Hamari Roti, Hamari Aazadi

Our Bread,Our Freedom

Diverse Women of the World Resolve to Defend Biological and Cultural Diversity, through Non-violence, Love and Friendship

Bread is food, and has been a symbol freedom across cultures.

Across cultures we pray Give us our daily bread. The slogan of Le pain est le droit du peuple (Bread is People’s Right) reverberated across France during the French Revolution the slogan. India’s first freedom movenent of 1857 which brought to an end the brutal rule of the East India Company spread through a the spread of bread (chapati). This intricate relationship between bread and freedom was echoed in “Hamari Roti, Hamari Azaadi”.

Today’s new East India Companies are hijacking our seed and our daily bread, leading to an epidemic of farmers suicides, hunger and malnutrition, and the spread of major Chronic Non-Communicable diseases (NCD) which include cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers and chronic respiratory diseases. A large proportion of these NCDs have been proven to be related to unhealthy diets and fake food causing disease through biological risk factors like blood pressure, blood sugar, blood lipids and body fat.

A corporate food system driven by greed is robbing us of real food and forcing fake food on us through fake knowledge and pseudo safety rules.  Pseudo food safety regulating bodies which are facilitating the transition from good fat to fake fat, good protein to fake protein with melamine polymer (which is also responsible for kidney failures), from real fiber to fake fiber like Keratin and “carbohydrate polymers obtained from physical, enzymatic, or chemical means, and synthetic carbohydrate polymers”.

There is an attempt to deregulate Biosafety Regulations to promote GMOs.

The same corporations  are now trying to push new GMOs based on gene editing and tag them as ‘natural’. Unveiling this façade, the European Court of Justice  found gene edited / CRISPR modified crops to be subject to GMO regulation.

Industrial agriculture produces nutritionally empty and toxic food. This fake nutrition epidemic is based on fake knowledge which is trying to impose more fake nutrion on the world through Biofortification and Golden Rice. In 2015, on women’s day, Diverse Women for Diversity, exposed this fake knowledge related to Biofortification.

On 2nd Oct, 2018, Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, Diverse Women from across the world resolve to renew the movement for “Our Bread, Our Freedom” (Hamari Roti, Hamari Azaadi). We come together to build alternatives that allow us to celebrate and enjoy real food with real nutrition instead of the fake food with fake nutrition. Through our bread we reclaim our freedom ,we reclaim our knowledge to produce diverse foods from diverse plants as food and nutrition experts who have cared for the health of the planet and our children over millennia. We move from the monocultures of chemical farming, junk packaged food which is creating mountains of waste and wasting our health. At “Our Bread, Our Freedom” celebration on 2nd Oct in Doon Valley women from 25 regions in India and internationally  cooked Aska (Mixedmillet) roti from Uttarakhand; rice flour chila from Chhatisgarh; bajra khichdi from Rajasthan; Sathuu from Bihar; Mandhua petha with jaggery steamed in sal leaves and Chilka roti (rice) from Jharkhand;  Sevayian and Dal badi from Madhya Pradesh; Jowar roti  from Maharshtra; Gur chawal peetha from Orissa; Rice petha partisapta & Payas Puli from West Bengal;  Pharma Roti from Sikkim; buckwheat roti from Bhutan and rice balls from Japan.

We celebrate the shift from monocultures to diversity , from the paradigm of violence against the earth and our bodies to a paradigm of non-violence in food and agriculture – to affirm ahimsic kheti and ahimsic bhojan-by protecting the biodiversity of our seeds, our foods, our knowledges, our cultures, our economies.

Our birth right to our food heritage and our nutrition, our livehoods and our knowldege. This is Anna Swaraj. This is Food Sovereignty.

Our Pledge

  • We will rejuvenate our biodiversity, our local food heritage, our nourishment, our livelihoods and the earth through linking our farmers and eaters through seedha, saccha and swacch food system in India.

  • We will work for Swacch Bharat through Swacch Bhojan. No junk within and no junk in the  environment. We will create a plastic free and poison free India and world through “Our Bread ,Our Freedom”.

  • We will spread food and nutrition literacy and remove ignorance about how our food is grown and about what we are eating, to address the ecological crisis and the epidemic of chronic diseases,  to protect the health and well-being of our people and our Mother Earth.

  • We will create healthy living food economies based on fairness and justice and direct links to our annadata to end farmers debt and farmer’s suicides to create a new Jaivik Bharat and a Poison Free Food & Farming 2050.

  • We will sow seeds of freedom and planting gardens of hope. We will reclaim our common food sovereignty, our right to produce our own healthy food, as small farmers in villages and as  residents in cities, by tranforming  our terraces and our balconies  into urban food gardens. We will grow gardens & food everywhere till the planet becomes a garden of nutrition, garden of biodiversity and garden of peace.

The forces of greed that are destroying the planet, our livelihoods, our knowledge ,our health, our freedom have the power of money. We are the power of shakti.  We are power in nonviolent creative form .We have the power of our diversity, our love, our friendship.

Through this creative non-violent power will reclaim “Our Bread, Our Freedom”- “Hamari Roti, Hamari Azaadi”

Related event

Diverse Women for Diversity Conference

Women’s Biodiversity Festival & Launch of “Our Bread, Our Freedom” Campaign

2-3 October 2018: Keeping Food Sovereignty, Food Security & Food Safety in Women’s Hands

Related Campaign

Call to Action 2018: Our Bread, Our Freedom