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Re-thinking agrarian reform, land andterritory in La Via CampesinaPeter RossetPublished online: 05 Sep 2013.

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GRASSROOTS VOICES

Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina

Peter Rosset

Introduction

Transformations in the model of economic development in Brazil have forced changes in thenature of the struggle for land and agrarian reform. There is no longer room to call for a classicbourgeois agrarian reform, supported by an industrial bourgeoisie or by nationalist forces.Neverthelessagrarian reform is ever more urgent and necessary. Today the struggle for agrar-ian reform has become a class struggle against the model of agriculture dominated by Capital.This means that the peasants struggle for land rights and a new model of agriculture face a newcorrelation of forces with powers of coercion and consensus building that are stronger thanthose of traditional landowners in the past and new social actors arrayed against them: capi-talized landowners, nancial capital, and transnational corporations.

Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil1

Since the founding of La Via Campesina and the launching of the Global Campaign for Agrar-ian Reform, we have had many signicant achievements, and at the same time the world hasundergone major changes But the changes are not just in the world around us. We also havegrown in our struggle, thanks to the exchange among cultures, to our processes, our victoriesand our setbacks, and to the diversity of our peoples. That is why over the past few days wehave been meeting to reect upon and update our visions and concepts in the struggle for agrar-ian reform and the defense of land and territory. We have begun to outline some key elementsof a new vision of agrarian reform and the sovereignty of peoples over their territories.

Bukit Tinggi Declaration on Agrarian Reform in the 21st Century,La Via Campesina and the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform2

This special Grassroots Voices (GV) section includes a variety of contributions that illus-trate major changes over the last 20 years in the thinking of rural social movements concern-ing agrarian reform, land and territory, particularly in the case of La Via Campesina (LVC).It is motivated and informed by a workshop held by LVC in Bukit Tinggi, West Sumatra,Indonesia, from 1013 July 2012, on Agrarian reform and the defense of land and territoryin the 21st century: the challenge and future.

The world is changing, and so the agrarian struggles of rural social movements and theirvisions of agrarian reform, land and territory change as well. Their evolution in thinking hascome about dialectically, both as a result of transformations in the external world, and basedon the internal learning and exchange of experiences that take place inside the movementsas they interact with each other and with the world. While issues of agrarian reform, landand territory have been with us for much longer (Sobhan 1993, Rosset et al. 2006, Lipton2009), this GV focuses on the past two decades of struggle, since the founding of LVC as a

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1Page 33 of this Grassroots Voices.2See annex to this contribution.

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transnational social movement (Borras 2004, Desmarais 2007, Martnez-Torres and Rosset2010).

LVC celebrated 20 years of agrarian struggle in 70 countries in June of 2013, at its VIInternational Conference, held in Jakarta, Indonesia.3 In preparation for the conference,LVC held international internal thematic seminars during 2012 that served as spaces for col-lective learning and reection, analysis of current reality around the world, and updating ofvisions, positions and plans of action for its central issues of struggle (i.e. agrarian reform,public policy for food sovereignty, agroecology, women and gender, youth, etc.). The BukitTinggi event was part of this series, and was organized by LVCs Global Campaign forAgrarian Reform (GCAR). In the discussions that took place, it was abundantly clearthat social movement visions of agrarian reform today are very different from what theywere in the early years of LVC.

This edition of GV includes an essay by Shalmali Guttal with highlights from BukitTinggi and earlier landmark events in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2006) and Nylni, Mali(2011). An annex provides access links to the nal declarations of each one. The Land,territory and dignity Forum held in 2006 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, marked a key turningpoint in the broadening of LVCs vision of agrarian reform and the defense of land and ter-ritory, while the event in Mali targeted land grabbing. Also included is an analysis of theevolving conditions and models of struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil, by the LandlessWorkersMovement (MST), that clearly explains how the recent wave of (re)capitalizationof agribusiness by nancial capital has forced the Movement to adapt its vision of agrarianreform and its tactics of struggle.

The testimony of Indra Lubis, leader of a peasant organization in Indonesia andmember of the International Operative Secretariat (IOS) of LVC, and an essay by Faus-tino Torrez, a Nicaraguan peasant leader, give us an internal view from key members ofthe GCAR team, on the hows and whys of the changing vision of agrarian reform. Thetestimony of Elizabeth Mpofu, a peasant leader from Zimbabwe and emerging inter-national leader of LVC,4 gives us an inside look at perhaps the most important state-implemented land reform carried out in recent decades anywhere in the world. Shetells us how the recovery of indigenous cosmovision, the accompaniment by spiritualhealers and traditional authorities, the conviction of former liberation ghters (calledwar veterans), and womens leadership in the struggle, were key elements in a move-ment within the larger land occupation movement that achieved agrarian reform fromthe State. This movement within a movement has a mission of endogenous communitydevelopment based on agroecological farming, and is based in land reform settlementsacross Zimbabwe.5 The linkages in this case between land occupations from below,land reform by the State, and agroecology are emblematic of a number of the issuestouched upon in this GV. Finally we include a short analysis of land grabbing inEurope, and the testimony of Morgan Ody, a young farmer active in land strugglesand occupations in France.

In order to set the scene for extracting some specic conclusions from these contri-butions as well from my long-term role as team member of the GCAR and participant-observer, it is necessary to briey review some movement history.

3See Martnez-Torres and Rosset (2010) for an explanation of the history, structures and internal pro-cesses of La Via Campesina. See also http://www.viacampesina.org.4See Via Campensina (2013b).5See also Via Campesina (2011).

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The evolution of La Via Campesina since 1992

The idea of LVC emerged at a meeting of farmer leaders from Central America, the Car-ibbean, Europe, the USA and Canada, held in Managua, Nicaragua, in April of 1992. Atthat meeting, peasant and family farm leaders identied neoliberal policies beingimposed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as conditionality for external debtnegotiations, and the trade liberalization taking place through the General Agreement onTariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations as forces bringing farmers to the brink of extinc-tion, extinction that would be inevitable unless farmers could build unity to ght backacross international borders (Managua Declaration 1992).

A year later, in Mons, Belgium, peasant leaders from various continents formallyfounded LVC. They pointed to the productivist model of agriculture and the criminalizationof social protest as additional aggravating practices (Mons Declaration 1993). This was atime period in the nations of the South marked by the structural adjustment policies thatweakened state presence in the countryside, depriving peasants of support prices, technicalassistance, subsidized credit and inputs and other accoutrements of the developmentaliststate (Martnez-Torres and Rosset 2010).

While the GATT soon became the World Trade Organization (WTO), cheap importedfood ooded the markets of many countries, undercutting the ability of local peasantries tomake a living. These were imports whose very cheapness was based on ever lower pricespaid to farmers in large agroexport countries, creating the objective basis for joint strugglebetween peasants in the South and family farmers in the North (Rosset 2006a).

The reformist and revolutionary agrarian reforms of previous decades were beingreversed through counter reforms led by the World Bank and its land administration andtitling programs. These were designed to create functioning land markets to attract invest-ment to rural areas, inevitably leading to the reconcentration of land. Though the Bankdressed up this privatization of communal and public lands as market assisted landreform, in fact the net effects ran contrary to the interests of peasants (Borras 2006,Rosset et al. 2006).

