La Via Campesina

By staff - La Via Campesina, June 30, 2023

Latin America sows a great soul, who defended the rights of the peasantry, indigenous peoples and Mother Earth, founded the National Agrarian Confederation (CNA) and made the long-awaited Agrarian Reform in Peru a reality.

(Bagnonet, June 26, 2023) La Vía Campesina recognizes the enormous political, social and humanist legacy of our comrade Hugo Blanco, a Peruvian and internationalist, who died yesterday in Sweden. His militancy and commitment marked the organization of peasant farmers for agrarian reform in the 20th century, not only in Peru, but also throughout Latin America.

Hugo participated in the fight for the first agrarian reform in Peru, organizing peasants and indigenous people in the early 1960s in the semi-tropical zone of the department of Cusco, more specifically in the province called La Convención and in the district of Lares to the south of the country, where coffee, tea and cocoa are grown. He denounced the exploitation and slave labor experienced by the peasantry, who were forced to work free in days of up to more than 12 hours a day, including women and children.

He was sentenced by the Peruvian justice to the death penalty, which he managed to avoid due to a strong international campaign of solidarity, but he spent nearly 7 years in prison and had to live several years in exile as well. “When I entered the room to be judged, and saw my comrades after three years in prison, I yelled: Earth or Death! That was our slogan. They responded: We will win!” He commented in an interview conducted in 2018, and added, “some said that it was Hugo Blanco’s agrarian reform, but it was not Hugo Blanco’s agrarian reform, because when it happened I was already in prison, it was the peasantry in struggle as a whole that conquered the land.”

Throughout his militancy, Hugo understood that the struggle and the need for the organization was even broader, not only against the latifundio, but against neoliberalism, capitalism and transnationals. So he became a tireless defender and staunch critic of extractivism and the depredation of Mother Earth. He accompanied marches, walks, crossed and toured the entire country defending the rights and dignity of the peoples of the countryside and cities.

“In the past, the struggle was to have land, work and farm. Now that neoliberalism acts and fiercely attacks nature, our fight has changed to the defense of mother earth, of pacha mama, that is the fundamental fight of now. Before I fought to socialize the land, today I have to fight for the maintenance of the human species” he commented.

For La Vía Campesina, Hugo Blanco is today a native seed, with an enormous potential for life, which inspired and will continue to inspire many generations in Peru and in the world. His legacy and commitment will endure in the struggle, in the organization and in the collective memory, because ideas do not die, like seeds multiply, grow and bear fruit.

“There are men that fight one day and are good. There are others that fight for a year and are better. Some fight for many years and are very good. But there are those who fight all their lives: those are the essentials» Bertolt Brecht

By staff - La Via Campesina, June 28, 2023

Bagnolet | 28 June 2023: Instead of finding real answers to the environmental, social and democratic crises, the French government is choosing to imprison activists and ban movements critical of the extractivist agro-industrial model.

On 21 June, the French government announced the dissolution of the movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre, which campaigns against land and water grabbing and the destruction of ecosystems. That same week, dozens of activists were arrested by the anti-terrorist police, on the pretext that they had taken part in demonstrations against mega-basins, extractivist industries or agro-industry and its pollution. On June 28th, two peasant trade unionists from the Confédération Paysanne, Nicolas Girod and Benoît Jaunet, along with Julien LeGuet, spokesperson for the collective Bassines non merci, were arrested by the police for their involvement in organizing these collective gatherings as representatives of their respective organizations. They were released later in the day but received court summonses for the month of September. Such acts of repression against legitimate protests are unacceptable and unjust, creating a negative precedent and seeking to intimidate all defenders of fundamental rights. In this context it seems that the FNSEA, a French farmers’ union, has also been calling for the dissolution of La Confédération Paysanne.

We, La Via Campesina and European Coordination Via Campesina, stand together with our member organisation in France, La Confédération Paysanne. We firmly reject these threats and will act decisively in Europe and around the world to ensure that La Confédération Paysanne and its members can continue to defend peasant agriculture and its workers.

We express our support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre (the Uprisings of the Earth ). These tens of thousands of young people mobilising to ensure land and water are shared fairly, which is an expression of the acute sense of responsibility that young people have in the face of social inequalities and the destruction of ecosystems.

We call on the French Government to cease its violations of human rights, and in particular of the rights recognised in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Rural Workers (UNDROP), such as freedom of thought, opinion and expression, freedom of association and the right to participation.

We call on our member organisations and allied organisations to mobilise in support of the
Confédération Paysanne and social movements in France, in particular by sending letters to French embassies and the French government and by organising rallies in front of French embassies.

By staff - La Via Campesina, June 17, 2023

UN EXPERTS’ COMMUNIQUE: Will the rights of trade unions and social and environmental movements be respected by the French government?

On 15 June 2023, seven independent experts from the United Nations expressed their concernⁱ at allegations of excessive use of force during the recent demonstrations against pension reform and mega-water basin projects in France.

