Land activists, including some prominent international anti-globalisation protesters, will be holding an alternative gathering to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), organisers said on Wednesday.
The National Land Committee (NLC) and the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) said they would host an international ”week of the landless” at a venue near Nasrec, south of Johannesburg, dubbed the ”Landless People’s Camp.”
The organisers also made no bones of it that they were opposed to the summit.
”The upcoming summit follows 30 years of broken promises by world governments and financial institutions to end poverty and make the world a habitable place for humanity.”
Conditions for the world’s poor and landless had worsened dramatically since the first promises were made at the 1972 Stockholm Conference (the first ”Earth Summit”), and the poor and landless had no reason to be optimistic that the WSSD would offer anything new, LPM national chairman Patrick Mojapelo told a media conference.
It was for that reason that they would hold an alternative gathering at which the landless would formulate their own vision of land reform and sustainable development.
About 4 000 participants were also expected to march on the Sandton Convention Centre, where the ”development jet set will be pontificating the plight of the poor in the plushest possible surroundings,” NLC land rights coordinator Andile Mngxitama said.
Marchers would include supporters of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Durban Social Forum and the Cape-based Anti-eviction Committee.
Mojapelo, Mngxitama and LPM national organiser Mangaliso Khubeka were equally dismissive of Tuesday’s launch of the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
”What is Nepad? How is it going to help the poor? They just want to impress their bosses outside,” Khubeka said in reference to President Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders supportive of Nepad.
In a statement released at the media conference the two organisations pledged themselves to the ”growing international land struggle and the wider struggles against neo-liberal policies including Gear (the South African government’s macro-economic Growth, Empowerment and Redistribution strategy), Nepad and World Bank land reform, which are deepening poverty in South Africa and around the world.” – Sapa