By 1999, LVC was ready to virtually declare war on the WTO in Seattle (Rosset2006a), and to simultaneously target World Bank land policies. That year LVC createdthe Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR), with the FoodFirst Information andAction Network (FIAN International) International as a non-governmental organization(NGO) partner,6 in support of struggles for land and agrarian reform around the world(Via Campesina and FIAN 1999, Borras 2008). Later a third partner, the Land ResearchAction Network (LRAN),7 would be added to the Campaign to provide research and analy-sis support. GCAR was created to support existing struggles for agrarian reform, to promotenew initiatives of agrarian reform, to carry out international lobby and solidarity work, andto engage in dialog [i.e. with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)] and/or protest(i.e. against the World Bank) directed at international institutions concerned with landissues. A further key element was (and is) an emergency network to respond to situationsof actual or imminent violations of the humans rights of peasants struggling for land.

One of the earliest acts of the GCAR was to convene the First International Meeting ofLandless Peasants in July of 2000 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras (Declaration InternationalMeeting Landless 2000). The meeting focused on the dichotomy between agrarian reformand the market mechanisms being pushed by the Bank, on agrarian reform as a state

6http://www.an.org7http://www.landaction.org

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obligation derived from the Right to Food, and on gender equality both in terms of landrights and in terms of the roles of women and men inside the movement itself.

Later that year LVC held its III International Conference in Bangalore, where the rstdetailed analyses were generated of what was meant by food sovereignty (Via Campesina2000a) and by agrarian reform (Via Campesina 2000b). LVC analyzed the limited capital-ist or bourgeois agrarian reforms of the past, and those carried out by socialist governments,highlighting the limitations of the former, and the worst-case situation of those countriesthat had benetted from neither. A signicant rise in landlessness as a result of a decadeof neoliberal policies was observed.

In the Bangalore document (Via Campesina 2000b), agrarian reform was dened as abroad process of distribution of land ownership. Emphasis was placed on individualfamily plots. In a foreshadowing of what LVC would later call genuine or integral agrar-ian reform,8 the argument was made that just distributing land would not be enough toensure the wellbeing of peasant families, and that therefore agrarian reform would haveto include major changes in the overall policy environment for peasant agriculture (trade,credit, crop insurance, education, democratic access to water and seeds, etc.).

For the rst time, agrarian reform was linked to the construction of food sovereignty, themajor new paradigm being launched by LVC at the same III Conference. Land was to bedistributed to produce food for people, rather than exports for the global economy. In stra-tegic terms, land reform was pitched not as an exclusive struggle of peasants, but rather as asolution to many of the larger problems of Society (Rosset 2006c).

LVC itself is a space of encounter among different cultures and cosmovisions of therural world, indigenous and non-indigenous, farmer and farm worker, East and West,North and South. The inherent differences across this diversity have over time led to con-frontation and debate, usually resolved in expanded visions and evolving collective con-structions. The encounter with other rural cultures and actors outside of LVC has alsoprofoundly affected thinking and visions. Perhaps the most important such encountertook place in March of 2006 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Land, territory and dignityForum was organized by LVC and other organizations of global civil society in the daysimmediately preceding the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Devel-opment (ICARRD), hosted by the FAO with the presence of member states.9

The Porto Alegre process was the rst time that LVC really engaged with the non-peasant peer actors who share the rural territories that are contested in struggles for agrarianreform and the defense of land and territory. Of particular note was the encounter of LVCwith groups of nomadic pastoralists, sher folk and indigenous peoples. The collectiveanalysis that was produced included a call to re-envision agrarian reform from a territorialperspective, such that the distribution of land to peasants would no longer mean a truncationof the rights of pastoralists to seasonal grazing areas, sher folk to shing sites, and of forestdwellers to forests. Porto Alegre also reected a persistent emphasis on the obligation ofstates and the revindication of land occupations as a tool of struggle.

Finally, Porto Alegre is signicant because on 8 March 2006, thousands of Brazilianpeasant women took the rst mass action by LVC against land grabbing (ironically,before the term land grabbing came into common usage to describe large-scale land

8See, for example, Via Campesina (2006a).9For LVC, the mere fact that FAO organized the ICARRD conference was a a victory and a testimonyto the impact of the struggle for agrarian reform. It was also considered a victory that the ofcialdeclaration of ICARRD recognized the continued need for agrarian reform (Borras 2009).

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acquisitions). They destroyed hundreds of thousands of Eucalyptus seedlings being grownin greenhouses by the Aracruz paper pulp corporation for transplant to an ever-growinggreen desert that was placing enormous tracts of land out of the reach of landless peasants(Via Campesina 2006b). By doing so they made the one of the rst major outcries againstthe human and ecological costs of agribusiness plantations and land grabbing, rmly estab-lished the leadership role of peasant women in the defense of land and territory, and sparkeda debate about the meaning of violence and non-violence in the context of social move-ments. When the mass media and the state government accused them of violent, terroristacts, they responded that they, and all of LVC, are committed to non-violent direct action,and that this action might include the occupation and/or destruction of corporate property,but not violence against persons. They pointedly asked what represented the greaterviolence: the pulling up of seedlings of a tree species that when used in monoculture plan-tations is known to destroy the soil, or the deprivation of thousands of rural women ofaccess to the land they need to feed their families, thus propagating the silent violenceof hunger.

The World Social Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2011, has special importance in thedefense of land and territory because of the Dakar appeal against land grabbing (Petitiononline 2011) that was issued by many organizations from civil society that were presentthere, including LVC.While many in LVC feel that land grabbing is not a new phenomenon(see the Indra Lubis testimony in this GV), there is no doubt that the same ood of nancialcapital into rural areas that is described by the MST in Brazil is fueling this latest wave ofland acquisition, which has rapidly grown to represent one of the most signicant contem-porary threats to peasants and indigenous people around the world. In November of 2011,LVC organized the International Conference against Land Grabbing in Nylni, Mali, thatis discussed by Shalmali Guttal in her essay in this GV. Not only has agribusiness beennewly (re)capitalized, but so have other extractive and/or land grabbing industries, includ-ing mining, dam and infrastructure construction, tourism and others, all putting more andmore pressure on peasant and indigenous territories. The new rise of land grabbing andthe response by LVC and other social movements are among the signicant changes thathave taken place during the past 20 years of struggle.

The contribution to this GV by the European Coordination of LVC (ECVC) highlightsa major new discovery: that land grabbing is not just a phenomenon of the South, but infact is rampant in the North as well. This reects an earlier conclusion that real estatespeculation in Europe and North America, among other land issues, has made access toland a virtual impossibility for youth and other new farmers, so that an agrarian reformis urgently needed in the North in addition to the South (SOC and LVC 2010). YoungFrench farmer Morgan Ody tells us how older and new farmers have formed an uneasyalliance in Europe to defend and occupy farmland earmarked for development by landgrabbers. At the youth assembly of the VI International Conference of LVC held inJakarta in June of 2013 (where youth accounted for more than 30% of the total delegatesto the Conference), young European farmers stood arm in arm with young peasants fromAfrica, Asia and the Americas in the collective repudiation of land grabbing, demands foraccess to land for young farmers and commitment to agroecology (see Via Campesina2013a).

