La Vía Campesina

Abstract

reviewed by John RiddellThe neoliberal assault that has driven labour into retreat over the last two decades has also sparked the emergence of a peasants' international, La Vía Campesina. Rooted in 56 countries across five continents, this alliance has mounted a sustained and spirited defense of peasant cultivation, community, and control of food production. Annette Desmarais's book La Vía Campesina has given us a probing and perceptive account of the world peasant movement's origins, outlook, and activities. ("La Vía Campesina" means "Peasant Path" or "Peasant Way," but see "Peasant or Farmer?" on page 6.)The movement began as a response to globalization, which Mexican peasant leader Alberto Gomez has defined as "a global offensive against the countryside … against small producers and family farmers" whose existence poses a barrier to "an industrialized countryside."Such coercive industrialization involves "delinking" food production from consumption through the intrusion of agribusiness corporations that usurp different stages of production: provision of inputs, food processing, transportation, and marketing, Desmarais says. Industrial products replace farmer inputs: chemicals in place of manure, hybrid seeds in place of farmers' seed stocks. Many peasants are shackled to corporate production contracts, which, Desmarais notes, now control about 90% of U.S. poultry farms."Farmers are no longer considered producers of knowledge," Desmarais says, but rather as consumers of the marketed wisdom of agribusiness, mere cogs in the gears of corporate industry.

Food sovereignty and the quinoa boom: challenges to sustainable re-peasantisation in the southern Altiplano of Bolivia

“…81 As Desmarais points out in her study of La Vía Campesina, 'communities should be seen as sites of diversity, differences, conflicts, and divisions often expressed along gender, class, and ethnic lines and characterized by competing claims and interests'. 82 Despite the highly fraught transformations occurring in the southern Altiplano, there are promising grassroots organising efforts, both at the level of producers' associations and at the level of indigenous ayllus, markas (a grouping of ayllus) and confederations. CONAMAQ (the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu) 83 has been calling for the government to prioritise domestic consumption of quinoa as a means of strengthening cultural identity and tackling malnutrition.…”

“…3 As Desmarais explains, food sovereignty is explicitly rooted in the assertion of a peasant identity in the face of neoliberal capitalism, which declares the disappearance of the peasantry to be an inevitability of progress. 4 The (re)affirming of peasant cultures and economies -or re-peasantisationthus appears as a strategic necessity for the building of food sovereignty, particularly since 54% of the global population now lives in cities. 5 Indeed, the call for food sovereignty emerges at a seemingly dismal historical moment for peasants.…”

The Class Dynamics of Food Sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

“…According to this tradition, the peasantry has a specific form of production and organization that has existed for centuries within distinct modes of production, and will continue to do so in the future (Kay 2001, 379). McMichael and other supporters of food sovereignty (Desmarais 2007;Teubal 2010;Rosset 2011) tend to frame the neoliberal food regime as a top-down and systemic entity that constrains and subordinates the peasantry, yet remains external to the inner dynamics of the latter's existence (Bernstein and Byres 2001, 6;Jansen 2015, 218). In turn, 'the peasantry' is conceived as a unitary concept constructed in opposition to capital (Bernstein 2014(Bernstein , 1041) and the agent that will shape alternatives to the corporate food regime (Jansen 2015, 218).…”

Eating Cars: Food Citizenship in a “Community in Crisis”

“…The role of food in place-making is of course not new, but its transformative potential is of increasing interest to new food movements, such as La Vía Campesina and the locavore and Slow Food movements (Desmarais, 2007;Parkins and Craig, 2006;Petrini, 2004;Smith and MacKinnon, 2007;Wekerle, 2004). Food has long been a marker of things other than nutrition: food can speak equally to relationships of class and ethnicity in particular locales as it can to nation-building and global projects (Caldwell, 2002;Caplan, 1994;Diner, 2001;Mintz, 1985).…”