Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-24-2019
Abstract
In December 2018, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. UNDROP is the product of 17 years of struggle by La Via Campesina, other transnational agrarian movements and allies that included NGOs, states, UN mandate holders, and academics. It recognises the dignity of rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and their ‘special relationship’ to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights to land and natural resources, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. This Grassroots Voices forum includes interviews and articles by activists in the UNDROP campaign: peasants from Indonesia, Belgium, France, Germany, Senegal and Argentina; a US farmworker leader; a women’s rights activist from Spain; a Bolivian diplomat; the Indian leader of a transnational Catholic farmers’ movement; an advocate for fishers from Uganda; a Swiss jurist; a Mexican indigenous rights leader; and human rights advocates from the NGOs CETIM and FIAN. They describe a new kind of people’s diplomacy and an innovative, bottom-up process of building alliances, lobbying, and authoring international law.
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Comments
The UN adopted the Declaration on #PeasantsRights in Dec. 2018. Priscilla Claeys and Marc Edelman have compiled 14 interviews and short articles by participants in this 17-year-long struggle, which La Via Campesina initiated and which many other rural and human rights organizations joined. With the participation of Vincent Delobel, Henry Saragih, Christophe Golay, Andrea Nuila, Philip Seufert, Sofía Monsalve, Ana María Suárez, Melik Özden, Florian Rochat, Natalia Pacheco, Ndiakhate Fall, Diego Montón, Geneviève Savigny, Paula Gioia, Tirso Moreno, Margaret Nakato, Saúl Vicente Vázquez, George Dixon Fernandez and Sandra Moreno. Free download here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2019.1672665