Key changes in thinking

The 2012 event in Bukit Tinggi was an opportunity to reect on these and other changes,and to re-think Agrarian Reform in the 21st Century in light of them. In this section I

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highlight and summarize some of the key changes in the vision of agrarian reform and thedefense of land and territory that have taken place inside of LVC, and that are reected inthe analysis of Bukit Tinggi and in the other documents in this GV.10

The evolving object of struggle

If at the very earliest stages of the agrarian struggles that led to the founding of LVC theobject was to just obtain a piece of land, any land, to use as a means of production, thatbegan to rapidly evolve in a number of ways. The bad experiences of getting land butnot being able to stay on it, because of low crop prices and a hostile economic environmentfor peasant agriculture, meant that almost from the very beginning LVC called for genuine,integral agrarian reform in which access to land was to be accompanied by policies andprograms supportive of peasant agriculture. From there it was a short step to place agrarianreform in the context of food sovereignty (Rosset 2006c). In this GV, the MST highlightsthis latter aspect of the contemporary dispute over land between peasants and agribusiness.Whereas peasants demand land to produce food for the Brazilian people, agribusiness wantsland to produce agrofuels and exports.

Yet perhaps an even bigger change has been the way in which the movement hasincreasingly learned to think in terms of territory. The second international meeting ofthe landless was held by LVC at the second World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in2002. At that meeting, LVC leaders from indigenous peoples organizations challengedLVC and the GCAR to expand their shared vision of agrarian issues to include the indigen-ous perspective of territory, rather than just land.

In the words of the veteran agrarian leader Faustino Torrez in this GV, who was pro-foundly affected by that debate:

Territory expresses the identity of a people, it is where the ancestors lived and where they stillreside, it means knowledge and ways of knowing (saberes), historical memory, and the rightof usufruct of the communal resources which properly speaking belong to the Mother Earth.11

In fact, many of the movements inside LVC, and not just the indigenous peoples inLatin America, have long had a territorial perspective. The Indonesian peasants describedby Indra Lubis, and the landless black peasants in southern Africa, whose land wasseized by European colonists, dont want just any land, they specically want torecover their ancestral territories, and this has increasingly marked the broadened visionof agrarian struggle inside LVC, which increasingly has begun to think and speak aboutterritory.

At the Land, territory and dignity Forum held in Porto Alegre before ICARRD in2006, this expanded vision was crystallized in the declaration of that event, whichspeaks about the growing threats to those territories still in the hands of indigenouspeople and peasants, and from thence forward the GCAR was to call for agrarianreform and the defense of land and territory instead of just agrarian reform. More recentlythe calls by indigenous people inside and outside of LVC for Buen Vivir (living well inharmony with each other and with the Mother Earth) have found resonance in the discourseof LVC, as described by Shalmali Guttal.

10Also based on my own participant-observer experience.11Page 43 in this Grassroots Voices.

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Land and territory for what?

The growing concern for the Mother Earth inside LVC has in turn resonated with a ques-tioning of why we want land and territory and how we use it; in other words, Land forwhat?, or Territory for what? While many organizations in the early years of theirstruggles called for more credit, subsidized agrochemicals and machinery for peasants,that is becoming less true for LVC member organizations (Rosset and Martnez-Torres2012). Typically, agrarian movements that gained land through occupations and/or landreform from the State obtained poor quality, degraded land; land in which soil compactionand degradation are such that chemical fertilizers have little impact on productivity. This island that can only be restored by agroecological practices to recover soil organic matter,fertility and functional biodiversity. Furthermore, many in the agrarian movements insideLVC, like the MST, began to ask what it means to bring the model of agribusinessinto our own house.12 By that they refer to the natural tendency of landless peasants,who had previously been farm workers for agribusiness, to copy the dominanttechnological model of production once acquiring their own land. Yet, as Rosset et al.(2011, 162) said,

Reproducing the agribusiness model on ones own land by using purchased chemicals, com-mercial seeds, heavy machinery, etc. will also reproduce the forces of exclusion and thedestruction of nature that dene the larger conict. There is an increasing search for alternativesby the grassroots membership of LVCmember organizations, partly in response to the dramaticuctuations of prices of petroleum-based inputs over recent years, putting these inputs largelybeyond the reach of many peasant farmers.

Thanks to the gradual working out of this logic, and to the hard experiences of trying tocompete with agribusiness on their terrain that of industrial agriculture where who winsthe competition is who has access to more capital, which is demonstrably not peasants whohave recently acquired land we can say today that, based on LVCs series of agroecologyencounters over the past ve years, almost all LVC organizations now promote somemixture of agroecology and traditional peasant agriculture rather than the Green Revolu-tion. Both the discourse of farming in ways that protect the Mother Earth and the healthof farmers and consumers, along with the practice of recovering traditional farming knowl-edge and making the transition to agroecological farming, are growing fast in LVC (Rossetand Martnez-Torres 2012).

The question of Land and territory for what? has another answer as well, which is alsoincreasingly common, and that is land and territory for (re)constructing and defending com-munity. Gaining access to ones own land, and/or diversifying production, make it morepossible for youth to stay on the farm, for some family members who had migrated tothe city to return and engage in productive activities, and for reduced patriarchy insidethe peasant families as more members of the family engage in productive activities onthe farm and gain their own income sources and spaces of decision-making. This reinte-gration on the land, of the extended peasant family that has been atomized by forced mod-ernization in the countryside, has been documented for land occupations and agrarianreform settlements in Brazil (Fernandes 2000) and for agroecological diversicationaway from monoculture in Cuba (Machn Sosa et al. 2013, Rosset et al. 2011). Similarly,questions of how to organize physical space on land gained through land occupations, in

12Paraphrased by the author as heard on many occasions.

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order to favor community cohesion and continued political mobilization, are increasinglyunder discussion (see Bertolini and Carneiro 2012).

On the evolution of land occupations or land reform from below

A persistent problem with the tactic of land occupations has been the manner in whichthe media, governments and public opinion xate on examples of land occupationstainted by corruption, in which the powerful manipulate and often pay the landless tooccupy land in order to title it and pass it on the behind-the-scenes patron. This tendsto delegitimize land occupations as invasions, and can make it difcult for movementsto mobilize support for the untainted, legitimate land occupations that they engage in(see discussion of this phenomenon in Guatemala in Martnez Aniorte and VillagrnGarca 2009, 1347). A typical media framing (Mongabay.com 2008), in this case fromBrazil, afrms that:

My neighbors 25,000 hectares of forest reserve was rst invaded, instigated by the samecorrupt network. That problem has trickled over to us. Poor squatters are used as cannonfodder. They are paid to occupy the land so some big guy can eventually claim it and thensell it. By the time the authorities look into it, the backer has long moved on, taking hismoney with him.

Really, not until the MST in Brazil raised land occupation to an art, or a science, withorganizationally and ideologically well-prepared occupiers (see Rosset 2006b), did theimage of land occupations begin a partial shift, as they were able to eliminate tainted occu-pations and, by preparing people well, ensure much lower rates of land abandonment afterthe successful creation of land reform settlements (Fernandes 2000). The success of theMST has been widely noted inside LVC, and their methodology has diffused acrossnational borders and continents as a result of exchanges of experiences.

