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The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle
Resistance, Rights and Democracy
By Robin Dunford Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Robin Dunford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-782-0
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Peasants, those who live from the land, were famously described by Karl Marx as 'a sack of potatoes', entirely lacking in any organisation. 'Their mode of production', Marx continued, 'isolates them from one another ... they are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.' 'They cannot represent themselves, they must be presented'. While the organised industrial labour in which Marx placed his hopes for revolution has dispersed across different parts of the world and is showing few signs of driving revolutionary processes, a vibrant peasant movement has emerged, allowing peasants to speak in their own name in global discussions concerning the future of food and agriculture. The transnational peasant movement are making demands for 'food sovereignty', a set of rights for peasants to produce their own food on their own territory. 'For the livelihoods of billions of small producers around the world, for people's health and the planet's survival we', the transnational peasant movement, 'demand food sovereignty and we are committed to struggle to achieve it collectively.'
Food sovereignty challenges an existing global model of food and agriculture. This model sees large businesses produce food through mechanised, industrial forms of production. Huge fields are devoted to single crops, irrigated and harvested with machines before being exported across the world, often in order that they can be used as animal feed, make heavily processed food or be turned into biofuels. Corn and soybean, thanks in part to large agricultural subsidies, might be grown in vast quantities in the United States and in Brazil, before being used to feed animals reared in China and to provide cheap, unhealthy processed food across the world. In other countries, the availability of cheap imported food makes it impossible for local producers to produce staple goods like wheat and corn at a market competitive price, forcing them to devote their land instead to the production of coffee, cocoa, and 'exotic' fruit and vegetables. These products are often produced through contract farming schemes, which see small farmers work for agribusiness corporations, and not for themselves on their own terms and in their own way. Alternatively, in the absence of schemes connecting small producers, often on adverse terms, to the markets in wealthy parts of the world where such exotic goods are sold, those who produce food have been cleared from land entirely as the availability of cheap, imported food renders them unable to compete in local and national markets. With food imported from elsewhere, the agricultural sector in some countries and regions has shrunk drastically, with urban forms of economic development taking priority. In recent years the challenges faced by peasants have intensified. Since 2008 there has been an enormous rise in 'land grabs' — deals in which large areas of land are taken from those who have historically lived on the land and used instead for a variety of purposes including the growth of food for biofuels, development projects, carbon cap-and-trade schemes, speculative investment and the growth of food for export.
According to la Vía Campesina, a large and vibrant transnational peasant organisation, this agricultural model is working to degrade land, as the production of single crop varieties fails to nourish the soil for future production. It is destroying biodiversity and the natural ability it has to capture carbon. It is generating dependencies on agricultural inputs — on machinery and the energy required to run it, on the vast quantities of water required to irrigate mono-cropped fields and on the seed varieties and fertilisers that agribusiness corporations provide to smallholders who produce food through contract schemes. It is heating up the planet as food is produced in a machinery-intensive manner before being shipped across the world. It is also dispossessing diverse groups of peasants who work on and live from the land. The dispossession of peasants in turn erodes centuries of ancestrally shared knowledge of different, more environmentally friendly forms of production and leads to a loss of different, ancestrally shared seed varieties. Moreover, with food distributed primarily according to market principles, many who have been dispossessed from the land from which they live go hungry. Today, 795 million people in the world suffer from hunger in a world in which enough food is produced to feed fourteen billion people and in a world where there is a growing epidemic of diseases relating to unhealthy diets and overeating. Finally, as peasants are dispossessed and as knowledges are lost, people, countries and regions have become dependent on food produced as a commodity by others elsewhere. With local, domestic and regional food production abandoned in favour of cheap imports, people, countries and regions have become extremely vulnerable to spikes in food prices — spikes which may come about by virtue of increases in the cost of the fuel with which food is grown and transported. In 1974 and 2008, this dependence led to major food crises as dramatic spikes in the price of staple food commodities generated enormous increases in the number of those suffering and dying from a lack of food.