“Lack of restraint in the use of force against members of civil society who are peacefully demanding their participation in decision-making processes concerning their future, access to natural resources, protection of human rights, dignity and equality, would not only be anti-democratic, but deeply worrying for the rule of law”, the experts said.

The Confédération Paysanne and CETIM welcome this position and call on the French government to heed these warnings. The concerns expressed are in line with those we voiced in our submission to the UN experts on the occasion of the International Day of Peasant Struggles (17 April). Indeed, mega-basin projects are being carried out at the expense of the right to water of all peasants in the territories because they reinforce the problem of drought and the increasing scarcity of access to water. Peasant organizations and other sectors of civil society have mobilized to question these projects and demand respect for human and environmental rights, suffering unprecedented repression.

This communique from the UN experts has a very particular resonance, given that mobilizations are continuing around water and land issues in many areas, and at a time when the criminalization and repression of these mobilizations and of trade unions and social and environmental movements are still the order of the day.

Human rights issues, and more specifically the rights to water, food, freedom of expression and demonstration, cannot be scorned and repressed in this way. We cannot accept the threats to dissolve the Soulèvements de la Terre movement. In view of the above, we urge the French authorities to honour their international human rights commitments, as recalled by the UN experts.

The Confédération Paysanne is continuing its trade union action to obtain a moratorium on mega-basin projects and for the establishment of a dialogue on the management and sharing of water in France, a sine qua non for the respect of human rights.

By staff - Global Justice Ecology Project, May 2, 2023

Note: In collaboration with several Brazil-based organizations including FASE, Global Justice Ecology Project is organizing an international meeting of the Campaign to STOP GE Trees in Espirito Santo, Brazil, where we will meet with members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) in communities that have taken over and occupied industrial tree plantations. Please check out this New York Times article for more on the history and mission of the MST.

The New York Times article by Jack Nicas first appeared April 30, 2023 in the New York Times and discusses the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, a large – and polarizing – social movement in Latin America.

Below are excerpts from the article, which can be read in full on the New York Times website.

The movement, led by activists who call themselves militants, organizes hundreds of thousands of Brazil’s poor to take unused land from the rich, settle it and farm it, often as large collectives. They are reversing, they say, the deep inequality fed by Brazil’s historically uneven distribution of land.

Group organizers and outside researchers estimate that 460,000 families now live in encampments and settlements started by the movement, suggesting an informal membership approaching nearly two million people, or almost 1 percent of Brazil’s population. It is, by some measures, Latin America’s largest social movement.

Despite the landless movement’s aggressive tactics, the Brazilian courts and government have recognized thousands of settlements as legal under laws that say farmland must be productive.

The proliferation of legal settlements has turned the movement into a major food producer, selling hundreds of thousands of tons of milk, beans, coffee and other commodities each year, much of it organic after the movement pushed members to ditch pesticides and fertilizers years ago. The movement is now Latin America’s largest supplier of organic rice, according to a large rice producers’ union.

By Max Ajl, Luana Carvalho, Pedro Horta and Lanka Horstik - Global Climate Jobs, September 19, 2022

By staff - La Via Campesina, September 17, 2021

By staff - La Via Campesina, September 12, 2022

The new edition of the Nyéléni newsletter is online! 

At a time when the media is sounding the alarm on high prices and shortages due to the war in Europe, even if there is not always an exact correlation, we are once again questioning the information that places large corporations as the suppliers of most of our food. Anchored to this fabricated image, the industrial agri-food system pushes a new assault on agriculture with the digitalisation of its processes, promotes “carbon sequestration” based on so-called “nature-based solutions”, continues its drive to control and regulate supply chains to benefit its interests, and even seeks to supplant the attempts of peasants in many parts of the world by sponsoring an “agroecology” that is now promoted by the same corporations and investment funds that for centuries have stripped peasants of the possibilities of an independent agriculture.

We are therefore committed to defending our Food Sovereignty: the possibility of being able to reproduce our seeds on our terms and in our spaces, i.e., in full freedom, and to maintain our total independence in producing our own food. For this, it will remain crucial to challenge land grabbing and to insist on autonomy and on the defence of peasant and Indigenous territories and even urban spaces of popular self-management within neighbourhoods.

IPC for Food Sovereignty, FoEI and GRAIN

Click here to download the English edition or read it directly in the website at www.nyeleni.org For any further information, contact info@nyeleni.org

Circulate it!

By staff - La Via Campesina, September 6, 2022

After more than two years, the COVID-19 pandemic is still a reality in our daily lives. More people today still bear the brunt of the pandemic with health restrictions, limited access to markets, worsening hunger and poverty, inequality, and also repression to people’s fundamental rights. During this period, hundreds of millions of people have contracted COVID-19, and over six million people succumbed to death. For peasants and other people living in rural areas, the pandemic has shown the importance of local, peasants’ food systems that are feeding the people and preventing widespread hunger. It is time to transform. The rights of people, dignity, and solidarity, not profits, should be the foundation of the new society post-pandemic.

