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Abstract
The transnational agrarian social movement Vía Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.
Notes
1In advocating for such a convention, Vía Campesina has produced the ‘Declaration of Rights of Peasants – Women and Men’, sometimes called the ‘Declaration on Farmers’ Rights’ (Vía Campesina Citation2008b, Citation2008a, Citation2009a). The term ‘farmers’ rights’ is used elsewhere to refer to traditional seed-saving practices that conflict with new intellectual property regimes requiring seed certification and licensing (Borowiak Citation2004).
2We will discuss briefly the other class-defined human rights convention, the Migrant Workers Convention, ratified by 43 countries, which are generally migrant-sending rather than migrant-receiving. We use ‘economically defined grouping’ here, because ‘class’ has different meanings in legal and social scientific thought. Agrarian activists and scholars have long debated the class character of the peasantry in the sociological sense, a discussion that is beyond the scope of this article (see Bernstein and Byres Citation2001, van der Ploeg 2008). For our purposes here, the heterogeneity of contemporary peasantries in social class terms is beyond dispute, as is the reality that rights violations may impact agriculturalists that are diverse in terms of resources, economic sectors, and production relations.
3The 1989 agreement was Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), a UN agency. It established the rights of indigenous communities to their traditional territories and to the natural resources found in and on them. The ‘first substantive decision’ of the UN Human Rights Council (created in 2006 to replace a UN Commission on Human Rights tainted and dominated by undemocratic member states) was to approve the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and to pass it on for a vote by the General Assembly. The 2007 Declaration by the UN General Assembly reaffirmed the rights enumerated in 1989 and went far beyond them in terms of land rights, self-determination and political autonomy (Anaya and Wiessner Citation2007).
4On the concept of an international human rights regime, see Donnelly (Citation1986).
5In particular, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna declared, ‘All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis’ (World Conference on Human Rights Citation1993). The framers of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights experienced considerable anguish over its unenforceable, non-binding nature and its lack of legal limitations on the actions of states (Moyn Citation2010, 184–6, Sellars Citation2002, 1–24). Some of them nonetheless viewed the Universal Declaration as a ‘moral force’ that contributed to what today might be termed ‘norms evolution’.
6Customary international law is that set of norms that arises from ‘consistent conduct of States acting out of the belief that the law required them to act that way’ (Rosenne Citation1984, 55). Sometimes the interval between an initial declaration and a legally binding treaty is substantial; the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, for example, passed in 1959, but it took 30 years before the Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force. In 1981, the General Assembly approved the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief (GA 36/55), but no international treaty has yet been approved that further protects freedom of belief (Burchill Citation2008, 55).
7The OAS is currently drafting an American Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples in an echo of the UN process. NGO pressure also led several IFIs (including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank) to adopt human rights monitoring procedures for their projects in the past 20 years (Wirth Citation1998). The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (cited above) is encouraging the UNFCCC climate change process to accommodate indigenous consultation and consent rights based on the UN Declaration. The July 2010 UN General Assembly resolution on the human right to water and sanitation is already being contemplated as a tool to influence the priorities of the Millennium Development Programme.
8Core conventions, corresponding monitoring bodies and ratifying parties are listed by the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/
9The claim that ‘almost half of the people in the world are peasants’ probably overstates the numbers of this group, however it might be defined, and its proportional weight in the global population. Nonetheless, peasants, farmers and agricultural laborers are still a major component of the world population, even though as countries industrialize, the proportion of their economically active population in agriculture tends to decline. FAO data indicate that today ‘agriculture provides employment to 1.3 billion people worldwide, 97 percent of them in developing countries’ (World Bank Citation2007, 77).
10The ICESCR entered into force in 1976.
11Saragih's comment echoes the 2002 declaration of social movements that attended the World Food Summit +5 and that went on to found the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty. This statement defined food sovereignty as including ‘the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and their societies’ (NGO/CSO Forum for Food Sovereignty 2002, italics added).
12In an historic reversal, these reforms, encouraged or imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, dismantled the commodities boards and the systems of subsidies for inputs, machinery, fuel, water, and credit that the World Bank had helped to set up in the 1950s and 1960s in order to make capital-intensive agriculture possible in conditions of poverty (Shiva Citation2001).
13Several scholars have analyzed distinctions between networks, coalitions and movements (Fox Citation2005, Citation2010, Edelman Citation2005). Because Vía Campesina and its allies have characteristics of all three organizational forms, such distinctions are not of central importance here.
14People's Global Action, for example, an alliance that lasted from 1998 to 2006, included several Vía Campesina member organizations. It characterized itself as having ‘a confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker’ (Peoples' Global Action Citation2001). A list of convenors of PGA provided by Juris (Citation2008) includes Vía Campesina members such as the Landless Workers Movement (Brazil), Krishok Federation (Bangladesh), Karnataka State Farmers Association (India), and the Nationwide Federation of Landless Peasants (Philippines).