Indra Lubis explains the continued centrality of land occupations for LVC. This landreform from below is essential to give people the small victories that are needed to sustaincommitment to the larger struggle. It is also the most effective way to pressure governmentsto act on land reform laws that otherwise languish without implementation.

Over time the discursive enemy of peasants and object of protests has grown, frommostly large landlords to including the World Bank, transnational corporations andnally international nancial capital. In Brazil, for example, the land available for landreform and thus suitable for occupation has shifted dramatically in recent years as aresult of the recent waves of capitalization of agribusiness (see MST in this GV). As unpro-ductive large landholdings have become productive agribusiness export platforms, theargument used historically in the dispute for public opinion has lost its relevance. It nolonger makes sense to argue about the essential unfairness of the majority of the landbeing in the hands of a few who dont even use it, while millions who desperatelyneed land have none at all. Today the MST increasingly targets occupations at agribusiness,and argues forcefully about the benets for all of Society and for the environment of peasantagriculture producing food without agrotoxics. They contrast this with the damage wroughtby large-scale industrial monoculture for export and agrofuels (Martnez-Torres 2012). Thisis mirrored in the overall evolution of LVC discourse against transnational corporations(TNCs) and nancial capital, and toward the benets of peasant and family farm agriculturefor building food sovereignty, growing healthy food, slowing global warming and takingcare of the Mother Earth (Rosset and Martnez-Torres 2012).

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Targeting transnational agribusiness backed by nancial capital is raising the ante forLVC member organizations. In the case of Brazil, targeting feudal-style landlordsbrought repression in the form of hired gunmen, corrupt local judges and local police.But targeting TNCs increasingly brings private security forces and militarized federalpolice into play, along with increased juridical criminalization of struggle, and ever-increas-ing demonization of the struggle in the mass media. LVC organizations around the worldare facing this more intense wave of criminalization, repression and media stigmatization.

Territory for whom?

LVC has been transformed by the internal and external dialog with non-peasants who sharerural territories, including landless laborers, indigenous people, forest dwellers, nomadicpastoralists, riverine and coastal peoples particularly artisanal sherfolk and others.As a result thinking has evolved, as described by Indra Lubis, Shalmali Guttal and FaustinoTorrez, from traditional forms of agrarian reform which, while they meant access to land forpeasants, under certain conditions and circumstances also meant enclosure and loss of userights for the non-sedentary farmer peoples that shared territories prior to land distribution(Joireman 1996, La Via Campesina et al. 2007). In the renewed vision, agrarian reformmust take into account the needs of all of these actors, and should have mechanisms toensure peaceful coexistence, perhaps modeled on traditional land use and common propertyresource systems. The challenge remains how to do this.

A related issue raised at Bukit Tinggi is the need to build alliances on the land issue, notjust with other rural peoples, but with the urban poor as well. The nancial speculation thatdrives rural land grabbing also drives urban real estate speculation, which leads to massiveevictions of the urban poor. This could be the basis for rural-urban, agricultural-non-agri-cultural and North-South solidarity and joint struggle for what some might call land sover-eignty, dened broadly as:

the right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and thebenets of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and land-scape This embraces struggles by indigenous movements, rural labourers, urban activistsand social movements North and South who have sometimes been excluded by traditionalland reform campaigns. (Borras and Franco 2012, back cover)

While the issues of women and land rights, and women as leaders in the struggle forland and the defense of territory, have been in the LVC since the earliest declarations, itwas at the International Seminar on Agrarian reform and gender hosted in 2003 inCochambama, Bolivia, by LVC and GCAR, that female and male peasant leaders from24 countries had the opportunity to debate these issues and engage in the collective con-struction of visions and processes (Declaracin de Cochabamba 2003, Monsalve Surez2006). Discrimination against women in past agrarian reform processes was discussed indepth, and the pernicious presence of patriarchy inside social movements for agrarianreform was hotly contested. Since then, these have been central issues inside LVC. Atthe V International Conference in Maputo, Mozambique, in 2008, LVC took on persistentpatriarchy inside the movement:

All the forms of violence that women face in our societies among them physical, economic,social, cultural and macho violence, and violence based on differences of power are alsopresent in rural communities, and as a result, in our organizations. This, in addition to beinga principal source of injustice, also limits the success of our struggles. We recognize the

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intimate relationships between capitalism, patriarchy, machismo and neo-liberalism, in detri-ment to the women peasants and farmers of the world. All of us together, women and menof La Via Campesina, make a responsible commitment to build new and better human relation-ships among us, as a necessary part of the construction of the new societies to which weaspire We commit ourselves anew, with greater strength, to the goal of achieving thatcomplex but necessary true gender parity in all spaces and organs of debate, discussion, analy-sis and decision-making in La Via Campesina, and to strengthen the exchange, coordinationand solidarity among the women of our regions. We recognize the central role of women inagriculture for food self-sufciency, and the special relationship of women with the land,with life and with seeds. In addition, we women have been and are a guiding part of the con-struction of Via Campesina from its beginning. If we do not eradicate violence towards womenwithin our movement, we will not advance in our struggles, and if we do not create new genderrelations, we will not be able to build a new society (Via Campesina, 2008a).

The challenge has been to move from the discursive commitment to equality in thestruggle to the material reality of equality. Nevertheless, the vision of women insideLVC has signicantly marked the internal debate over land titling.

Individual versus communal property

I am asking all of you here,If you have ever wondered,If the land is actually ours,And not of he who has more?

I am asking if, about the land,You have never wondered,That if that hands that work it are ours,Then is it not ours, and should it not be given to us?

Lets cut down the fences! Lets cut down the fences!Because the land is mine, yours, and his and hers,It is of Pedro, Mara, Juan and Jos.

A desalambrar, Daniel Viglietti (1968)13

The protest song A desalambrar has for decades been the anthem of landless peasants inLatin America cutting down the fences and occupying the lands of landlords. Yet an Argen-tinean agrarian activist recently commented to me in an ironic tone that A desalambrar (cutdown the fences) is now the slogan of the investment consortia who obtain rental conces-sions based on evicting peasants to plant large-scale monocultures. Her comment isillustrative of the state of the debate on individual versus communal property rights, andtouches at the heart of a debate about land titling that took place at Bukit Tinggi.

The debate over titling has historically been driven inside LVC by indigenous peopleand by women. It has also been informed by the positive legacy of certain forms of com-munal land tenure created by earlier agrarian reforms (i.e. the ejido system in Mexico). Tosimplify: early on, the goal of many of the agrarian struggles that today are part of LVC was

13Partial translation by the author of the lyrics of A desalambrar by Daniel Viglietti (1968).

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to get a piece of land with a piece of paper (title), typically in the name of the male head ofhousehold. This was backed by agrarian legislation in many countries, which onlydemanded the name of the man (Deere and Len 2001). Women inside and outside ofLVC began to clamor for equal rights to property ownership. Yet this coincided with theWorld Bank neoliberal drive to privatize and parcelize land in fungible titles, and soonthe whole question of private land titles was problematized in LVC, coming to a head inCochambama in 2003. The debate that took place there was described as follows by Mon-salve Surez (2006, 198200):

Consideration of this phenomenon led some women in Cochabamba to point out that thereforms that recognized and strengthened womens right to land in these circumstances didso within the neoliberal framework of protecting and strengthening individual propertyrights, and to that extent, such reforms represented a doubtful or, at least, ambiguousadvance. To place the issue squarely in context: how secure can individual entitlement tolands for peasant women be when established in a context of privatization and economic lib-eralization policies that have already brought about the dispossession and loss of lands of manyfamilies and communities? The linkage between advances in womens right to land withthose of womens individual right to private property continues to be an implicit one, and isa predominant idea in a great many public policies and in the debate over gender and land.

