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ABSTRACT
This article considers the role played by the language of human rights in a global campaign for food sovereignty. Led initially by the international peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina, the campaign opposes the globalisation of agricultural markets and neoliberal interventions in food production. Alongside other strategies, the campaign makes creative use of human rights and also seeks their institutionalisation in a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants. An examination of how the campaign employs human rights reveals a more complicated process than that suggested by the theoretical polarisation of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ accounts of rights development in the sociology of human rights. It demonstrates both wariness of state power and attempts to harness the power of the state against international forces. It also shows that a desire for legal reform co-exists with the struggle for more radical social and political transformations.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Hilary Charlesworth, Marie-Eve Loiselle, Hannah Miller, Robin Redhead, the participants in the 2016 ‘Beyond “Rights-Based” Approaches’ workshop at Kingston University (Kingston-upon-Thames, UK) and my anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback and suggestions. I am also grateful to participants in the 2015 ‘Rights, Regulation and Ritualism’ bilkura at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Oñati, Spain) for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Emma Larking is a Research Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Her disciplinary background is in law and political philosophy. She has worked as a lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Schools of Historical and Philosophical Studies and of Social and Political Studies, and was previously an Australian Research Council Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow at RegNet. She has published widely on the concept and status of human rights, and on refugees and people movements. She is author of Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights: Life Outside the Pale of the Law (Ashgate, 2014). Her current research engages with political mobilisations for social justice, with a focus on anti-poverty campaigns and the global food sovereignty movement.
Notes
1 This is implicit in Marx’ account of natural rights as protecting the autonomy of individuals conceived as egoistic and self-sufficient, and political rights as those rights that we accord each other as citizens. Neither category saves the individual without capital from wage slavery: Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46–64; Jeremy Bentham, ‘Anarchical Fallacies’, extracted in Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, ed. Jeremy Waldron (London: Methuen and Co., 1987), 46–53.
2 E.g. David Kennedy, ‘The International Human Rights Movement: Part Of the Problem?’ Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 101–125; Susan Marks, ‘Human Rights and Root Causes’, The Modern Law Review 74, no. 1 (2011): 57–78.
3 Neil Stammers, Human Rights and Social Movements (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 75.
4 ibid., 3.
5 Hannah Miller and Robin Redhead, ‘Beyond Rights-Based Approaches’, International Journal of Human Rights (2017): this issue.
6 Annette Aurélie Desmarais, La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 139. Vía Campesina is also widely known as ‘La Via Campesina’: Priscilla Claeys, Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement (London: Routledge, 2015), 141, n1. Except in the full titles of books and articles, in these notes both ‘La Via Campesina’ and ‘Vía Campesina’ will be shortened to ‘VC’.
7 Claeys, Human Rights, 102–107; Desmarais, VC, 158–59; VC, ‘The Committee on World Food Security (CFS): A New Space For the Food Policies of the World, Opportunities and Limitations’, VC Notebook, no. 4 (September 2012): 1 and 12–14; VC, ‘Gaining support for the peasant’s way - La Vía Campesina at the UN’s leading food security institutions’, VC website, published 11 October 2013, viacampesina.org/en/.
8 Priscilla Claeys, ‘The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion’, Sociology 46, no. 5 (2012): 844–860, 850; VC, ‘The CFS’, 12.
9 Kate Nash, ‘Human Rights, Movements and Law: On Not Researching Legitimacy’, Sociology 46, no. 5 (2012): 797–812, 798.
10 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 798.
11 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 798.
12 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 798.
13 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 799.
14 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 799.
15 Nash, ‘Human Rights’, 802.
16 Desmarais, VC; Maria Elena Martinez-Torres and and Peter M. Rosset, ‘La Vía Campesina: The Birth and Evolution of a Transnational Social Movement’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 37, no. 1 (2010): 149–175, 151–57; VC, ‘The International Peasants’ Voice’, viacampesina.org/en/index.php/organisation-mainmenu-44.
