← Wiki

Organization

La Vía Campesina

Also known as: LVC, International Peasants' Movement

International peasant-and-small-farmer movement — a coalition of ~182 organizations across 81 countries representing an estimated 200 million farmers, landless workers, Indigenous people, migrants, and agricultural workers. Founded 1993 in Mons, Belgium by farmer-organizations from four continents alarmed by the World Trade Organization's emerging trade-and-agriculture agenda. The largest grassroots social movement in the world by membership. Coined and continues to advance the framework of *food sovereignty* — the right of peoples to define their own food and agricultural policy, distinct from the corporate-trade framing of *food security*. Operates internationally through regional secretariats; the global secretariat rotates between continents every four years (current cycle: Africa).

Why this entry

The largest grassroots social movement on Earth, organized around food and agriculture, isn’t on this platform. [[mission-district-sf|The mission]] of worldwide abundance has La Vía Campesina as its single largest existing institutional ally — 200 million people, in 81 countries, organized in 182 farmer-organizations, working continuously since 1993 on the same set of questions [[0mn1one|the platform]] is asking.

What food sovereignty means

La Vía Campesina’s foundational framework — articulated at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome — distinguishes [[food-sovereignty|food sovereignty]] from food security:

  • Food security is the corporate-trade framing: every person in the world having enough calories, regardless of where they come from or who controls their production. Compatible with industrial monoculture, long supply chains, and corporate concentration.
  • [[food-sovereignty|Food sovereignty]] is the peasant-movement framing: the right of peoples to define their own food and agricultural policy. Who grows the food, who decides what is grown, who eats it. Compatible with agroecology, regional foodsheds, and farmer-and-community control.

The frameworks are not equivalent. The first can be achieved by Cargill and ADM if grain reaches every market; the second cannot, because corporate concentration is itself the structural-violence the framework rejects.

What La Vía Campesina has done

A partial inventory:

  1. The Declaration on the Rights of Peasants — a 12-year campaign that resulted in the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) in 2018. Recognizes peasant rights to land, seeds, water, food, biodiversity, justice, and political participation as a binding international framework.
  2. Agroecology training schools — the Instituto Agroecológico Latinoamericano (IALA) network: 8 farmer-and-Indigenous-led agroecology schools across Latin America that train farmers in the technical, political, and ecological skills of small-scale food production.
  3. International gatherings — annual continental meetings, every-four-years global conferences. The 2017 Derio (Basque Country) global conference brought 450 delegates from 81 countries.
  4. Direct-action campaigns — supporting members in confrontations with land-grab projects, GMO releases, agricultural-trade-agreements; the movement provides international visibility and solidarity for local fights.
  5. Building the food-sovereignty framework into national legislation — Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nepal, Senegal, and Mali have each incorporated food-sovereignty language into their constitutions or legal codes, substantially through La Vía Campesina advocacy.

What this means for the platform

  1. [[0mn1one|The platform]] isn’t alone. Worldwide abundance is the work of an organized 200-million-person global movement with 30 years of continuous practice. [[0mn1one|The platform]] should be in conversation with the movement’s existing intellectual and organizing infrastructure, not building from scratch as if the movement didn’t exist.
  2. [[directory|The directory]] should make space for international member-organizations. MASIPAG (Philippines), MST (Brazil), KRRS (India), Confédération Paysanne (France), National Farmers Union (Canada), Rural Coalition (U.S.), [[farm|Family Farm]] Defenders (U.S.). These are the working institutional infrastructure of the global mission.
  3. [[food-sovereignty|Food sovereignty]] is the right framing for 0mn1.one’s commerce. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s commerce-channel work — selling ethically-produced food, supporting farmer-producers, building markets — should articulate itself in the food-sovereignty framework rather than the corporate-food-security one. The movement has been building the language for thirty years.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Parallels: [[vandana-shiva]] · [[global-seed-sovereignty]]
  • Contains: [[berta-caceres]]
  • Member of: [[organization]]

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Cultural

parallels

  • Berta Cáceres COPINH was a member of La Via Campesina; Cáceres represented Honduran Indigenous-and-peasant interests at international peasant gatherings
  • Global seed sovereignty network the largest international peasant-movement coalition; the institutional spine
  • MASIPAG MASIPAG is a member of La Vía Campesina; the Filipino expression of the global movement

3 inbound links · 4 outbound