Including the Excluded in Global Politics: The Case of Peasants

Nora McKeon

Peasants, or small-scale rural producers, make up almost half of the world’s population and provide at least 70% of the world’s food. Although the term ‘peasant’ has pejorative connotations in English, many rural activists have re-appropriated the label as conveying a more culturally rooted, environmentally friendly and economically equitable approach to farming than industrial agriculture.

The marginalization of peasants has been a long-term process both in the global north and in the global south, where colonialism had a massive negative impact on local agriculture. Since the 1980s peasants have borne the brunt of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, which opened markets while cutting back state support to agriculture. and the Liberalization of agricultural trade under the World Trade Organization since 1995 These trends havehas also undermined peasant livelihoods while promoting market penetration and concentration on the part of agro-food corporations.

Peasant movements in global politics have emerged in direct reaction to these developments.The best known is perhaps the global network, La Vía Campesina (VC), launched in 1993. VC groups some 148 member organizations from 69 countries, representing some 200 million peasants. Another example is the West African network of peasant family farmers, ROPPA, established in 2000. ROPPA federates national peasant platforms from 13 countries in and represents some 50 million family farmers.

VC and ROPPA are grassroots movements that seek to strengthen family-based food production for local consumption. These movements fight against the liberalization of global agricultural trade, the privatization of productive resources, and corporate control of the world’s food chain. They fight for sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture, national and regional markets, and secure access to natural resources for local people.

Much of this alternative thinking revolves around the concept of ‘food sovereignty’. A global forum of peasants in 2007 defined this idea as ‘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 agricultural systems’. The food sovereignty principle links well with human rights discourse and, bridges North/South divides. It also facilitates alliances with other sectors of civil society, although relations between peasant movements and NGOs often remain problematic given the tendency of some NGOs to want to ‘speak for’ the rural poor.

Engagement with global governance institutions is an important part of the global peasant movement’s strategy. The most significant interaction has been with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).The main civil society interface with FAO is the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), which combines the political legitimacy and mobilization capacity of people’s organizations (in the majority) with the analytic and advocacy skills of NGOs. Since 2003 the IPC has facilitated participation by over 2000 representatives of small food producers’ organizations in FAO policy forums. Following the 2007 food crisis peasant movements, through the IPC, made a fundamental contribution to transforming the FAO Committee on World Food Security (CFS) into an authoritative, inclusive United Nations food policy forum. The final reform document adopted in 2009 provides for peasant organizations and other CSOs to be full participants in policy debates, for the first time in the UN system.

The peasant movement’s experience of VC, ROPPA and other peasant mobilizations offers many lessons for global engagement by marginalized groups. For example, it is vital to build empowerment up from the local level to the global. Second, the movement must keep control of its global engagement mechanisms and not be overcome by well-meaning NGOs or other actors. Third, it is important not only to protest, but also to develop a global alternative vision to neoliberalism and seek alliances with other sectors on this basis. Fourth, movements need to build up an understanding of the overall global governance system in order to identify the most opportune entry points. Fifth, they must insist that global governance authorities recognize the autonomy and right to self-organization of civil society.

Looking ahead, the peasant movement faces major challenges in global politics. Activists need to mobilize strength and resources for continuous engagement in the global political spaces that have now opened. At the same time it is vital to improve communication with the base, to build relations with other organized rural movements, to reach out to the unorganized, and to address inequalities internal to their own networks (for example, in respect of women and young people). Movements must also build meaningful links between policy decisions at global level and action at national level that improves livelihoods and increases government accountability.

Watch video footage of Nora introducing her paper on 'including peasants in global politics' at our international workshop in Rio de Janeiro.

The workshop brought together academics, activitists and policymakers from around the world and generated lively debates and new understanding on how to understand and overcome exclusion.

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including the exluded | rio workshop |   workshop findings

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