La Via Campesina is an enjoyable, accesible, and useful book about Via Campesina, a prominent peasants’ movement in the contemporary period. Geographers should read it–but not because the book is much of a contribution to geographic understanding. Rather, although the author, Annette Desmarais, has a Ph.D. in Geography, the book deals with a wide range of political and conceptual issues regarding agriculture, rural development, globalization and trade but without the author connecting her views to the geography literature. Why, then, should geographers–and especially readers of Human Geography–pay any attention? I will outline four reasons below, but allow me first to sketch out a quick description of the book and then identify some positive feature, as well as one or two flaws.

...Desmarais effectively weaves together her matierials on the movement with analysis of and comment on changes in the agricultural sector. She also tries hard to let us hear activists’ voices in relatively long quotations. And her analysis is open to the internal diversity within the movement. Although there are areas where she falls into line with certain groups and perspectives within movement. Although there are areas where she falls into line with certain groups and perspectives with the movement as a whole–for example, when she uncritically accepts arguments from the movement’s International Coordinating Commission, which states that ‘Great care has to be taken not to let national issues and conflicts to be drawn into the Via Campesina’ (p. 148; also Chapter Five more generally)–the work as a whole seems quite open about the movement’s future directions. Thus, in describing the movement’s internal battles to map the path towards success, Desmarais avoids the trap of offering an overly-confident, even cocky, and prescriptive account of ‘what should have been done.’ Her treatment of competing views regarding strategy and the way forward for the movement is balanced.
- Alistair Fraser

At this pivotal juncture, where alternatives are so desperately needed, there is no greater source of hope than Via Campesina. Via Campesina has emerged as the leading force opposing what’s wrong with the global food economy and the institutional architecture entrenching it, especially the World Trade Organization (WTO). Desmarais very effectively details this dogged oppositional character (highlighted in the title to Chapter 4: “The WTO...Will Meet Somewhere, Sometime. And We Will Be There”). She describes how it arose out of the growing awareness of the need to jump scales in advocacy (or to ‘go global’, as she puts it), from the local and national levels, where the energies of farmer movements had long been vested, to the scale of multi-lateral organizations where important rule making had shifted.
- Tony Weis

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The 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 on 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.” See “Peasants or Farmers?” at the end of this article.)

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.

Meanwhile, neoliberal trade policies have destroyed institutions and tariff barriers that provided farmers with market leverage, leaving them isolated victims of profiteering by gigantic worldwide agribusiness concerns.
The entire process recalls capitalism’s “de-skilling” of industrial workers, which replaced independent skilled craftsmen by assembly-line labourers. The logical end point would be replacement of the family farm with factory-style capitalist estate farming.

But this has not happened.

Family farming, Desmarais reports, has remained a prominent form of cultivation, in rich and poor countries alike. She cites data from the U.S., where farm technology is most advanced. There, family-owned farms made up 85% of all units in 1990s, although a significant proportion of them are dependent on wage labour. There is growing evidence, she says, “that small farms are more ‘efficient’ than large corporate farms” and are more “sustainable.” Indeed, ” ‘re-peasantization’ is going on as the absolute number of peasants grows.”

Farmers have survived – but have been subjected to extreme levels of corporate exploitation. Indeed agribusiness has learned to take maximum advantage of small-scale farmers, who carry the costs and risks of farm production but are robbed of almost all the proceeds. Added to that is predation by the banks, whose mortgages suck the lifeblood from farms before ultimately destroying them.
Even harsher exploitation is imposed on agricultural workers, concentrated in labour-intensive fruit and vegetable farms.

Desmarais reports National Farmers Union (NFU) findings that farmers in Canada earned just 0.3% return on equity in 1998, while “agribusiness corporations earned 5%, 20%, 50%, and even higher rates.” Since then, the situation has worsened. In 2004, the NFU reports, farmers in Canada could not even cover basic costs from their product sales.

In this context, peasants have both motivation and means for concerted resistance. The neoliberal era has in fact seen a revival of peasant activism, much of it coordinated by La Vía Campesina. Desmarais chronicles the dramatic intervention of Vía Campesina contingents in protests at successive World Trade Organization (WTO) gatherings. Among their achievements: “After having all but disappeared … over the past 25 years, agrarian reform is now back on the agenda.” Moreover, Vía Campesina has succeeded in maintaining unity of member organizations in both the richest and poorest countries of the world.

The Vía Campesina website reports member organizations’ activities in the first four months of this year in no less than 17 countries, nine of them in the Global South. Among these were a series of initiatives on behalf of the farmers and other citizens of Gaza under assault by Israel.

The peasants’ alliance has gone beyond defense of members’ immediate economic interests. It advocates the “right of peoples to define their agricultural and food policy,” which it terms “food sovereignty.” This program defends the interests of peoples of the Global South under pressure from the world’s richest states, while providing some key elements of a platform to unite working people and the oppressed both as producers and as consumers of food.

Food sovereignty embraces the principle that food is a basic human right, demands sustainable management of natural resources by those who work the land, and asserts the need for genuine agrarian reform.