The identication of womens right to land with that of their individual titling of land hasbeen intensely questioned and debated in sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps more than in otherregions, because some have seen in the issue the intention of changing customary systemsof land tenancy to the market and to foreign investment[while] in Latin America the contra-dictions of womens rights to land and property constituted as individual rights have beencalled into question primarily by indigenous peoples The tension between the rights ofwomen and the rights of indigenous peoples to preserve their traditional customary law andpractices is still there, even though several steps have been taken toward reconciling the fem-inist vision with the indigenous vision. Indigenous women have started to question the con-struction of customary normative systems and the decision-making structures of their townsand communities, pointing out that they are excluded from those processes

The participants in the Cochabamba seminar advocated communal forms of landtenancy, and it remained clear that this did not exclude also advocating womens individualright to land, as a personal right and under conditions equal with men. The question now,therefore, is how to strengthen womens rights to land in different systems of land tenancy,and not only as individual private property.

These and similar debates14 over time led to a more common emphasis in LVC ondemanding collective titles. Yet the issue remains more open than ever, both in terms ofwhether women are better served by individual legal title (thus legitimating land privatiza-tion in the eyes of many), or by defending common property regimes and/or demandingcollective titles (and having to battle patriarchy at the community and household level).There is also the question of what is best in terms of collective defense against land grab-bing. Monsalve Surez (2006, 199) concluded in 2006 that

communal property, in its diverse modalities considered in the law, could become an importanttool in stopping neoliberal purposes. If it is intelligently taken advantage of by peasant and indi-genous organizations, it can be an instrument for counteracting the expansion of the new lati-fundio and, more broadly, the land market.

14See, for example, the rich discussion in Herrero and Vilella (2009).

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Yet my Argentinean friend could argue in 2013 that tearing down the implicit enclosures ofsmall-scale private property actually favors corporate land grabbers.

This was reected in the debate in Bukit Tinggi in 2012. As the participants repeatedmany of the earlier debates on land titling, from demanding individual titles in the nameof the man, to demanding the same in the name of the women or of both the man andthe woman, to demanding collective titles, an African woman delegate spoke of howlegal community land titles actually facilitate land grabbing. With a community title,she said, giving specic examples, all it takes, all too often, is just getting the [male]leader drunk, so that he signs a long-term concession that leads to the eviction of hundredsof families from their ancestral lands. While a number of delegates pointed out that itwould be less of a problem with women leaders, another delegate observed that in manycountries there are now local intermediary businesses who consolidate individual landtitles into large blocks that can be signed over in bulk to investors.15 Foreign corporationsdont want to haggle with thousands of individual peasants, said another delegate, theyprefer territorial communal titles so they can get access to the whole thing with a singlenegotiation. The center of the debate shifted to the problematic nature of any sort oflegal title, unless it explicitly prohibits sales, rentals, leases and concessions. As ShalmaliGuttal tells us, the participants nally could agree that the key most likely lies in buildingsome form of self-determination and autonomous control over territories, but how to do soin different contexts remains an open topic of debate.

A more nuanced interpretation of state-led agrarian reform

While LVC and the GCAR were rm in calling for states to take the lead in agrarian reformat least through Porto Alegre in 2006, recent experiences with peasant-friendly govern-ments in various countries are leading to a more nuanced interpretation. The WorldBank-driven market-led land reform of Lula and the Workers' Party (PT) party in Brazil(Rosset et al. 2006), the slow pace of the agrarian revolution in Bolivia, growing disillu-sionment with Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and the early difculties with the war against lati-fundios in Venezuela (Gascn and Montagut 2010, Enrquez 2013) have all helped solidifythe shared understanding that without a well-organized and powerful peasant movement, itis an illusion that even progressive governments will move signicantly on redistributiveland reform.

This has been reinforced by those cases where signicant progress has been made.There is a shared belief that the success of the Cuban peasantry in feeding Cuba with agroe-cology after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (Machn Sosa et al. 2013; Rosset et al. 2011)was the key element in leading to more recent phases of the Cuban agrarian reform, and thatthe national scope and level of organization of land occupations in Zimbabwe (see Eliza-beth Mpofu in this Section) were central to achieving what LVC considers to be themost signicant redistributive land reform in decades, albeit not an integral agrarianreform, because of the paucity of credits and other supports for beneciaries.16 But theoverall conclusion is that is will be no state-implemented land reform from abovewithout land occupations, or land reform from below (Rosset 2006b).

15There are a growing number of ways that land is being consolidated for land grabs. The sowingpools in Argentina provide an illustrative example (Grosso et al. 2010, Goldfarb 2012).16See the recent revisionist analyses of the land reform in Zimbabwe by Scoones et al. (2010), Cliffeet al. (2011), and Moyo (2011).

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Establishing new rights

Since its founding, an important part of the struggle of LVC has revolved around claimingnew rights (Martnez-Torres and Rosset 2010, Monsalve Surez 2013). When LVC putforth food sovereignty as a superior concept to food security, they were moving beyondthe right to food and claiming a right of rural peoples to produce, thus implying state obli-gations to protect markets and implement agrarian reform in order to assure that right (Des-marais 2007, Martnez-Torres and Rosset 2010). Similarly, the GCAR has claimed a rightto land as derivative of the right to food and the right to feed oneself (Via Campesinaand FIAN International 1999, Borras 2008).

The adoption in 2007 of the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigen-ous Peoples convinced LVC to try to get a broader denition of peasants rights from theUN system. In 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights, LVC held the First International Conference on Peasants Rights, in Jakarta, Indo-nesia. The declaration from that conference calls for an international convention on pea-sants rights, as:

We have inherited a long history of peasants struggles defending our rights. The UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the main human rights treaties are important instru-ments in our contemporary struggles. Nevertheless, we feel as other oppressed groups such asindigenous peoples, and women, that [the] time has come to fully spell out our distinct individ-ual and collective rightsA future Convention on Peasant Rights will contain the values of therights of peasants and should particularly strengthen the rights of women peasants whichwill have to be respected, protected and fullled by governments and international institutions.For that purpose, we commit ourselves to develop a multi-level strategy working simul-taneously at the national, regional and international level for raising awareness, mobilizingsupport and building alliances with not only peasants, but rural workers, migrant workers, pas-toralists, indigenous peoples, sher folks, environmentalists, women, legal experts, humanrights, youth, faith-based, urban and consumers organizations as well. We will also seek thesupport of governments, parliaments and human rights institutions for developing the conven-tion on peasant rights. (Via Campesina 2008b)

Since then LVC drafted a proposed text, helped by sympathetic UN ofcials,17 andlobbied hard at various levels (see Edelman and James 2011). On 27 September 2012,the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolution A/HRC/21/L23, in which it commitsto establish an intergovernmental working group with the mandate of negotiating, nalizingand submitting to the Human Rights Council a draft UN declaration on the rights of pea-sants and other people working in rural areas (United Nations 2012). LVC hailed this asa small but important victory on the road toward full recognition of the rights of peasants,including their right to land and territory.

