A coalition of over 200 million small scale growers, fisherfolk, farmers and land workers from all over the world making real change on a global scale may sound too good to be true, but it is the reality of La Via Campesina, arguably the world's largest social movement.
La Via Campesina, translated literally as "the peasant's way," has been growing since its birth 20 years ago. During that time, the organization has been spreading its message of fair control over the food system far and wide, from community meetings with farmers in Africa to World Bank and UN meetings in Quebec City and Seattle.
Members of the movement attribute its growth to La Via Campesina's structural organization, which is rooted in the regional level long before it ever moves to the corporate boardroom. Regional meetings allow for education and a banding together of small farmers. "We must educate peasants to be independent, so they have freedom over their seeds, land, water, and a market of their own," says Nadini Jayaram, a small farmer in Karnataka, India. Jayaram also points to La Via Campesina's focus on training, education, communication, and exchanging generations of accumulated knowledge as qualities allowing the movement to succeed.
La Via's message centers around food sovereignty, a term introduced in 1996 during the World Food Summit in Rome. Food sovereignty is different from food security, a term more commonly heard. While food security focuses on people having enough to eat, it does not address where this food is coming from and how it is being produced. On the other hand, food sovereignty zeroes in on questions of power and control within the food system.
"Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations," reads the final declaration of the Forum for Food Security, held in 2007 in Sélingué, Mali. "Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations."
Since the 2007 Forum for Food Security, Ecuador has incorporated the concept of food sovereignty in its constitution. Venezuela, Mali, Bolivia, Nepal, and Senegal have also made it a part of national policy. Now, after heavy lobbying by La Via Campesina, negotiations are set to begin on a UN declaration regarding the rights of peasants. The UN has declared 2014 the year of family farms, and more international institutions and development agencies are talking about smallholder agriculture.
However, we must be cautious about declaring this a victory for small farmers and food sovereignty. "The problem is that what they're often proposing is … that they just need to be integrated in the global economy. That would be what I call adverse inclusion because it's the [industrial production] model itself that's the problem. If we want to deal with the food crisis, and climate change, we have to look at alternative models," says Annette Aurelie Desmarais, a small-scale farmer from Saskatchewan, Canada. "It's about putting the decisions around food systems in the hands of local communities, and really changing the way people think about food, their relationship with food, and their relationship with other people. It's much bigger than how we produce food – it's also about how we live and how we are."
Image by kaiyodai, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.