In similar notes, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, examines the emerging issues concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and the right to food. The report, entitled “The right to food and the coronavirus disease pandemic” (document A/77/177, available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian).

In this report, Fakhri summarizes the current situation of pandemic and framing the problem during pandemic times: especially the lack of concerted actions by governments all over the globe and the exacerbated situations done by corporations in putting profits first before humanity. The Special Rapporteur goes further showing the fragility of our general food systems in these pandemic times, highlighting that “[The pandemic] has underlined the value of sharing and solidarity, and the importance of the application of traditional, local knowledge in times of extreme hardship. Communities persevered when they were not exclusively dependent on food value chain operations for their food security. Resilient solutions included localized markets, public food reserves and associated public food distribution systems, mutual assistance and the sharing of food, as well as jut transition to agroecology [as a means for adapting to climate change].”

The report benefited from a series of regional consultations with civil society and inputs from Member States of the United Nations. Therefore it is worth to mention that just transition for workers was raised as one of the solutions for immediate response to the pandemic and the current food crisis, along with upholding land rights and genuine agrarian reform, curtailing corporate power, developing action plans on the right to food based on the principles of solidarity, self-sufficiency, and dignity, addressing debt crisis and financial needs, and ensuring that international trade law and policy create fair and stable markets.

The important report also makes good references to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), provisions from International Labour Organization (ILO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), also the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

By staff - Land Workers' Alliance, July 27, 2022

The Landworkers’ Alliance wishes to send a message of solidarity to the 40,000 members of the Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport (RMT) taking strike action today.

The workers taking this action include guards, signallers, maintenance and catering staff who are striking against a multipronged attack on their working conditions by Network Rail and the 14 Train Operating Companies. These including proposed £2bn of cuts to the rail system which will result in 2,500 fewer maintenance staff and 625,000 fewer hours of maintenance, the closure of 1,000 ticket offices, and an 8% pay rise over two years at a time when the RPI rate of inflation is already running at 11.4%. The RMT is striking against policies that threaten to make the railways less safe and less viable as a system of transport, when the extreme heatwaves of last week have foregrounded the necessity of transitioning to a transport system based on public provision rather than private vehicles.

This comes as likely Prime Minister-to-be Liz Truss pledges to restrict the fundamental right of rail workers to strike, and the introduction of new legislation that will allow companies to hire agency workers to replace strikers. These proposals will make it harder for everyone to defend themselves from companies who care more about their rates of profit than their workers and the people using their service.

These cuts also come shortly after the Train Operating Companies turned a £600m profit. In 2020, the Rolling Stock Companies, who own the trains, paid out almost £1bn in dividends to their shareholders. We recognise the similarities between the relationship that the Train Operating Companies have with the rail system and its workforce to the relationship that industrial agribusiness has with the food system. It is an extractive relationship that seeks to take as much value out of the system as possible, with little care for the damage that this practice does to the railways and the people that work them.

As a union of landworkers, peasants and small farmers, we try to place ourselves in the traditions of the wider labour movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were famously deported to Australia in 1834 for breaking the Combination Laws that prevented workers from forming trade unions, were agricultural workers themselves. We also recognise the essential role that the fight for better wages and working conditions plays in the struggle for a better food system. For too long cheap, mass- produced food has been used by successive government as an alternative to social policies that would increase incomes for working people. Only through the maintenance of an industrial food system, whose true costs of environmental destruction and superexploitation of agricultural workers are not reflected in their price at the supermarket, can a system that continually seeks to reduce wages sustain itself.

In light of this, we encourage our members to attend the RMT’s picket lines at their local stations. You can find details of the locations and times of these picket lines on the RMT’s website. If you can make it to a picket line, we encourage you to wear LWA merch and bring LWA banners to show our solidarity, and to share your photos on social media by tagging @LandworkersUK on Twitter, or @landworkersalliance on Instagram.

By Pelum Zimbabwe - La Via Campesina, July 15, 2022

“Water harvesting, in every sense should start at the household level. Water is sacred, and we have to nurture that love and relationship with water”

In this brief video, Nelson Mudzingwa from the Zimbabwe Small Holder Organic Farmers’ Forum explains the different techniques of water harvesting that is followed in six block of farms, cultivated with help from the Shashe Agroecology School.

He explains the use of dead level contours in preventing water from flowing off the land, and allows its infiltration into the soil.

“In the arable land we have nine earth dams and in the grazing area we have three earth dams. All the dams are connected in the arable land by a contour line. Our longest contour is almost 700 metres long, cutting across the arable land and connecting to homesteads. We have other contours that are less than 200 metres long. These contours are connected to the earth dams,” explains Nelson.

“Earth Dams, that can collect upto 200 cubic metres of water during heavy rains is another example of land-use that enable water harvesting”, he says. “Micro basins, about two feet deep, also help in harvesting water.”

“We also follow some upland techniques of water harvesting here. We build barriers, that can prevent run-off. All these techniques help us conserve the little rainfall we receive every year. Wet soil carries life, and we have to rely on all these techniques of water harvesting to survive a changing climate”. Nelson adds.