MPP Congress opens

Alterpresse, 18 March 2003

Papaye—(Alterpresse) 18 March, 2003—At the opening of its thirtieth anniversary congress outside the town of Hinche, the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) has appealed for national solidarity against globalisation and in favour of local agricultural products. The congress has been dubbed Thirty years of resistance to the Death Plan.

Addressing the more than one thousand people gathered at the MPP training centre in the hamlet of Papaye, MPP leader, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, said, Because of globalisation a minority of people are getting hold of all the world’s riches that in reality belong to the whole of humanity. We must fight to build another world based on respect for life and human dignity. We must raise our voices against the unacceptable so that Haiti will be green again and can feed all of its children.

Congress participants joined Jean-Baptiste in denouncing the high cost of living that is effecting all sectors of Haitian society. Jean-Baptiste blamed the irresponsibility of the State which, two hundred years since the creation of the flag of independent Haiti, is spreading death, imposing a peace of the cemetary, and hijacking public funds, not to build roads, but to finance gangsters known as ’chimeres’, and to suppress all dissent.

Members of the MPP opened the congress by exhibiting a variety of agricultural products, such as plantains, papayas, and sugar cane, grown in the organisation’s agro-production programmes. The exhibition was, the MPP said, a way of demonstrating their continuing demands for a genuine agrarian reform, the granting of land to peasant farmers, and the provision of technical assistance and credit, and the struggle against Western modes of consumption.

The MPP leader said, More than 40 million human beings are dying of hunger while there is a food surplus and sufficient finances to avert it, however the money is used instead to make war such as the one about to be unleashed on Iraq by US President George W. Bush.