Other News: The International Forum for Leaders of the Social Economy

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The 4th Mont Blanc Meetings

Meeting in Chamonix in 9 and 10 November, 200 leaders from 35 countries looked into the world food crisis along with representatives from several UN institutions (UNPD, ILO, WFP, FAO) along with representatives of the ICA, the AIM, and research centres.

1.    They have made 5 appeals:
–        The Mont Blanc Meetings ask governments to include the question of water in the Copenhagen Convention.
–        At a time when the international negotiations of the WTO are about to restart in Geneva, the participants of the 4th Mont Blanc Meetings want to express their opposition to the agricultural aspects of these negotiations, joining the positions expressed by the World Agriculture Organisation, so that agriculture can be excluded along the same lines as culture.
–        The Mont Blanc Meetings make an urgent appeal to the European Commission, since it also considers agriculture as a specific, strategic sector and should therefore develop a new European policy as a consequence, contrary to what is currently being prepared.
–        The Mont Blanc Meetings ask the FAO at its summit of the week of 16 November 2009 to include the social economy as an inevitable reference to be included in the strategies to be implemented.
–        The Mont Blanc Meetings ask the United Nations to create a social economy platform between various international agencies (UNPD, FAO, WFP, ILO, UNCTAD).

The social economy

confirms its desire to resist the rise of inequalities, the destruction of the soil, the wasting of water, the penetration of capital into vital needs: air, water, earth and seed;

calls on leading international companies to look at their strategies in liaison with union and social movements;

confirms the modernity of the social economy – a concrete alternative – to deal with issues of production and consumption, and in particular

confirms that the social economy is open to:

i.     fair trade,

ii.     shorter circuits between producers and consumers and the sharing of risks between them,

iii.     organic farming.

2.    The Mont Blanc Meetings have led to concrete commitments federated around existing projects of new forces, new financial, human and intellectual means:

i.     the sustainable rating of agricultural cooperatives led by Coop Fédérée (Quebec) and Coop de France (in Olivia and China), making the link with projects from new agricultural cooperative models supported by Coop Africa (10 countries);

ii.     the experience of ecological intensive agriculture tried out by the French agricultural cooperative Terrena with the Coop Fédérée and the Cooperative Nouricia;

iii.     the experience of real estate tools based on a public call to saving on the basis of the example of Terres de Lien in France.

–        The promotion of new, structural projects:

i.     based on the example of free software with AI2L, the development of a protection programme (intellectual property) of open seed and free producer access;

ii.     development of a “Better Eating” charter, promotion of it to all companies of the social economy, implementation of it in our canteens and regional experiences in promoting this charter;

iii.     mobilisation of the agricultural and financial sectors of the social economy to encourage the setting up of an international chair of micro-biology;

iv.     supporting rural players: promoting a campaign designed to liberate young “water carrier girls”, who cannot go to school (One Drop);

v.     setting up of a programme on the contribution of the social economy concerning feeding the planet in collaboration with various NGOs.

3.    The Mont Blanc Meetings want to continue developing partnerships:

–        With the UN: through the ILO (new cooperative models), the UNPD, the FAO, the WFP (a working group on “sustainable purchase prices), the ACI (micro-finance), the AIM (health insurance),

–        With research institutes (Research Foundation for Science Technology and Resources Policies in India, Pesticides Eco Alternative Center in Chine, Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France, the Laboratoire d’Analyse Microbiologique des Sols)…

–        With regional networks of the social economy (Euromed, Pan-African Cooperative Conference).

“Other News” is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on global issues, north-south relations, governance of globalization. The “Other News” motto is a phrase which appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003: “What walls utter, media keeps silent”. Roberto Savio
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