Derechos de la Madre Tierra

[ESPAÑOL ABAJO]
[FRANÇAIS CI-DESSOUS]

The people of the world confront the advance of capitalism: Rio +20 and beyond

Position Paper of La Via Campesina

Governments from all over the world will meet in Río de Janeiro, Brasil from June 20-22 2012, to supposedly commemorate 20 years since the “Earth Summit”, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, that established for the first time a global agenda for “sustainable development”. During this summit, in 1992, three international conventions were adopted: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention to Fight Desertification (Read more...)

Indian Farmers denounce government sponsored bio-piracy plans

Recently the head of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research was reported as saying that it is seeking to collaborate with MNCs, by offering its massive seed gene bank in exchange for “expertise” from private companies to develop a variety of high-yielding, climate-tolerant seeds that could be used in India and elsewhere in return for “a small share of the profits” (Read more...)

India, Farmers movements protest against Moserbaer power plant land grabbing
Letter to Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Chied Minister of Madhya Pradesh
On behalf of farmers movements, peoples organizations and civil society we condemn the arrest of the farmers and tribal's protesting the Moserbaer thermal power plant in Anuppur district of MP (Read more...)

Land grabbing: La Via Campesina urges States to act

(Rome, May 10th, 2012) This week, the United Nations Committee on World Food Security is convening for a special session to formally adopt the recently concluded Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security. These new guidelines could prove to be one small but important step towards reforming the policies at the root cause of the food crisis (Read more...)

Rio+20: International Campaign of Struggles: Peoples of the World against the Commodification of Nature
La Via Campesina calls on all the peasant organizations of the world and their allies to organize actions in the month of June
The advance of the capitalist system that has reached unprecedented dimensions in the past two decades is resulting in crises that are of equally unprecedented dimensions. The financial, food, energy and environmental crises are phases of the structural crisis of capitalism, which has no limits in its search for more profits. And, as in other structural crises, it impacts the peoples of the world and not the elites (Read more...)

A new report on peasant and farmer mobilization against land grabbing
(Bamako, 7 May 2012) The National Coordination of Peasant Organizations (CNOP) of Mali and La Via Campesina have today published a new report on the mobilization of social movements against land grabbing. Land grabs jeopardize food sovereignty and threaten sustainable family farming and peasants everywhere in the world (Dowload the report here).
Land Grabbing in Mali: Farmers arrested

(Bamako, 24 April 2012) Since 2009, men and women peasants of the Office du Niger in Mali, in particular those from Sanamadougou, Saou and Sansanding are being treated unfairly by certain investors. The targeted wrongs include bastonnades, or beatings with sticks and other weapons, arrests, the destruction of seed and seedlings, field grabbing and the grabbing of water supply sources. Dozens of families are now living from the solidarity of the other villages, having been unable to cultivate for three years, due to the lack of fields (Read more...)

The land belongs to those who cultivate it
Press release, Rome, 25th of April 2012, European Coordination Via Campesina
We, farmers, gathered in General Assembly in Rome this 24th and 25th of April, express our support and solidarity to all people struggling for the preservation of land, the access to land and to the profession. We are opposing the vague of privatisation of public land: (Read more...)
Opposition to biotech giant Monsanto growing worldwide, new report shows

FOEI, La Via Campesina and Combat Monsanto Media advisory
– Today, the day that biotech giant Monsanto (NYSE: MON) releases its second quarter earnings, a new report by civil society organisations shows that around the world small-holder and organic farmers, local communities and social movements are increasingly resisting and rejecting Monsanto, and the agro-industrial model that it represents (Read more...)

Farmers demand the World Bank and Wall Street stop grabbing their lands

The World Bank is playing a leading role in a global land grab, says farmers' movement and its international allies.(1) The World Bank’s policies for land privatisation and concentration, have paved the way for corporations from Wall Street to Singapore to take upwards of 80 million hectares of land from rural communities across the world in the past few years, they say in a collective statement released today at the opening of the World Bank’s Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC ( Read more...)

Tanzania: Farmers want the government to stop land grabbing

Small-scale farmers in the country now want the government to stop any kind of land grabbing purportedly being carried out in the name of public investment, saying the trend would soon send the country into utter chaos.
Farmers also have been persuaded on the need of unite in strong organisation in order to jointly defend their right even if it would cost them their lives (Read more...)

Honduras, Thousands of Honduran workers occupy land
Thousands of Honduran farm workers have launched a co-ordinated land occupation, squatting on some 12,000 hectares nationwide and fuelling new tensions over land rights, authorities said.
More than 3,500 families started squatting on farmland in the provinces of Yoro, Cortes, Santa Barbara, Intibuca, Comayagua, Francisco Morazan, El Paraiso and Choluteca on Tuesday - the International Peasant Day of Struggle (Read more...)
 
17 April: More than 250 actions around the world for the International Day of Peasant's Struggle

Small scale farmers and their allies are celebrating the International Day ofPeasant's Struggle tomorrow, 17th of April 2012, organising more than 250 actions and manifestations allover the globe. This event commemorates the massacre of 19 landless farmers demanding access to land and justice in1996 in Brazil ( Read more...)
 
The Voluntary Guidelines on the Tenure of Land Fisheries and Forests are complete
 
(Rome, 13/03/2012) Last Friday, 9th of March in the evening, the Committee on Word Food Security (CFS) completed the intergovernmental negotiations of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on theTenure of Land Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security (Read more...)
 
U.N. Human Rights Council Exhorted to Defend Peasants’ Rights
 
GENEVA, Mar. 9, 2012 (IPS) - Decades after peasants’ networks have advocated for a new legal instrument to protect the rights of small farmers to land, seeds, traditional agricultural knowledge and freedom to determine the prices of their production, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) may decide to start drafting a declaration on peasants’ rights next week (Read more...)
 
Stop Water Grabbing!

La Via Campesina Media Advisory Representatives of small-scale farmers and family farmers member of La Via Campesina from Madagascar, Mali, Bangladesh, Mexico and several European countries will come to Marseille, France from March 12th to 17th. They will share their experiences on the struggle to defend small-scale farmers right over water. They will also present their solutions on how to cope with the water crisis (Read more...)
 
La Via Campesina and the International Women’s Day
 
March 8th International Women’s Day, is the day upon which we honour the memory of the many women workers, both rural and urban, who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for their rights, for justice and to put an end to all discrimination and the social, economic and political inequities that have given sustenance to global capitalist development. It is also a day for celebration because of the important progress that has been achieved in women’s struggles for emancipation (Read more...)
 
Call for April 17: International Day of Peasant Struggle
 
(Jakarta, 2 March 2012) April 17 is the International Day of Peasant Struggle, commemorating the massacre of 19 peasants struggling for land and justice in Brazil in 1996. Every year on that day actions take place around the world in defence of peasants and small-scale farmers struggling for their rights (Read more...)
 
Intervention of Henry Saragih at the 19th session of UN Human Rights Council
 
(...) We defend small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way of promoting social justice and dignity—and we strongly oppose every form of agriculture that is destroying people and nature. Not long before the Final Study of the Advisory Committee, a professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands published an important book called The New Peasantries, in which he states that “there are now more peasants than ever before in history and they still constitute some two-fifths of humanity.” (Read more...)
 
Reclaiming our future: Rio +20 and Beyond

La Vía Campesina Call to Action

On 20-22 June 2012, governments from around the world will gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to commemorate 20 years of the "Earth Summit", the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that first established a global agenda for "sustainable development". During the 1992 summit, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Convention to Combat Desertification, were