There is, la Vía Campesina say, an alternative to this agro-industrial capitalist food system. For centuries, peasants have worked the land and produced food for themselves and for surrounding communities. They have done so through smallholder forms of production that do not depend on energy intensive inputs and which grow multiple crops in order to nourish the soil and provide for a varied and balanced diet. These forms of production can, according to la Vía Campesina, simultaneously cool the planet and feed the world. Indeed, there is evidence that small farms produce most of the worlds' food despite owning only 25 percent of agricultural land. These forms of production also enable people to live an autonomous life, getting what they need from the land and providing goods for sale in predominantly, though not exclusively, local markets.
In a world of food sovereignty, the countryside would no longer be dominated by large swathes of land devoted to single crops and cultivated by machines. No longer would people in rural areas be forced to move to urban slums by virtue of the dominance of agro-industrial production and by virtue of the availability of cheap imports. No longer would peasants be dispossessed as the land from which they live is grabbed for the purposes agro-industrial 'development' or agribusiness profiteering. No longer would the world be divided into those who are stuffed, suffering from obesity thanks to a diet rich in processed foods, and those who are starved, unable to feed themselves thanks to their inability to afford food that exists primarily as a commodity to be bought and sold.
Instead, those who live from the land would be protected from land grabs, protected from cheap imports and protected from exploitative agribusiness interests in order that they can grow their own food on their own territory. Moreover, a process of 'repeasantisation' would see some of those who have been dispossessed (re)turn to a world in which they can live from and feed others from the land, share sources of water, share knowledges of seeds and produce a diverse range of food. This diverse range of food would provide nourishment for the soil, a livelihood for the producer and nutritious food for surrounding rural and urban communities. This world of food sovereignty is one in which people, rather than agribusiness interests and unrepresentative institutions, control the food system. It is one in which peasants produce their own food using agro-ecological methods which reduce their dependence on inputs and minimise damage to the planet. To this end, peasants would avoid dependence on energy intensive inputs by recycling nutrients and energy on the farm. They would restore and reuse ancestrally and communally shared seeds and thereby undercut their dependence on genetically modified seeds that they purchase or receive from agro-industry as part of contract schemes. They would undercut their dependence on artificial pesticides, often purchased from multinational corporations, by encouraging natural enemies of pests. They would ensure that both the soil and people's diets are nutrient rich by diversifying plant species and rotating crops. A world of food sovereignty would be a world in which peasants perform these agro-ecological practices in order to produce their own food and food for others on their own shared territory.
Peasant activists are working to create and promote this world of food sovereignty. Their attempts to enact and demand a world of food sovereignty have involved building real alternatives situated in particular places. Peasants have shared skills and knowledge and defended and reclaimed land in order to allow them to produce food on their own territory. In the process, they have enacted, albeit on a small scale, the world of food sovereignty that they desire. They have also extended their movements both nationally and transnationally. This movement extension and solidarity has enabled peasants to engage with and make demands upon the state and on institutions of global governance. In some cases, the pressure that peasant movements have put on the state has led to concessions and legal and constitutional changes which enshrine food sovereignty, albeit often in an incomplete manner, in national and international law.
What has made the peasant movement particularly powerful and inspiring has been the manner in which they have connected diverse, place-based alternatives through transnational forms of organisation. The importance of this connection between place-based alternatives and transnational forms of organisation will continue to be stressed throughout the book. Through place-based actions including land occupations, peasant activists have been able to resume or begin the environmentally friendly, small-scale forms of production that enable them to produce their own food, for themselves and for nearby communities, on their own territory. But transnational exchanges have been key in strengthening and extending these place-based alternatives. Through transnational exchanges across diverse peasant movements, peasant activists have exchanged the knowledge and skills that help people (re)turn to and continue smallholder alternatives, even when the dominance of agro-industrial forms of production had meant that they had lost or did not have access to the skills, knowledges and ancestrally preserved seed varieties that are so crucial to small-scale food production. Through transnational solidarities, peasant activists have also been able to engage in protests against the global institutions and transnational actors that produce and reproduce the agro-industrial global food system. This has helped raise awareness of the manner in which the current food system is failing to feed the world, is destroying the planet and is destroying the livelihoods of people living and working in rural areas. More broadly, transnational protest and advocacy has enabled peasant activists to develop and build support for an alternative — a world of food sovereignty. Through their transnational organising, then, peasants have started to shape global discourses concerning human rights, food and agriculture. Finally, their transnational forms of organisation have enabled grassroots peasant actors to establish a voice within some institutions of global governance, enabling them to contribute to discussions of the global governance of food and agriculture and to instigate a process of drafting a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Though the dispossession of peasants and the grabbing of land in pursuit of large-scale, monoculture production continue apace, peasant activists have made notable changes both to the lives of those in place-based mobilisations and to global discourses and debates concerning food, agriculture and peasants' rights.