Also in 2012, the Committee on Word Food Security (CFS) of the FAO completed theintergovernmental negotiations of the Voluntary guidelines on the tenure of land, sheriesand forests in the context of national food security. This was the product of a remarkablyparticipatory process under the Civil Society Mechanism of FAO (McKeon 2013), althoughthe result represented signicant compromises with non-social movement actors (TNCs andgovernments). The completion of this process is seen as a step towards better protection ofthe right to food and access to natural resources, but LVC and allies cautioned that theresstill a long road ahead before peoples rights to land, sheries and forests are fully recog-nized and respected (see Via Campesina 2012). The most glaring deciency in the

17Via Campesina (2009).

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Guidelines is expressed in the word voluntary. At Bukit Tinggi, participants agreed toalways omit that word, simply referring to them as the Tenure Guidelines, or TG, aswe have nothing to gain from the voluntary part; we will ght for compliance as if theywere mandatory.18

The peasants rights issue, and the guidelines, can be seen in two ways. The rst way isin view of the fact that member organizations of LVC are always hungry for additionalinternational commitments to wield against their governments in the public opiniondebates surrounding peasant struggles. LVC responds to this collective internal demandby working towards additional instruments at the international level. The second way tointerpret this institutional engagement is in the light of the discussion by Martnez-Torresand Rosset (2010), concerning the differentiated engagement that LVC has or does nothave with different multilateral institutions. These are divided between those for whomthere is no hope from a peasant perspective, and to whom LVC will only show resoluteopposition, protest and denunciation (WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank),and those, generally in the UN System, who at least in theory might have some democraticaspects, with whom LVC will engage in dialog, though on its own terms (FAO, HumanRights Council, etc.).

Multiple crises and the green economy

LVC sees the present historical period as marked by multiple crises of the capitalist system.These include the nancial, food, climate, energy and social crises (see Via Campesina2008c). While LVC argues that food sovereignty based on integral agrarian reform andagroecological peasant agriculture offers the clearest solutions for cooling the planetand resolving the food and social crises (Rosset and Martnez-Torres 2012), the continualtendency of capitalism to reinvent itself through its periodic crises means that it continuallydevelops new threats to peasants and indigenous peoples. As Shalmali Guttal examines inher summary of the debates in Bukit Tinggi, this can be seen in the new drive for the euphe-mistically named Green Economy and the concomitant nancialization of Nature. LVCdenounces various elements of the Green Economy as false solutions to the crises.These include agrofuels, payment for environmental services, carbon credits, so-calledReduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) andREDD + , ecotourism, etc., all of which can generate green grabbing. Green grabbingis nothing more than land grabbing for agrofuels, to cash in on carbon credits, for so-called ecotourism, etc. (see discussion in Fairhead et al. 2012). In its participation in theConference of the Parts (COP) process (climate summits) and the Rio +20 summit, LVChas focused on making the distinction between real and false solutions to the crises(Salleh 2010, Rosset and Martnez-Torres 2012), using this as an argument for agrarianreform and the defense of land and territory in the context of food sovereignty.

Conclusions

The past 20 years of agrarian struggle in a changing world have led to evolution in thethinking and vision of movements such as LVC, who are engaged in struggles for landand territory. The world is different, with new waves of nancial capitalization of

18The TGs may ultimately be the object of different interpretations based on competing political strat-egies, as explained by Borras et al. (2013).

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agribusiness and extractive industries, that drive renewed land grabbing, with the successesand failures of land reform from above and from below, with the contemporary crises ofthe capitalist system and the nancialization of nature, etc.

Movements have responded to these changes with new ideas, strategies and tactics, andthey have also evolved in response to internal dynamics concerning gender, indigenouscosmovision and concern for the Mother Earth, etc. At the same time they have beenprofoundly affected by encounter and dialog with non-peasant peoples, moving from anarrow focus on land to an expanded vision of territory. A constant in the struggle hasbeen the use of land occupations as a tactic, though the framing discourse to defend thispractice in eyes of public opinion has shifted, with an ever-greater emphasis on food sover-eignty, healthy food and protection of the Mother Earth as arguments in favor of agrarianreform.

Some debates have been opened yet not resolved; key among these is the issue of landtitling, where the concerns of women, indigenous people and other rural peoples, and therising threat of land grabbing all demand ever more innovation, cooperation and creativityfrom the movements. Of one thing we can be certain: over the next 20 years of struggle, wewill continue to witness the evolution of movement thinking and visions concerning landand territory.

The nal declaration of the VI Conference in Jakarta (June 2013) reads in part:

We reject capitalism, which is currently characterized by aggressive ows of nancial andspeculative capital into industrial agriculture, land and nature. This is generating huge landgrabs and a brutal displacement of people from their land, destroying communities, culturesand ecosystems Agroecology is our option for today and the future Peasant agroecologyis a social and ecological system encompassing a great diversity of technologies and practicesthat are culturally and geographically rooted. It removes dependencies on agro-toxins, rejectsconned industrial animal production, uses renewable energies, and guarantees healthy food. Itenhances dignity, honors traditional knowledge and restores the health and integrity of theland We demand a Comprehensive Agrarian Reform. This means ensuring full rights overland, recognizing indigenous peoples legal rights to their territories, guaranteeing shing com-munities access and control of shing areas and ecosystems, and recognizing pastoralmigratory routes. Only such reform ensures a future for young rural peoples. A ComprehensiveAgrarian Reform also includes a massive distribution of land as well as livelihood and pro-ductive resources to ensure permanent access to land for youth, women, the unemployed,the landless, displaced, and all those willing to engage in small-scale agroecological food pro-duction. Land is not a commodity. Existing laws and regulations need to be reinforced, whilenew ones are needed to protect against speculation and land grabbing. We continue to ght forland and territories (Via Campesina 2013c).

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Via Campesina 2006a. Commentary on land and rural development policies of the World Bank, 14February [online]. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/agrarian-reform-mainmenu-36/83-commentary-on-land-and-rural-development-policies-of-the-world-bank2 [Accessed 8 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2006b. La Via Campesina women occupy a farm in South Brazil, 08 March 2006[online]. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/biodiversity-and-genetic-resources-mainmenu-37/100-la-via-campesina-women-occupy-a-farm-in-south-brazil [Accessed 8 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2008a. Food sovereignty now! Unity and struggle of the people! Declaration ofMaputo: V International Conference of La Via Campesina [online]. Maputo, Mozambique,1922 October 2008. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/our-conferences-mainmenu-28/5-maputo-2008-mainmenu-68/declarations-mainmenu-70/600-declaration-of-maputo-v-international-conference-of-la-via-campesina [Accessed 4 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2008b. Final declaration of International Conference on Peasants Rights [online].24 June. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/human-rights-mainmenu-40/550-nal-declaration-of-international-conference-on-peasants-rights[Accessed 5 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2008c. Open letter from Maputo: V International Conference of La Via Campesina[online]. 26 October. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/our-conferences-mainmenu-28/5-maputo-2008-mainmenu-68/declarations-mainmenu-70/602-open-letter-from-maputo-v-international-conference-of-la-vcampesina [Accessed 8 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2009. Declaration of Rights of Peasants Women and Men. Available from: http://viacampesina.net/downloads/PDF/EN-3.pdf [Accessed on 5 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2011. Shashe Declaration: 1st Encounter of Agroecology Trainers in Africa Region 1[online]. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issuesmainmenu-27/sustainable-peasants-agriculture-mainmenu-42/1065-shashe-declaration-1st-encounterof-agroecology-trainers-in-africa-region-1 [Accessed 4 May 2013].

