internationalism

Fifth International Conference of La Via Campesina, Maputo, Mozambique

By Luis Hernández Navarro and Annette Aurélie Desmarais
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2009

They numbered almost 650, from 86 countries and five continents, when they arrived in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. They were delegates, support teams and special guests of the Fifth International Conference of La Vía Campesina, which took place from October 16 to 23, 2008. To reach Maputo, most of the delegates had made a considerable economic and human effort. Maputo is not a city you get to easily. At a moment when the world economy had yet to come up for air, in which the credit, environmental, food, trade and finance crises were colliding against one another and shaking the international economic architecture, farm leaders from many regions of the planet gathered together to collectively analyze the global food crisis and its relation to the financial crisis, and to show the world why food sovereignty - the democratization of the global food system - is a viable and necessary alternative.

La Vía Campesina is a transnational agrarian movement made up of organizations of peasants, small- and medium-scale farmers, rural women, farm workers and indigenous agrarian communities throughout Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. These groups all share an intimate connection to the land and a collective will to work together to build a more humane world.

Since its inception in 1993, La Vía Campesina has become a powerful voice of radical resistance to the globalization of a neo-liberal and corporate model of agriculture. Born from peasants’ tenacious determination to continue being peasants, La Vía Campesina is now a key actor in the archipelago of altermundista (alter-globalization) movements. Resisting the kind of modernization that excludes the majority, La Vía Campesina promotes instead a modernization which embraces everyone.

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