Press Release
6th Jan., Hyderabad

People's Partnership Summit: Building another Asia in partnership with the Earth and People

Hyderabad is the venue for two gatherings. At the Asian Social Forum, at the Conference on Ecology Culture and Knowledge, organised by Navdanya, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and the International Forum on Globalisation, speakers talked about another Asia, and Asia based on partnership with the Earth to ensure sustainability, between people to ensure peace, and between governments and people to ensure democracy and justice. At the CII-organised Partnership Summit, neither the Earth nor her people exist even in the consciousness of CEOs and ministers. The partnership that is being organised by big business is to push out people from their land, their forests, their rivers, their cultures, their homes, and turn everything into a commodity and a market

Breaking the partnership of governments with people and people and their resources, cultures and knowledge is an intrinsic part of the globalisation agenda. Alienating people from the resources that provide livelihood requires violence and coercion. The global partnership for this coercive appropriation of people's wealth and destruction of their economies and livelihoods was the agenda of the corporate Partnership Summit.

While the Indian people, especially the Dalits, tribals, minorities and women are being made refugees in their own homes by government policy, destroying the very basis of national integrity and cultural diversity and identity, the government is hosting a NRI jamboree to construct to construct national and cultural identity. The People's Partnership Summit presented cases and analysis of how globalisation is robbing the poor of their only resources.

Rajendra Singh of Tarun Bharat Sangh, Rajasthan, who is leading the Campaign for People's Rights to Water and against its privatization reiterated that water is not a commodity and cannot be traded. It is the commons which belongs to the earth and will be available only if used only in partnership with the earth.

This partnership is a sacred partnership and is inviolable, as expressed by Oscar Oliviera, the leader of "Water is Life" - the anti privatization movement of Bolivia, which threw out the MNC Bechtel in spite of the citizens being brutally attacked and killed by the government for resisting privatization.

Dr. B.D. Sharma who was instrumental in giving legal recognition to the inalienable rights of tribals to their land and resources through the Panchayati Raj Amendments to the Scheduled Areas, alerted the gathering on the war that is being waged against tribals, through massive forced evictions, subverting the Constitutional guarantee for protecting the inalienable rights of tribals.

Nurie Abdul Razzak from Iraq made it clear that the impending war on Iraq has more to do with oil than how Iraq is being governed.

Ashok Rao, who conceived the idea of an Asian Social Forum, and has been the leading campaigner against of energy and power, provided details of how every privatisation has been based on a scam, and how people in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana have paid with their very lives in the fight against energy privatisation.

Vandana Shiva, Walden Bello and Tony Clarke of the International Forum on Globalisation, which was the main organiser of the Seattle Resistance, released a report on Alternatives to Economic Globalisation, which outlines the . Vandana Shiva outlined the world view of Earth Democracy based on principles of partnership with the earth and between people, that new world beyond globalisation needs to be built upon.

Prof. Samdhong Rimpoche, the Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government in Exile, said that globalisation is destroying the very core, the very soul of Asia. All the religions of the world were born in Aisa. Asia needs to return to its pluralistic and spiritual roots not just to build another asia, but to build another world.

Participants of the Conference on Ecology then joined the silent procession of Ryots to mourn the suicides of farmers as a reult of globalisation of agriculture and seeds which has steeped peasants in unpayable debt and made farming made vulnerable to drought and climate change. The silent procession - NO MORE FARMER' SUICIDES led by victims family, walked through the street of seed merchants selling seeds and chemicals of MNCs such as Monsanto and Syngenta. The procession ended in a public hearing at which victims called upon the seed industry and the government to work in partnership with farmers, and not with seed and agribusiness MNCs. They demanded seeds that sustain and called for a ban on corporate seeds of suicde.