Biodiversity and Food Sovereignty

Terra de Direitos uses public interest law to act in defence of the right to free use of and access to biodiversity, especially in defence of people who live in rural areas, alongside rivers and in forests. We also work to promote the principles of agro-ecology and to strengthen social experiences and struggles towards achieving food sovereignty.

It is our understanding that land, plants, seeds, water, forests and everything that comes from them - including the ancestral wisdom of the peoples – are common goods of the planet and all humankind. However, access to them and to the fruits thereof is increasingly restricted by the attempt to turn them into private goods, attributing monetary value to property that belongs – or should belong – to everybody.  

It is important to bear in mind that this process of appropriating common goods is not dissociated from a developmentalist model that sees industrialization as the way to economic growth. It is a model that encourages the creation of new technologies that are not always used for social development. On the contrary, the argument of providing benefits to society is used to maximize and legitimize processes of expropriation and to increase profits.

This is what happens, for instance, with pesticide and transgenic technological packages sold by multinational companies and which symbolize agribusiness. This is the logic that benefits large businesses whilst restricting access to land, seeds, plants and traditional knowledge. Terra de Direitos works against the predominance of a logic based on privatization and exclusion from sharing common goods.