Via Campesina 2012. Civil society organizations joint reaction to the Guidelines on Land, Fisheriesand Forests [online]. 11 May. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/agrarian-reform-mainmenu-36/1239-civil-society-organizations-joint-reaction-to-the-guidelines-on-land-sheries-and-forests [Accessed 8 May 2013].

Via Campesina. 2013a. Los jvenes de La Va Campesina clausuran su III Asamblea con el compro-miso de garantizar el futuro de la agricultura campesina agroecolgica [online]. 10 June 2013.Available from: http://viacampesina.org/es/index.php/nuestras-conferencias-mainmenu-28/6-yakarta-2013/1757-los-jovenes-de-la-via-campesina-clausuran-su-asamblea-con-el-compromiso-de-garantizar-el-futuro-de-la-agricultura-campesina-agroecologica [Accessed 8 July 2013].

Via Campesina. 2013b. International Operative Secretariat of La Via Campesina will be hosted byZIMSOFF in Zimbabwe [online]. 13 June. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/our-conferences-mainmenu-28/6-jakarta-2013/1426-second-draft-for-declaration-on-transition-for-vi-conference [Accessed 8 July 2013].

Via Campesina. 2013c. The Jakarta Call [online]. 20 June. Available from: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/our-conferences-mainmenu-28/6-jakarta-2013/resolutions-and-declarations/1428-the-jakarta-call [Accessed 8 July 2013]

Via Campesina and FIAN International. 1999. Global campaign for agrarian reform. Tegucigalpa:Via Campesina and FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN).

Viglietti. D. 1968. A desalambrar [online]. Available from: http://letras.mus.br/daniel-viglietti/516948/ [Accessed on 5 May 2013].

Peter M. Rosset is a faculty member at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Chiapas,Mexico, a researcher at the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano(CECCAM), co-coordinator of the Land Research Action Network (LRAN), and a team memberof the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR). Email: prosset@ecosur.mx

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ANNEX: Access to key historical documents referenced in this Grassroots Voices1. Final declaration of the land, territory and dignity forum for a new agrarian reform based onfood sovereignty!, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 69 March 2006. Available at: http://www.foodsovereignty.org/Portals/0/documenti%20sito/Resources/Archive/Forum/2006/2006-En-Final%20Declaration%20Porto%20Alegre.pdf [Accessed 31 May 2013].

2. Nylni conference declaration: stop land-grabbing now!, held in Nylni, Mali, 1719 November2011.Available at: http://www.viacampesina.org/en/index.php?option = com_content&view = article&id= 1154:stop-land-grabbing-now&catid = 23:agrarian-reform&Itemid = 36 [Accessed 15 May 2013].

3. Bukit Tinggi declaration on agrarian reform in the 21st century, Agrarian reform and thedefense of land and territory in the 21st century, held in Bukit Tinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia,14 July 2012. Available at: http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/agrarian-reform-mainmenu-36/1281-bukit-tinggi-declaration-on-agrarian-reform-in-the-21st-century[Accessed 3 May 2013].

EVENT HIGHLIGHTS

Porto Alegre, Nylni and Bukit Tinggi: evolving views of agrarianreform

Shalmali Guttal

Land reform is a struggle not only between peasants and landlords, but a struggle for all ofsociety. What kind of society do we want to live in? Do we want inequality, globalwarming, poverty, misery and urban slums? Agrarian reform and food sovereignty are thekeys to changing this society.

We need to develop international solidarity around issues of land; we need to connect landreform, food sovereignty and agroecology.

Participants at the Bukit Tinggi workshop, 2012

From 1013 July 2012, about 150 representatives from peasant, sher-folk, indigenouspeoples, women, youth, human rights and activist research organizations from Asia,Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe met at an international workshop andseminar in Bukit Tinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia, to explore a collective vision for agrar-ian reform and defense of lands and territories. The meeting, Agrarian reform and thedefense of land and territory in the 21st century: the challenge and future, was organizedby the Global Campaign on Agrarian Reform (GCAR)19 and hosted by the IndonesianPeasant Union (SPI) and La Via Campesina (LVC).

The main goals of the Bukit Tinggi workshop were to update ourselves on the presenthistorical moment, identify the elements of a common vision of agrarian reform and defenseof land and territory, identify the main barriers to realizing our vision, and threats to ourmovements, and formulate future strategies by examining the lessons learned from thepast two decades of struggles. This paper presents the main discussion points at the work-shop. But rst we begin by reviewing earlier discussions held in Porto Alegre, Brasil, in2006, and Nylni, Mali (2011), which laid essential groundwork for the debates in Buki

19The Global Campaign on Agrarian Reform (GCAR) is made up of La Via Campesina, FIAN Inter-national and the Land Research Action Network (LRAN).

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Tinggi. This essay consists exclusively of syntheses of the discussions, analyses and con-clusions from each of these crucial events.

From land to territories

Indigenous peoples talk about loving not only our lands but our entire territories.Participant at the Bukit Tinggi workshop, 2012

In GCAR, our search for a new vision of agrarian reform that encompasses the changingcontext and unites peoples at the forefront of struggles for resource rights, justice and self-determination gained new traction at the Land, Territory and Dignity Forum in PortoAlegre, Brazil in March 2006. Held in tandem with the International Conference on AgrarianReform and Rural Development (ICARRD) organized by the Food and Agriculture Organiz-ation of the UN (FAO), the Forum was a historic meeting of social movements, human rightsdefenders, engaged scholars and activist researchers, who decided to join forces to resist capi-talist and neoliberal models of resource governance and rural development, and build a collec-tive vision of agrarian reform that responds to our diverse priorities.

The new agrarian reform must recognize the socio-environmental function of land, thesea and natural resources, in the context of food sovereignty, to which we should commitat the highest level of will. We understand that food sovereignty implies policies of redistri-bution, equitable access and control over natural and productive resources (credit, appropri-ate technology, etc.), by peasants, indigenous peoples, communities of artisanal sher-folk,pastoralists, unemployed workers, Dalit communities, afro-descendant communities andother rural communities; rural development policies based on agroecological strategies cen-tered on peasant and family agricultural and artisanal shing; trade policies against dumpingand in favor of peasant and indigenous production for local, regional and national markets;and complementary public sector policies like health care, education and infrastructure forthe countryside.

