Learning from peasant activism challenging trade politics Brazilian peasants and La Vía Campesina (original) (raw)
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Rural social movements have in recent years adopted agroecology and diversified farming systems as part of their discourse and practice. Here, we situate this phenomenon in the evolving context of rural spaces that are increasingly disputed between agribusiness, together with other corporate land-grabbers, and peasants and their organizations and movements. We use the theoretical frameworks of disputed material and immaterial territories and of re-peasantization to explain the increased emphasis on agroecology by movements in this context. We provide examples from the farmer-to-farmer movement to show the advantages that social movements bring to the table in taking agroecology to scale and discuss the growing agroecology networking process in the transnational peasant and family farmer movement La Vía Campesina.
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2010
The Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague has long been an important centre for the political-economic study of the 'agrarian question'-the historical and contemporary evolution of agrarian social property relations and their relationship to rural and urban social and economic development. In January 2006, the ISS organized a major conference on 'Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development', which brought together scholars, rural activists and international policy-makers in a wide-ranging dialogue on the countryside in the global South. One of the parallel workshops during the conference focused on 'The Peasantry and the Development of Capitalism in a Comparative Perspective'. The essays collected in this exciting volume are the result of this workshop that brought together a wide range of scholars of the historical and contemporary agrarian question. The editors' introduction (chapter one) outlines the volume's two broad themes-the historical trajectory of agrarian change; and the contemporary impact of 'neoliberal globalization' on rural producers and economic development in the global South and on global food supplies. Ellen Meiskins Wood's (chapter two) begins the historical discussion with a lucid recapitulation of Marx's classic analysis of the origins of 'the market imperative' in the transformation of the conditions in which rural social classes obtain, expand and maintain the possession of landed property.Terence Byres (chapter three) argues for the importance of different levels of inequality among pre-capitalist peasants on historical class struggles that led to capitalist agriculture in England, France and Prussia. Amiya Bagchi (chapter four) makes a powerful case that contemporary neoliberal globalization is a continuation of nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialism's capitalist transformation of the countryside in the global South. Farshad Araghi's contribution (chapter five) focuses on the role of politics and non-market coercion-what he calls the 'visible foot'-in dispossessing peasants and creating the conditions for the operation of market coercion, Smith's 'invisible hand'. The remainder of the essays examine the impact of contemporary capitalist globalization on class relations, class conflict and economic development in the countryside of the global South. The authors generally agree that neoliberalism-the deregulation of capital, labour and commodity markets over the past three decades-has radically transformed agriculture around the world. Rural households secure in their possession of landed property independent of successful market competition and engaged in 'safety-first' subsistence-oriented production have all but disappeared in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As state subsidies and other guarantees of small-scale landholding have been abolished, a wide variety of 'classes of rural labour' (Henry Bernstein, chapter ten) has replaced the peasantry. Capitalist contract farmers producing for transnational agro-industrial corporations, smallholders who work on plots so small and marginally fertile that they are unable to reproduce their households through their own labour and are compelled to join the ranks of seasonal agricultural wage labourers, full-time farm workers, and a myriad of landless peoples attempting to secure land in desperate attempts to find alternatives to wage labour dominate the countryside in the global South.
Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements
2016
Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements by Marc Edelman and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. is the fifth volume in the Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies Series from icas (Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies). The first volume is Henry Bernstein's Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, followed by Jan Douwe van der Ploeg's Peasants and the Art of Farming, Philip McMichael's Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions and Ian Scoones' Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development. Together, these five outstanding books reaffirm the strategic importance and relevance of applying agrarian political economy analytical lenses in agrarian studies today. They suggest that succeeding volumes in the series will be just as politically relevant and scientifically rigorous. A brief explanation of the series will help put the current volume by Edelman and Borras into perspective in relation to the icas intellectual and political project. Today, global poverty remains a significantly rural phenomenon, with rural populations comprising threequarters of the world's poor. Thus, the problem of global poverty and the multidimensional (economic, political, social, cultural, gender, environmental and so on) challenge of ending it are closely linked to rural working people's resistance to the system that continues to generate and reproduce the conditions of rural poverty and their struggles for sustainable livelihoods. A focus on rural development thus remains critical to development thinking. However, this focus does not mean de-linking rural from urban issues. The challenge is to better understand the linkages between them, partly because the pathways out of rural poverty paved by neoliberal policies and the war on global poverty engaged in and led by mainstream international financial and development institutions to a large extent simply replace rural with urban forms of poverty. Mainstream approaches in agrarian studies are generously financed and thus have been able to dominate the production and publication of research and studies on agrarian issues. Many of the institutions (such as the World Bank) that promote this thinking have also been able to acquire skills in producing and propagating highly
La Via Campesina: Peasant-led agrarian reform and food sovereignty
Development, 2011
summarizes the findings of the Agrarian Reform Commission of La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement that initiated the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform. The process included a global encounter with the landless peoples in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the La Via Campesina conferences, and the global fora in Valencia and Porto Alegre. La Via Campesina has been developing a new concept of agrarian reform that recognizes the socio-environmental aspects of land, the sea and natural resources, in the context of food sovereignty. Integral agrarian reform encompasses policies of redistribution, just, equitable access and control of natural, social and productive resources (credit, appropriate technologies, health, education, social security etc.) by peasants and their families, indigenous people, landless workers, artisanal fisherfolk, pastoralists, the unemployed, Dalit communities, Afrodescendents and other rural peoples. He argues that development policies should be based on agro-ecological strategies centred on family and peasant agriculture and artisanal fishing; trade policies that oppose dumping of products in the market and favour peasant and family farm production oriented towards local, national and international markets; and public policies in the areas of education, health and infrastructure for the countryside that complement trade and other policies.
Rural Social Movements and Agroecology: Context, Theory, and Process
Rural social movements have in recent years adopted agroecology and diversified farming systems as part of their discourse and practice. Here, we situate this phenomenon in the evolving context of rural spaces that are increasingly disputed between agribusiness, together with other corporate land-grabbers, and peasants and their organizations and movements. We use the theoretical frameworks of disputed material and immaterial territories and of re-peasantization to explain the increased emphasis on agroecology by movements in this context. We provide examples from the farmer-to-farmer movement to show the advantages that social movements bring to the table in taking agroecology to scale and discuss the growing agroecology networking process in the transnational peasant and family farmer movement La Vía Campesina.
Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state-society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, largescale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.