17 Saturnino Borras Jr, ‘La Vía Campesina and its Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform’, Journal of Agrarian Change 8, nos 2 and 3 (2008): 258–289, 274, 280; Desmarais, VC, 27, 29–30; VC, ‘The International Peasants’ Voice’.
18 See Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 165–66.
19 Desmarais, VC, 28; Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 165.
20 Desmarais, VC., 27–28, 30, 32, 38; Marc Edelman and Carwil James, ‘Peasants’ Rights and the UN System: Quixotic Struggle? Or Emancipatory Idea Whose Time Has Come?’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 81–108, 91. For less sanguine accounts of deliberative processes in the movement, see Desmarais, VC, 158–59.
21 Desmarais, VC, 21–24; 90–103; 122–23; 131–34.
22 See HRC, ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on a Draft United Nations Declaration on the Right of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas’ (A/HRC/30/55, 22 July 2015, para 21) where the Chairperson noted that ‘a positive connotation of the word “peasant” was being led from the grassroots’; and VC, ‘Specific rights for peasants are also important for European farmers’, Statement of the European Coordination of Vía Campesina to the Working Group on a UN declaration on the rights of peasants (Geneva, 15 July 2013), claiming that ‘the Confederation paysanne considered [it] a great victory to have rehabilitated the term Paysan in France. This word, very undervalued a few decades ago, is now used with pride by all farmers.’
23 Desmarais, VC, 32, 39, 104.
24 Borras, ‘VC and its Global Campaign’, 260; Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 846; Desmarais, VC, 26, 34; Eric Holt-Giménez and Raj Patel, Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2009), 86; Hannah Wittman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe, eds, Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2010), 1–5; Jean Ziegler, Christophe Golay, Claire Mahon, and Sally-Anne Way, The Fight for the Right to Food: Lessons Learned (UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 352–56.
25 VC, ‘The CFS’, back page.
26 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 846; Desmarais, VC, 33–34; 47–67; 102; 104–34, esp. 132; VC, ‘The International Peasants’ Voice’; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 2; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 40–41, 354–55.
27 VC leader, Paul Nicholson in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 7; VC, ‘The Right to Produce Food and Access to Land’ (statement presented at NGO forum, World Food Summit, Rome, November 1996); Robin Dunford, ‘Human Rights and Collective Emancipation: The Politics of Food Sovereignty’, Review of International Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 239–261, 250 ff.
28 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’.
29 VC in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 7.
30 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 354.
31 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Desmarais, VC, 47–49; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 40–41.
32 Desmarais, VC, 49; Wittman et al., Food sovereignty, 2.
33 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Desmarais, VC, 5–8; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 355.
34 Desmarais, VC, 44–45; 47.
35 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Desmarais, VC, 45, 63; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 355.
36 Ziegler et al., The Fight.
37 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Desmarais, VC, 34, 35, 106, 113; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 354.
38 VC, ‘The International Peasants’ Voice’; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 354–55.
39 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; ‘The CFS’, 4.
40 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’.
41 ibid.
42 ibid.
43 VC in Desmarais, VC, 36.
44 HRC, ‘Final Study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the Advancement of the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working In Rural Areas’, A/HRC/19/75, 24 February 2012, paras 9, 16, 25–28; Holt-Giménez and Patel, Food Rebellions!, 96–97; VC, ‘The CFS’, 4; Matias Margulis, Nora McKeon, and Saturnino Borras Jr, ‘Land Grabbing and Global Governance’, Globalizations 10, no. 1 (2013): 1–23.
45 HRC, ‘Final Study’, paras 16, 25–28; Margulis et al., ‘Land Grabbing’, 2.
46 Desmarais, VC, 36; VC, ‘The Right to Produce’.
47 Noha Shawki, ‘New Rights Advocacy and the Human Rights of Peasants: La Vía Campesina and the Evolution of New Human Rights Norms’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 6, no. 2 (2014): 306–326, 316.