15Eight months after the 2000 ‘water war’ in Cochabamaba, Bolivia, organizers of the anti-privatization uprising hosted a gathering of water activists called ‘Water: Globalization, Privatization, and the Search for Alternatives’. The conference's Cochabamba Declaration put forward a global call for a human right to water, urging that, ‘These rights must be enshrined at all levels of government. In particular, an international treaty must ensure these principles are noncontrovertable’ (Cochabamba Declaration Citation2000). This demand was incorporated into the 2009 Bolivian Constitution, and encouraged the 2010 UN General Assembly Resolution on the Right to Water and Sanitation.
16Food sovereignty, advanced by Vía Campesina, is discussed below. Biopiracy describes the appropriation of agricultural lifeforms and knowledge for profit (Shiva Citation1999). Creative Commons is a legal schema created to legally facilitate the use and circulation of creative intellectual property without payment, but according to the wishes of the creator. Autonomous municipalities, proposed and implemented by the Zapatistas and the Mexican indigenous movement, create local forms of governance at the municipal level.
17ROPPA is Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et des Producteurs Agricoles de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (Network of Farmers and Agricultural Producers' Organizations of West Africa).
18Vía Campesina is always referred to by its Spanish name, which means ‘the peasant way’.
19Others have variously called it ‘venue shifting’ (Van Rooy Citation2004, 20) or ‘leap-frogging’ (O'Brien et al. Citation2000, 61, Howard Hassmann 2005).
20Anti-sweatshop campaigners have repeatedly invoked international norms while petitioning and pressuring transnational corporations. They sought to convert the latter into (often unwilling or resistant) tools to ensure adherence to global labor standards. On the other hand, the effort to criminalize marital rape won international legitimacy as a requirement of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), in part through the Beijing Women's Conference. Since then, changes to national laws on marital rape have been demanded through the periodic review process of the Convention, adding to local campaigns for criminalization.
21It has also included regional lobbying of ASEAN governments. The annual reports on ‘peasants’ rights violations’ focus largely on countries where Vía Campesina has member organizations (e.g. Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil, Honduras, Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, and India). In a trenchant analysis of peasant resistance in contemporary China, Walker (Citation2008, 479) laments that Vía Campesina's ‘annual reports of “Violations of Peasants’ Human Rights” virtually ignore this area of the world where one in three peasants reside’.
22Ecological debt, according to an Ecuadorian organization in the forefront of the movement, is ‘the debt accumulated by Northern, industrial countries toward Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases, from the industrial countries’. Its mechanisms include ‘the ecologically unequal terms of trade caused by goods being exported without taking into account the social and environmental damages caused by their extraction or production [and] the intellectual appropriation and the use of ancestral knowledge related to seeds, the use of medicinal plants and other knowledge, upon which the biotechnology and the modern agro-industries are based, and for which, we [in the Global South] have to pay royalties' (Acción Ecológica Citation2005).
23The United States signed the latter Covenant in 1977, but has never ratified it; it only ratified the ICCPR in 1992. The Soviet Union signed both accords but opposed the optional protocol of the ICCPR that allowed for international review of citizen complaints.
24More generally, the intensification of global civil society activity in the 1990s generated momentum in the UN system for institutional changes that opened new space for social movements and NGOs, notably during the 1990 World Conference for Children in New York and the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development. After 1996, UN reforms broadened criteria for granting NGOs ‘consultative status’ with UN agencies. The trend intensified following the 2004 report of the ‘Cardoso Panel’ on United Nations–civil society relations chaired by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Falk Citation2006, McKeon Citation2009, Willetts Citation2006).
25This process of redefinition paralleled the emergence of demands for ‘food sovereignty’ and the intensifying critique of technical measures of ‘food security’.
26Edelman's recorded interviews with Costa Rican, Nicaraguan, Canadian, and Dutch participants in 1996 Rome FAO and 2001 Rome +5 events.
27Hathaway (Citation2002) provides an able summary of different theoretical approaches, as well as a cross-national empirical test of the effectiveness of five international and five regional human rights treaties.
28After 10 years of negotiating a text introduced by indigenous peoples in 1995, just two of 45 articles had been adopted (Cooper Citation2005).
29ALBA is the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, an alliance of populist and left-leaning governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and various small Caribbean countries. In 2005 the Venezuelan government signed a technical cooperation agreement with Vía Campesina to create an Institute of Agro-Ecology, coordinated by Latin American Vía Campesina member organizations. The Institute enrolled its first class of 250 students in 2006.
30For a summary of existing international recognition of land rights see South African Human Rights Commission (2004, 9). For overviews of land reform policies, see Borras and Franco (Citation2010) and Sikor and Müller (Citation2009).
31France, for example, signed the ICCPR but nonetheless asserted that the article protecting the rights of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities to ‘their own culture … religion, or … language’ contradicted the French Constitution's guarantee of ‘equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion’ (Burchill Citation2008, 59).
32The UK lodged derogations to its obligations under the ICCPR and the European Human Rights Court following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. It argued that it now faced a singular security threat that required suspending basic rights for individuals suspected of terrorist involvement (Burchill Citation2008, 62–3).
