The Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA) will be hosting a choreographed football match between Family Farmers United &Agribusiness FC at a high profile location in Westminster at 1.30pm on Thursday 16thOctober. The publicity stunt takes place as part of United Nation’s World Food Day, which will see coordinated actions taking place across six continents under the banner “Family Farming – Feeding the world and caring for the earth”.
The LWA is a coalition of producers across the UK who are fed up with the un-level state of the playing field between corporate and small-scale farming. Changes to agricultural policy, intensified under the coalition government, have resulted in unfair support and a skewed market that encourages production on large-scale industrial farms at the cost of smaller-scale alternatives.
“Defra policy is increasingly driven by the demands of big business and large landowners” says Dan Taylor from the LWA “We have seen clear examples of this with their recent decision to strip small farmers of entitlements to public support while at the same time refusing to limit payments to the country’s biggest industrial producers. As a referee for UK farming Defra is not only shortsighted but inherently biased.”
The LWA is an official member of the international peasant farming movement La Via Campesina that represents 200 million small-scale producers around the world. We campaign for the rights of small-scale producers and lobby the UK government and European parliament for policies that support the infrastructure and markets central to our livelihoods.