48 Much land in the post-colonial developing world is state owned, and private individuals and corporations also have vast landholdings in many developing countries: see Borras, ‘VC and its Global Campaign’, 266; HRC, ‘Final Study’, paras 11–13, 16; 25–28.
49 Borras, ‘VC and its Global Campaign’, 261,ff; Claeys, Human Rights, 48; Desmarais, VC, 9; Margulis et al., ‘Land Grabbing’, 7; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 39–40.
50 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Desmarais, VC, 34; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 3.
51 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 849; Desmarais, VC, 131–32; VC, ‘The Right to Produce’; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 353.
52 VC, ‘The Right to Produce’. Note that the NGO forum produced a separate, less radical statement (Desmarais, VC, 101).
53 VC, ‘Priority to Peoples’ Food Sovereignty’, 6 November 2001, in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 200–207.
54 Ibid.; see also Ziegler et al., The Fight, 353.
55 Ziegler et al., The Fight, 353–54.
56 Such as Aventis/Bayer, Cargill, DuPont, Monsanto, Sygenta, and Unilever (Desmarais, VC, 55–60; VC, ‘Priority to Peoples' Food Sovereignty’, in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 202).
57 Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 153.
58 VC, ‘Gaining Support for the Peasant’s Way: La Vía Campesina at UN’s Leading Food Security Institutions’, VC website, viacampesina.org/en (accessed 18 April 2016); VC, Blurb to ‘The Jakarta Call’ Documentary (VC, ZinTV and Alba TV, Harare, 10 April 2014); see also Desmarais, VC, 111; Edelman and James, ‘Peasants’ Rights’, 91; Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 158.
59 VC, SADC Peoples’ Summit, 8 August 2014; Desmarais, ibid., 136.
60 Desmarais, VC, 116–18.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 156.
63 Ibid., 137–38.
64 Ziegler et al., The fight, 39 and re Indonesia, Claeys, Human Rights, 42.
65 Desmarais, VC, 5, 104–134, 154; Edelman and James, ‘Peasants’ Rights’, 91; Susan George, Another World Is Possible If … (London: Verso, 2004), 176; Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 151.
66 Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 6.
67 Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty.
68 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 846; Desmarais, VC, 8–9, 131; Holt-Giménez and Patel, Food rebellions!, 86; Martinez-Torres and Rosset, ‘VC’, 151; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty., 2–9; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 353.
69 Madeleine Fairbairn, ‘Framing Resistance’, in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 15–31, 15.
70 Regionally, the Organisation of American States recognised food sovereignty policies in some of its member states in the Declaration of Cochabamba on ‘Food Security with Sovereignty in the Americas.’ The Declaration does not itself advance food sovereignty as it encourages participation of food producers in markets and supports private-public investment as key to food security (OAS doc. AG/doc.5329/12 corr. 1, 14 June 2012).
71 Claeys, Human Rights, 30–32; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 302–303.
72 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 852; Human Rights, 29–41; Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty, 8–9; and re Brazil, Ziegler et al., The Fight, 38.
73 Desmarais, VC, 50; 55–60; 138.
74 Desmarais, VC, 136, 154–55, 157; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 39.
75 HRC, ‘Final Study’, para. 32; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 35.
76 HRC, ‘Final Study’, paras 31, 33; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 35–37, 41.
77 Ziegler et al., The Fight, 39–40.
78 Borras, ‘VC’, 270–73; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 39.
79 To around 40,000 in 2015 (Montreal WSF 2016 Collective, ‘Working Paper’, September 2015, 2).
80 Desmarais, VC, 114–15; George, Another World, 67, 228–30.
81 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 852; Desmarais, VC, 124, 131.
