[E-rundbrief] Info 1611 - International Day of Peasants Struggles 2017

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 1611 - La Via Campesina: This April 17th 2017 – We 
defend the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. 
Focus on the Global South: Special Edition on the International Day of 
Peasants' Struggles 2017.

Bad Ischl, 17.4.2017

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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This April 17th 2017 – We defend the rights of peasants and other 
people working in rural areas

La Via Campesina

Press Release

https://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/actions-and-events-mainmenu-26/17-april--day-of-peasants-struggle-mainmenu-33/2280-this-april-17th-we-defend-the-rights-of-peasants-and-other-people-working-in-rural-areas

(Harare, April 17, 2017) Today La Via Campesina, the international 
peasant movement, commemorates the International Day of Peasants' 
Struggle[1] with a focus on strengthening, protecting and recognizing 
the human rights of peasants. The initiative towards a United Nations 
(UN) Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in 
Rural Areas is one of the ways to legitimatize our struggles to build 
and reinforce food sovereignty where by our social, cultural, economic 
and political values are fully respected and upheld. We believe that 
in championing the rights of peasants and other people working in 
rural areas, humanity also wins.

Hundreds of millions of peasants are forced to live and lead 
undignified lives as their basic rights are increasingly very 
vulnerable as a result of capitalist and neoliberal logic of profit 
maximisation. Our rights to land, water, seeds, biodiversity, decent 
income are continuously being compromised, denied, violated and 
usurped. We, the Peasants, despite producing the bulk of the food 
consumed globally, continue to face criminalisation and discrimination.

We, the peasants, women, youth, men, and indigenous peoples, however, 
continue to build our struggles globally to defend our rights against 
corporate interests, persecution and violence against peasants and 
other people working in rural areas. We struggle for a genuine 
agrarian reform and a better protection of rights to land against 
land-grabbing; we continue to conserve, use, and exchange our seeds - 
denouncing laws and interests that seek to prohibit such practises; we 
promote agroecology, traditional practices and knowledge to combat 
climate change; we continue the struggle to end corporate control of 
our food and reject free trade agreements; and we keep on building 
gender equality and move forward for the rights of peasant women, 
youth, migrants and other people working in rural areas.

Next month in May, the 4th session of UN Open Ended Intergovernmental 
Working Group will be held to finalize the UN Declaration on the 
Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Our 
collective struggles will pressure governments and other parties to 
support and commit to a strong UN declaration. We believe that the UN 
declaration will be crucial to solve malnutrition, hunger, poverty, 
and climate crisis.

Join us today by organising demonstrations, public debates and 
discussions, film screenings, farmers' markets, festivals, lobbying 
governments, or any other solidarity actions. We are calling to all 
people's movements, women, youth, indigenous, fisher folk, migrants, 
workers, environmentalists, to support this movement. Share your 
actions by sending to lvcweb at viacampesina.org so that we can capture 
and circulate them on our MAP of actions.


[1] On April 17th 1996, in the Amazonian state of Pará, at Eldorado 
dos Carajás, the state military police massacred peasants organized in 
the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), killing 19 individuals 
and injuring 69. That day, 1500 women and men organized in the MST 
occupied and blocked the BR-150 highway in Eldorado dos Carajás, with 
the aim of bringing pressure to bear on the State and Federal 
governments to implement agrarian reform. State authorities, the 
police, the army and powerful local landowners were involved in the 
planning and executing of the massacre.

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Special Edition on the International Day of Peasants' Struggles

Focus on Global South

http://mailchi.mp/95f30685d9e5/special-edition-on-the-international-day-of-peasants-struggles?e=5df8263f6a

To mark the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, Focus on the 
Global South releases this special edition that puts together articles 
on issues that small farmers and peasants continue to face.  These 
pieces also highlight the different forms of resistance that farmers 
and peasants put up amidst these challenges.

Mary Ann Manahan of Focus-Philippines remembers the hard work of her 
grandfather, a small farmer who eked out a living from his small farm 
of coffee and fruit, and died with hardly anything to pass on to his 
family but his small plot and his pride for being a farmer. Ms Manahan 
would realize the bigger context of her grandfather’s hardships as she 
grows up, studies, and becomes involved in the agrarian reform 
struggle in the Philippines.

Niabdulghafar Tohming from Focus-Thailand tells the story of 
communities in forest lands who have been harassed, criminalized, and 
dispossessed because of the military government’s Forestry Plan.

Similarly, in India, tenanted farmers are under attack via state-led 
repression, with many of those affected getting imprisoned under false 
charges, but they pledge to forge ahead with their resistance.

Raphael Baladad’s (Focus-Philippines) reflections on youth power gives 
us something to be hopeful about, in the midst of the decades-long 
struggle of Filipino peasants. Peasant leaders have grown “tired and 
weary, and literally old,” but the involvement of students and youth 
in their struggle are seen as means to not only re-energize the 
peasant movement but the youth’s as well.

Annalie Gepulani, Focus intern, writes her impressions of the farming 
community in Bataan, Philippines, she visited.

Afsar Jafri covers a peasant mobilization in New Delhi to commemorate 
this day.


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Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
Wolfgangerstr. 26, A-4820 Bad Ischl, Austria,
fon: +43 6132 24590, Informationen/ informations,
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