.

In Canada, Inter Pares is an active member of several coalitions. As a founding member of Food Secure Canada, we provide institutional support and funding and participate in key initiatives such as Eat, Think, Vote. In an effort to influence how international development assistance is given, Inter Pares brings our feminist analysis to the Canadian Food Security Policy Group to support agricultural approaches that build autonomy (over land, seeds, knowledge and markets). We also continue to challenge corporate influence over biotechnology together with CBAN.

Internationally, we continue to support organizations like DDS in India and more than a dozen other organizations in Latin America, Asia and Africa to build resilient local food systems and promote food sovereignty and agroecology. In recent years, we have successfully leveraged over $20 million dollars from GAC to deepen counterparts’ work in West Africa, inspired by decades of farmer-to-farmer learning exchanges and rooted in feminist practice, local knowledge and solidarity.

How we do this work

Our work is rooted in long-term relationships of trust and solidarity with feminist organizations, farmers’ movements and rural women. Their expertise guides us. We accompany farmer-led research, agroecology training and seed security assessments, and bring rural women’s voices to decision makers. Farmer-to-farmer exchanges remain one of our most powerful tools for building solidarity, fostering bonds of trust, and sparking new programming initiatives. We work in coalition to amplify collective power. Together with allies, we participate in campaigns to raise the alarm on urgent threats to food sovereignty. And we raise funds from the Canadian public to ensure this work can continue and grow over the next 50 years.

Continuing onwards

The fight for food sovereignty is far from over. Corporate concentration in food and agriculture is intensifying, and climate change is putting enormous pressure on ecosystems and communities. Yet the knowledge, resilience and creativity of farmers, especially women farmers, offer hope and direction.

As we look ahead, Inter Pares remains committed to working alongside counterparts who are reimagining and rebuilding food systems that nourish both people and the planet. Together, we will continue the struggle for food sovereignty—just as we have for the past 50 years.

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