82 Ziegler et al., The Fight, 39–40.
83 VC, ‘The CFS’, 3.
84 VC, ‘The CFS’, 1; VC, ‘The Right to Produce’.
85 FAO, ‘Partnerships’, fao.org/partnerships/en/ (accessed 19 April 2016); VC, ‘Gaining Support’.
86 FAO, ‘Governing and Statutory Bodies’, fao.org/unfao/govnbodies/gsbhome/conference/en/ (accessed 19 April 2016); VC, ‘Gaining Support’; ‘The CFS’, 1, 3.
87 VC, ‘The CFS’, 1, 5. Moreover, the role of social movements is prioritised over that of NGOs.
88 VC, ‘The CFS’, 5, 8.
89 VC, ‘The CFS’, 8; Margulis et al. ‘Land Grabbing’, 10.
90 VC, ‘The CFS’, 4–5, see also Borras, ‘VC’, 268.
91 VC, ‘The CFS’, 3–4; VC, ‘Gaining Support’. VC was also represented in the Food Systems Caucus in the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (Desmarais, VC, 140). With FIAN, it provided background information to the former UN Commission on Human Rights (Desmarais, VC, 153).
92 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 850; Human Rights, 43, 55–56.
93 Claeys, Human Rights, 43.
94 Claeys says the decision to pursue a rights declaration ‘belongs entirely to [VC]’, but her account of IIED’s involvement seems to suggest the initial impetus could have come from the NGO: Human Rights, 56; see also 4, 55–56.
95 ibid; Arne Vandenbogaerde, ‘Localising the Human Rights Council: A Case Study of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants’, Journal of Human Rights (2015), 9. doi:10.1080/14754835.2015.1123088, 1–23.
96 Borras, ‘VC’, 265–66; Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 853; Human Rights, 147–48, n33; Vandenbogaerde, ‘Localising’; VC, ‘Declaration of [the] Rights of Peasants – Women and Men’ (Seoul, March 2009), available at viacampesina.org (accessed April 18, 2016), introductory material, para. V.
97 VC, ‘Declaration’, final pg.
98 A/HRC/RES/21/19, September 27, 2012; mandate extended by A/HRC/30/L.19, September 28, 2015.
99 27/01/2015, available at www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RuralAreas/Pages/2ndSession.aspx (accessed August 19, 2016). This ‘Advanced Version’ has now been included in a UN Document: HRC, ‘Draft Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas Presented by the Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group’, A/HRC/WG.15/3/2, 8 March 2016. The text in this document replicates that in the earlier ‘Advanced Version’ apart from some minor grammatical changes. Citations in this article are to the ‘Advanced Version’. The Working Group’s first draft replicated an HRC Advisory Committee draft, annexed to HRC, ‘Final Study’.
100 For a discussion of the hurdles to obtaining ECOSOC status, see Vandenbogaerde, ‘Localising’, 11–12.
101 See the Working Group’s reports of its first and second sessions: HRC, ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on a Draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas’ (A/HRC/26/48, 11 March 2014, paras 2 and 50(b)); HRC, ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovermental Working Group’, 2015, paras 1 and 91. Note that a third session, which I do not analyse in this article, was held 17–20 May 2016. Documents relating to the third session are available at www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RuralAreas/Pages/3rdSession.aspx (accessed August 19, 2016).
102 Sixty-five states were represented at the first session and six NGOs, with a further nine representatives of NGOs/civil society (including the two from VC) participating as panellists (HRC, ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group’, 2014, paras 5 and 6). Sixty-six states were represented at the second session and 12 NGOs, with a further four representatives of NGOs/civil society participating as panellists (‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group’, 2015, paras 6–9, Annex II).
103 Art 1. Future references to ‘peasants’ in the declaration imply a reference also to ‘other people working in rural areas’.
