CETRI
During the past two decades, nation-states in developing countries have been
transformed by a triple ‘‘squeeze’’ : globalization, (partial) decentralization, and the
privatization of some of their functions (Fox 2001). Although central states remain
important, they have been transformed. Different actors have contested the scope,
pace and direction of the transformation, including its agrarian restructuring
component. The changing international–national–local linkages that structure the
terms under which people accept or resist corporate-controlled global politics and
economics present both threats and opportunities for the world’s rural population.
The co-existence of threats and opportunities has prompted many rural social
movements to both localize further, in response to state decentralization, and to
internationalize, in response to globalization. The seemingly contradictory social–
political pressures of globalization and decentralization that are transforming the
nation-state are also changing rural social movements. More horizontal solidarity
linkages and ‘‘polycentric’’ rural social movements are emerging and struggling to
construct coherent structures for the coordination of greater vertical integration. La
Via Campesina is the largest and most politically coherent of all current
transnational agrarian movements (TAMs).
Via Campesina is an international movement of poor peasants and small farmers
from both the global south and north. Initiated by Central, South and North
American peasant and farmers’ movements and European farmers’ groups, Via
Campesina was formally launched in 1993. Existing transnational activist networks
located in peasant movements and nongovernmental funding agencies in the North
facilitated the contacts between key national peasant movements that emerged
primarily in the 1980s. By 2008, Via Campesina represented more than 150 sub-national, rural, social movement organizations from 56 countries in Latin
America and the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, Asia and Africa.
The building of transnational agrarian solidarity discussed in this essay is new in
at least three ways. First, in the early 1990s, before the existence of Via Campesina,
the only global solidarity linkage that claimed representation of the world’s rural
poor was the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, or IFAP, an
organization of middle and rich farmers mainly based in the North. Unlike IFAP,
whose politics tended to be conservative, the Via Campesina represented the
solidarity of poor peasants and small farmers with class and political interests
different from IFAP. The international solidarity represented by Via Campesina was
thus new.
Second, the scale of Via Campesina’s transnational movement or network and the
scope of its political work are unprecedented, despite the fact that it remains absent
or thin in many regions of the world. The movement’s use of the latest
communications technology (internet, email, electronic conferences) is new in the
agrarian movement world. Moreover, the Via Campesina’s issue-framing and
demand-making perspective has been consciously ‘‘rights-based’’ and linked to
socio-economic and cultural rights as well as ‘‘global citizenship rights,’’ something
that did not previously exist in any systematic way in the agrarian movement
world.
Third, a similar NGO-based global advocacy framework on behalf of poor
peasants and small farmers existed before the organization of Via Campesina. When
Via Campesina organized, it therefore quickly defined its identity (i.e., ‘‘people of
the land’’) and class composition (i.e., poor peasants and small farmers), clarified its
claims of direct representation, and declared that intermediary NGOs should stop
representing poor peasants and small farmers. The demand that NGOs stop speaking
on behalf of peasants and farmers emerged from the popular saying, ‘‘not about us
without us.’’ This article concerns the third dimension of contemporary solidarity
involving agrarian movements, and it focuses on Via Campesina.