In addition to calling for food self-sufficiency and strengthening family farms, La Vía Campesina’s original call for food sovereignty in 1996 included these points:
•    Guarantee everyone access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human dignity.
•    Give landless and farming people – especially women – ownership and control of the land they work and return territories to indigenous peoples.
•    Ensure the care and use of natural resources, especially land, water and seeds. End dependence on chemical inputs, on cash-crop monocultures and intensive, industrialized production.
•    Oppose WTO, World Bank and IMF policies that facilitate the control of multinational corporations over agriculture. Regulate and tax speculative capital and enforce a strict Code of Conduct on transnational corporations.
•    End the use of food as a weapon. Stop the displacement, forced urbanization and repression of peasants.
•    Guarantee peasants and small farmers, and rural women in particular, direct input into formulating agricultural policies at all levels.

The end result of such policies, Desmarais believes, will be to build and strengthen rural communities, which she views as “sites of diversity, differences, conflicts, and divisions” among people “engaged in the same argument” about “the common things in their everyday lives.” The Vía Campesina model, she states, “does not entail a rejection of modernity, or of technology and trade,” but insists that they must be inserted in a model “based on certain ethics and values in which culture and social justice count for something.”

See the rest of this review at the link.

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Three-quarters of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers. A significant minority have forged one of the largest transnational activist networks of our time in order to ensure that peasants, indigenous, and other rural people are not erased from the global equation and instead to demand that their voices be taken into account. They have also articulated an alternative path to development centered on “land, food, dignity, and life.” Annette Desmarais’s La Via Campesina:
Globalization and the Power of Peasants is at once an authoritative and authentic treatment of this remarkable surge in peasant activism at the dawn of the 21st century.

La Via Campesina means the “peasant road” or “peasant way.” It is a global network of small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, fisherpeople, and rural organizations encompassing women’s and indigenous agricultural groups, claiming to represent tens of millions across the planet. Thus, it is probably the largest single organization resisting neoliberal globalization today, and particularly those targeting the free trade regime. Desmarais demonstrates, however, that the Via Campesina is much more than just a reactionary or defensive protest movement.

These activists have collectively articulated a rural, socially-embedded, counter-hegemonic alternative to growth-obsessed liberalism. This program aims to preserve and revalorize peasant ways of life and identities while simultaneously proposing alternative peasant roads to sustainable development wherein the peasantry would be a vital socio-economic class.

The book begins by situating the Via Campesina within the current globalization debate and juxtaposes their brand of grassroots, democratic, and direct activism to the more staid, NGO-led “civil society” organizations. The author credits this global peasant network with putting the concept of food sovereignty on the international and many domestic agendas. She then analyzes the enclosure of agriculture under the most recent round of capitalist expansion, and asks “which way forward” for development praxis in this anti-peasant terrain where, until very recently, globalization’s losers have been largely ignored or, when they question the subsumption of all societal values to that of market efficiency, were chastised with Thatcher’s mantra “there is no alternative” (TINA).

The rest of the book answers the question of which way forward by descriptively analyzing the Via Campesina and their challenge to the TINA’s hegemony. It shows how diverse strands of rural activists and organizations forged common ground and solidarity as “People of the Land”, and how they have carved out an autonomous space independent of those who had paternalistically claimed to represent them, namely the Church, conservative political parties, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It traces how the Via Campesina has constructed itself from the local to the regional and finally to the global level in opposition to its main target, the World Trade Organization. By devising an organizational structure that promotes democratic participation and mass mobilization, in addition to forging strategic alliances with NGOs willing to play a supportive, not directive, role, the Via Campesina has remained locally embedded while at the same time flexing its muscle globally at protest events and in NGO and inter-governmental organization (IGO) fora.

Desmarais concludes with a candid yet sympathetic treatment of how these activists incessantly work to expose, challenge and address power disparities and oppression within their own body with regard to gender, race, economic wealth, and nationality.
On this score, the Via Campesina is an innovative experiment yielding potentially important lessons for other transnational social movements, NGOs, and IGOs alike.

Desmarais’ book is an exemplary work of Critical Globalization scholarship.  It is researched and written by a truly organic intellectual: The author has transitioned from conventional to organic farmer, to international peasant activist, and finally to scholar-activist. This insider’s vantage point is not only ethically-consistent with her emancipatory and feminist methodological approach, it is also pragmatic and probably necessary if one is to understand or explain marginalized and under-studied social classes and movements such as rural campesinos.

Although the risk of bias certainly accompanies a “committed insider” position, in this particular case, the benefits outweigh those of striving to be an “objective” outsider. Desmarais worked as technical support for the Via Campesina for a number of years. Furthermore, her mutually- arrived-at decision to pursue a doctoral dissertation (on which this book is based) in consultation with the Via Campesina’s elected leadership gave Desmarais the much-needed access to organizational resources and key informants and helped her gain trust and establish rapport with her partners in—not objects of—inquiry. Finally, this insider position provided the scholar- activist with an opportunity to support and accompany a movement in its efforts to bring about social change.

At a more general level, the work challenges intellectuals, activists, NGO workers and policy- makers across the political spectrum to confront their deeply-rooted biases against peasants and rural people—be they that when it comes to producing food, “bigger is better,” that the peasantry is a backward and disappearing class, or that urban professionals know what is best for rural people, the environment, and creating sustainable societies. In each of these ways, La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants is a model for critical, challenging, socially-engaged and purposeful scholarship.

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