104 Art 2.
105 Art 3. Article 3(4) also requires states to take affirmative action to reduce discrimination against peasants.
106 Art 4.
107 Art 5.
108 VC, ‘Declaration’, introductory material, para. V.
109 Art 2(1).
110 Art 5(4).
111 E.g. VC, ‘The Right to Produce’.
112 Art 5(5).
113 This explains the significance of the Chairperson’s ‘understanding’ that the right to choose seeds would have to be exercised consistently with domestic legislation (HRC ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group’, 2015, para 37). By implication, it could be narrowed in order to ensure consistency with laws implementing international trade and other obligations.
114 Christoph Golay, ‘Negotiation of a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas’, Academy In-Brief No. 5 (Geneva Academy, Geneva, January 2015), 5, 10.
115 Art 19(1).
116 Art 19(6).
117 Art IV(12).
118 HRC ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group’, 2015, para 63.
119 Art IV(9).
120 Art 19(4).
121 See Miguel Altieri, ‘Scaling Up Agroecological Approaches for Food Sovereignty in Latin America’; Jim Handy and Carla Fehr, ‘“Drawing forth the force that slumbered in peasants’ arms”: The Economist, High Agriculture and Selling Capitalism’, both in Wittman et al., Food Sovereignty (120–33; 45–61); George, Another World, 152–53; Ziegler et al., The Fight, 41, 73.
122 Art 19(3).
123 Art 19(3).
124 Ben Cousins, ‘Capitalism Obscured: The Limits of Law and Rights-Based Approaches to Poverty Reduction’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 4 (2009): 893–908, 897.
125 HRC ‘Report of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group’, 2015, para 28.
126 In Desmarais, VC, 35, quoting New Left Review 2002, 100.
127 Art 19(5).
128 Art 10 (1) and (3).
129 Art XII(5).
130 Art XII(4).
131 Art IV(11).
132 Art V(2).
133 Art V(3).
134 Art IX(3).
135 Art X(3).
136 Art X(4).
137 Art X(6).
138 Art XI(3).
139 Art 25.
140 Claeys, ‘The Creation’, 846.
141 VC, ‘The CFS’, 1, 5; Margulis et al., ‘Land Grabbing’, 10.
142 VC, ’The CFS’, 9. Note, however, that only ‘three or four’ VC representatives were closely involved in negotiating the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Lands, Fisheries and Forests (ibid, 13).
143 ibid., 1, 11; VC, ‘Gaining Support’.
144 VC, ‘The CFS’, 11; ‘Gaining Support’.
145 VC, ‘La Via Campesina Celebrates World Food Sovereignty Day’, Press Release, 16 October 2013.
146 ibid.
147 ibid.
148 Desmarais, VC, 131–32.
149 Cited in Ziegler et al., The Fight, 73.
150 VC, ‘Joint Sign-On Statement: FAO Symposium on Biotechnology’ (2016).
151 E.g. the ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’, and its ‘Grow Africa’ programme, co-convened by the African Union Commission, the World Economic Forum, and the USA, with private sector members on its Leadership Council representing the world’s largest agribusiness interests.
152 VC, ‘The CFS’, 8.
153 Edelman and James, ‘Peasants’ Rights’, 853.
154 Golay, ‘Negotiation’, 4.
155 Desmarais, VC, 139.
156 VC, ‘Gaining Support’.
157 Rafael Alegría, quoted in Desmarais, VC, 5.
158 For a different perspective, see Claeys, Human Rights, 48–49.
159 VC, ‘Vía Campesina Promotes International Declaration’, Media Release, 24 September 2015, Geneva.
160 ibid.
161 ibid.; VC, ‘Declaration’, introductory material, para IV; ‘Report of the WG’, 2015, para.31.
162 In Adam McBeth, Justine Nolan, and Simon Rice, The International Law of Human Rights (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2011), 246.
163 Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ‘Report to the UN General Assembly’, A/70/274, August 4, 2015, para 65.
164 As discussed above, while these provisions have been removed from the 2015 draft, some civil society members of the Working Group are arguing for their reinstatement.