Final declaration, Land Territory and Dignity Forum, Porto Alegre, 200620

Two critical advances were made in Porto Alegre in terms of our collective thinking. First,there was agreement that agrarian reform must be based on the concept and principles offood sovereignty. Second, agreement that agrarian reform must respect and defend theconcept of territory, i.e., the bio-ecological surroundings on which human collectivesdepend to satisfy material and economic needs, construct social and political relationships,and develop culture and spirituality. For rural communities, especially indigenous peoples,land is not only a means of production, nor can it be regarded in isolation from other elementsof nature. Land is embedded in territory, which includes water, air, forests, plants, animals, sh,other living creatures, culture, sacred sites, ceremonies and practices. Territories connote hol-istic relationships between people and their environment. Neoliberal models of governanceunbundle nature and disembody its elements, making them easier to commodify, privatizeand market, and making it simpler to alienate people from life-sustaining ecosystems, resourcesand relationships. For peasants, sher-folk, pastoralists, workers and indigenous peoples, thedefense of land and territories is thus a matter of survival as well as a political imperative.

All of the original peoples, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, tribes, sher-folk, ruralworkers, peasants, the landless, nomadic pastoralists and displaced peoples, have the rightmaintain their own spiritual and material relationships; to possess, develop, control, use andreconstruct their social structures; to politically and socially administer their lands and terri-tories, including their full environment, the air, water, seas, rivers, lakes, ice oes, ora,fauna and other resources that they have traditionally possessed, occupied and/or utilized.This implies the recognition of their laws, traditions, customs, tenure systems, and institutions,as well as the recognition of territorial borders and the cultures of peoples. This all constitutes

20See annex to the previous contribution.

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the recognition of the self-determination and autonomy of peoples.Final declaration, Land Territory and Dignity Forum, Porto Alegre, 200621

In November 2011 we met again at the Nylni peasant training center in Mali for the InternationalConference against Land Grabbing organized by LVC. Here, we sought to analyze and understandbetter the triggers, drivers and dynamics of land and resource grabbing, and identify strategies tostrengthen the capacities of our movements and communities to defend food sovereignty, thecommons and our lands and territories. In the conference declaration, Stop land-grabbing now!,we noted that land grabbing is a global phenomenon led by national and transnational elites, inves-tors and governments, and facilitated by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to control theworlds most precious resources. We recognized that although women produce most of theworlds food and take primary responsibility for family and community well being, they continueto be dispossessed from the lands they cultivate and their rights to resources by patriarchal structures.

The ght against land-grabbing is a ght against capitalism, neoliberalism and a destruc-tive economic model Land grabbing displaces and dislocates communities, destroys localeconomies and the social-cultural fabric, and jeopardizes the identities of communities, bethey farmers, pastoralists, sher-folk, workers, dalits or indigenous peoples. Those whostand up for their rights are beaten, jailed and killed. There is no way to mitigate theimpacts of this economic model and the power structures that promote it.

Final declaration, International Conference against Land Grabbing, 201122

Changing contexts

In Bukit Tinggi in 2012, we began by reviewing Porto Alegre and Nylni, as part of a morecomprehensive process of collective reconstructing of historical antecedents. The develop-ing consensus saw the issues of agrarian reform and freedom from hunger in the twentiethcentury as directly linked to decolonization and liberation struggles. Agrarian reform wasviewed in many newly independent nations as a crucial step towards redressing past injus-tices, but implemented with varying commitments and results. Agrarian reform includeddistributing land to the landless for agricultural production, ensuring appropriate accessto infrastructure, credit, resources, markets and public services, and policies that supportedsmall-scale producers and rural economies. By the early 1980s, new movements started toemerge of indigenous peoples and other rural peoples negatively affected by dams, mining,infrastructure and conservation projects, tourism, etc., who called for the defense of ances-tral domains, territories and self-determination.

In the twenty-rst century, the participants felt that agrarian reform has still not beenfully implemented anywhere. Around the world, fertile lands, water sources and bodies,and rich ecosystems have been or are being seized and enclosed by investors, nanciers,government agencies, military forces and even environmental organizations. Past agrarianreform successes are being reversed, and IFIs, FAO, the United Nations Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP) and many governments are imposing neoliberal governance frameworksthat facilitate the widespread dispossession and alienation of local agricultural producersfrom their resources through seizures and enclosures. Lands and forests are often identiedas idle, underused, degraded, or marginal to justify their transfers to large investors.

Both peasant movements and agribusinesses are growing, but family farmers whobecome entrepreneurial are crushed by agribusiness. Rural indebtedness is increasingbecause of credit programs to integrate farmers into global value chains. Fisher-folk have

21See annex to the previous contribution.22See annex to the previous contribution.

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not been able to escape the trap of neoliberalism and markets either. Since the 2004 tsunamiin Sri Lanka, the Government has intensied investment in coastal areas, allowing corpor-ations to take over the shing waters and lands of sher-folk. Across Asia and Africa, gov-ernments are pushing sher-folk to integrate into global markets, and promoting megainfrastructure, energy and tourism projects, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and industrialaquaculture in coastal areas.

Struggles for rights to food, water, land, resources, self-determination and life itself byaffected peoples and human rights defenders are dealt with extremely harshly by states andcorporations. Those who oppose destructive policies and projects are branded as anti-state,anti-development, dangerous and terrorists. Evictions, intimidation, violence, arbitraryarrests, incarceration, assassination and disappearances of rights defenders and thosewho propose alternative development models are increasing in all our countries.

Some international institutions argue that the redistribution of land to landless and land-poor communities is no longer possible, that large-scale, land-related investments arenecessary for economic growth, and that land acquisition by states and private investorsis thus inevitable. What is needed instead, they argue, are rules to mitigate negativeimpacts and make these deals win-win, for example through initiatives for transparency,consultation and information disclosure, as outlined in the World Bank designed Principlesof Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI). Many NGOs are also involved in theseinitiatives and huge amounts of money are being spent on building false expectationsthat communities can benet from these deals. The participants did not support thisapproach, feeling that it mainly serves to legitimize further land grabbing under the guiseof ethics.

Challenges and threats

We recognized that our visions and strategies must evolve to respond to the multiple crisesof food, climate, nance, poverty and unemployment, as well as strengthen our movements.

Participants identied capitalism, imperialism and neoliberalism as forces that drive theongoing exploitation of nature, peoples and cultures, while destroying rural economies andlivelihoods in myriad and inventive ways. Free trade and investment agreements promoteexport-oriented agriculture, facilitate land and ecosystem conversions, and enable land,water and resource grabbing, which destroy sustainable modes of agricultural production,local food systems and the livelihoods of small-scale agricultural producers. TransnationalCorporations (TNCs) are capturing control over markets, nature and labor by capturingnational/international regulatory power and building vertically and horizontally integratedvalue chains.

We discussed how nancial liberalization has enabled huge amounts of surplus capitalto ow into extractive industries, industrial agriculture, forestry and sheries, agro-fuels,energy and transportation infrastructure, tourism projects, urban expansion and conserva-tion areas. The new Green Revolution in Africa and elsewhere which promotes geneti-cally modied organisms, synthetic biology and land conversions is attracting nancingand other support from governments, multilateral agencies, corporations and non-govern-mental organizations (NGOs).

A rapidly expanding threat that was highlighted is the nancialization of both agricultureand nature, whereby different aspects of agriculture and nature can be commodied andtraded in nancial markets. This is showcased in the Green Economy, which is promotedby UNEP, IFIs and many governments as an innovative program for sustainable develop-ment in the midst of the climate crisis. The Green Economy proposes ways to extract

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