This book explores what peasant resistance can tell us about the politics of transnational resistance, human rights and global democracy. Reflecting its attempt to inform understandings of resistance, rights and democracy through a case study of practices of peasant resistance, the book is organised thematically. Chapter 3 focuses on the politics of transnational resistance, chapters 4 and 5 on the politics of human rights and chapter 6 on global democracy. Chapter 3 asks the question of how different, small-scale spaces of resistance can connect together to form a powerful, counter-hegemonic global movement. In so doing, it challenges understandings of resistance which places hope for the emergence of a powerful, counter-hegemonic global movement in abstract, structural features of the world that will magically result in the self-organisation of diverse and dispersed pockets of place-based resistance. Focussing on practices of peasant resistance suggests that the organisation of pockets of resistance into a counter-hegemonic mass movement requires work, performed by activists, of facilitating and organising forces of resistance. In order to facilitate and organise resistance, the peasant movement has built the skills of members, enabling them to return to farming. Peasants have also developed transnational forms of organisation and exchange in order to strengthen local alternatives, protest against and challenge the legitimacy of institutions and practices that work to dispossess peasants and make demands on national and global institutions.
Chapter 4 challenges the idea that human rights have an inherently emancipatory logic on the one hand, or an inherently dominatory one on the other. In particular, it challenges accounts that suggest that human rights fail to articulate a broad, collective vision of the good life, that they cast victims of rights violations as abject and incapable of enacting rights for themselves and that, as a result, they fail to challenge or even legitimise and extend neoliberal and imperialist forms of capitalism. The chapter claims that, though human rights can have such dominatory effects, they can be part of an emancipatory politics. That they can be so is demonstrated through practices of peasant resistance. Practices of peasant resistance see rights to food sovereignty demanded and enacted, by peasant activists themselves, through collective mobilisations that directly enact the rights demanded. They also link demands for rights to a broader, collective political project challenging agro-industrial, capitalist systems of food production in the name of rights to food sovereignty for all.
Chapter 5 focuses on how rights travel. It tracks the way in which food sovereignty has travelled, developed and changed through grassroots, place-based mobilisations on the one hand and through transnational meetings among the peasant movement on the other. In so doing, it focuses on the resonances, connections and forms of dialogue that have connected diverse grassroots peasant activists demanding rights across multiple locales. These resonances, connections and dialogues among grassroots activists have enabled peasant activists to develop a new set of rights — to food sovereignty — that hold significance across a diverse set of perspectives. By travelling through resonances, connections and forms of dialogue, food sovereignty has become a globally salient idea that unites the potentially conflicting demands of different peasant farmer, indigenous, pastoralist and fisherfolk activists operating in diverse locales. By highlighting these ways in which rights to food sovereignty travel, the chapter challenges the idea that rights travel through a combination of elite agency and structural features of rights, namely, their stripped back, abstract and already universal nature. Rights to food sovereignty have travelled through grassroots agency, with elite agents only taking food sovereignty in response to or out of respect for the actions of grassroots activists. Rights to food sovereignty, moreover, have not travelled as an abstract, universal idea, stripped of any culturally specific content. Instead, as they travel, rights to food sovereignty have been woven with and continue to be enriched by the cultures, histories and contexts of the grassroots activists that continue to enact, demand and co-construct them.
In chapter 6, I suggest that if there is any hope for a global form of democracy, it will come about through the work of actually existing agents demanding change and demanding that their voices be heard. Moreover, global democracy does not necessarily or initially involve the development of large global organisations with the power to hold states, corporations and other transnational actors to account, but will instead involve strengthening particular, place-based alternatives, like the alternative pockets of food sovereignty that are created as peasant activists reclaim land in order to produce their own food.
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Excerpted from The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle by Robin Dunford. Copyright © 2016 Robin Dunford. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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