Water and Food

We defend the right to water and food

Local communities know how to produce food at any time and in anyplace. Organising themselves in local systems and combining harvesting, agriculture, hunting and fishing, over time they have accumulated a huge heritage of resources and knowledge.

The dominating economic and globalised system tends to reset this heritage: models, such as the industrial model, are imposed and these concentrate the power of production and distribution of food and water in the hands of the few, using unsustainable techniques which put at risk the availability of key resources necessary for community life such as land, water, forests and biodiversity. The production of food has become in this way a decisive crossroad where all the critical aspects of the current development model come together: the centralisation of the forms of power and control, cultural homologation, environmental aggression and the denial of communities’ and people’s rights.

For this reason COSPE is committed to sustain mobilisation campaigns of citizens against the privatisation of common goods, of which water, to fight the phenomenon of land and water grabbing, and to bring the production of food back to the local community in Italy and the world, supporting them with agricultural initiatives, sustainable crops and fishing to improve yield and guarantee, over time, self-sufficiency and a decent income.

Support to family and peasant agriculture and links between producer and consumer are at the centre of this commitment. It also provides for the insertion of self-sufficient agriculture with commercial agriculture, and the production-transformation-market supply chains, together with the recognition of the right to access land. COSPE’s challenge is to work so as all people and future generations are able to have healthy and safe food and clean water.