The Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Gender Equality
September 05, 2005
One of the dangers in presenting analyses around gender and land is that it can too easily be compartmentalized, with the analysis plucked away from the patriarchal mainstream of land politics. Once they have been de-contextualized, free-floating ideas about ‘gender and land’ lend themselves to policy interventions that attempt to ‘mainstream’ them once again. Yet gender politics in debates around land are not supplementary analyses to be ‘mainstreamed’, nor ahistorical complaints about power, but actively constructed through existing institutional politics. In order to address this concern, this chapter begins with a short introduction to the institutional context and location of the gender politics that I address, specifically looking at Via Campesina and the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, before moving to consider the gendered land politics that have been addressed through these forums.
* This is a shorter (cut) version of the original paper. The full version (in Spanish) can be found at: http://www.acciontierra.org/display.php?article=315
“The processes of women’s self-organization and self-empowerment that we are building are the new spring that will inspire our struggle for agrarian reform.” - Cochabamba Declaration
One of the dangers in presenting an analysis around gender and land is that it can too easily be compartmentalized, with the analysis plucked away from the patriarchal mainstream of land politics. Once they have been de-contextualized, free-floating ideas about ‘gender and land’ lend themselves to policy interventions that attempt to ‘mainstream’ them once again. Yet gender politics in debates around land are not supplementary analyses to be ‘mainstreamed’, nor ahistorical complaints about power, but actively constructed through existing institutional politics. In order to address this concern, this chapter begins with a short introduction to the institutional context and location of the gender politics that I address, specifically looking at Via Campesina and the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, before moving to consider the gendered land politics that have been addressed through these forums.
Structural adjustment programs and regional and global trade agreements effective as of the 1980s have had disastrous effects on the life of rural communities, and have unleashed profound social and economic transformations in the countryside. Facing this landscape, La Vía Campesina formally constituted itself in 1993 with the purpose of collectively confronting threats and the actors responsible for these policies, as well as articulating the visions and demands of diverse rural groups4.
The creation of La Vía Campesina resulted from a series of encounters and exchanges primarily between peasant organizations from the Americas and Europe, in which the organizations sought a common analysis and understanding of their position in current—increasingly globalized—economic, social, and political relations; and of the principal changes that were affecting rural communities all over the world, such as increasing poverty and inequality, the accelerating disappearance of small- and medium-scale producers, the destruction of the social fabric in the countryside, and the continued devaluation of the peasant identity and peasant forms of life and production in this latest attack by agricultural modernization, among others. The convergence was also motivated by the need to exchange experiences and strategies for organization and struggle in the face of such threats, and to explore possible forms of collective resistance and action.
In this analysis, the peasant organizations identified the international financial institutions (IFI), particularly the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the regional and global free-trade treaties that preceded the World Trade Organization (WTO), as the main promoters of the structural adjustment policies that had overwhelmingly benefited great transnational corporations and practically driven peasant and indigenous communities to extinction. Noteworthy among these policies are the processes of de-regularization of land ownership and agrarian counter-reform; the dismantling of rural public services and those that supported production and commercialization by small and medium producers; the fostering of highly capitalized and technified agro-exportation; the push toward the liberalization of agricultural commerce and toward policies of food security that are based on international commerce. Through this analysis, the peasant organizations also identified the fact that the institutional framework and the decision-making processes of agrarian and agricultural policies had shifted from the national to the regional and international levels, and it was thus crucial, to that extent, that peasant organizations articulate their efforts beyond the national framework in order to effectively act and defend their rights and interests regionally and internationally.
The food sovereignty framework was developed as an alternative proposal to the neoliberal orthodoxy {Rosset, 2003 #66}. Within this framework was the concrete demand for “The recognition of the rights of peasant women who play an essential role in agricultural and food production.” La Vía Campesina has turned into one of the main global social movements that are radically opposed to neoliberalism and that seek to strengthen the processes of self-organization and autonomy of the Peasant Movement. It also seeks to strengthen alliances with other sectors in order to develop policies and institutional frameworks alternative to the current ones, so as to achieve a more just world. La Vía Campesina is also a movement that is seriously committed to the struggle for gender equality. Rural women have actively participated in the debate and the political construction of this movement. It was they, for example, who demanded that “the right to produce our own food in our own territory” be at the very heart of the notion of food sovereignty{Desmarais, 2003 #25; Desmarais, 2003 #27; Via Campesina, 2003 #51}. Furthermore, women introduced a health dimension into the critique of an agriculture that is highly dependent on chemicals, and the need for a sustainable agriculture that protects the environment. It must be underlined that the International Coordinating Commission of La Vía Campesina has equal gender representation, so that every region must elect a male and a female representative. The fact that La Vía Campesina attached so much importance to the topic of gender has forced member regions and organizations to address the matter, and it has opened up important spaces for peasant and indigenous women at the national and international levels.
One of the institutional instruments for this cooperation has been the collaboration between Via Campesina and FIAN, the Foodfirst Information and Action Network. The collaboration was instituted through the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR).
Due to the limitations in the operating capacity of the GCAR, owing to a shortage of resources, and to the lack of better coordination between the GCAR and the gender commission of La Vía Campesina, the subject of gender was not raised at the beginning of the GCAR, but only recently, in 2002. The first activity was to organize an international research mission to Bolivia, from a gender perspective, in November 2002 {FIAN, 2002 #32}. International research missions are an instrument of human rights work, adapted by the GCAR for its purposes. The objective of these missions is to verify reports of concrete cases in which the human right to food seems to be threatened or violated for the following reasons: non-implementation of agrarian reform, failures in the implementation of agrarian reform, processes of agrarian counter-reform, or repression of agrarian reform activists and their organizations. These reports are documented and disseminated both at the national and international level as a way of supporting the struggles of those social movements, and of pressuring the nation-states to fulfill their obligations to human rights. An international delegation made up of women and men from Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Austria, and Germany thus traveled to Bolivia with the aim of learning about the specific conditions and the principal problems faced by Bolivian peasant and indigenous women with respect to access to and control over land, and to document future concrete cases of violations of the right of these women to food; as well as to address the issue of gender relations within peasant organizations that struggle for land.
This mission was very important from several points of view: first, because it mobilized international support and solidarity with Bolivian women by stressing the legitimacy of their demands at a moment when they faced the repression of the government. Second, because it was an opportunity to intensify the exchange of experiences and learning regarding gender and agrarian reform between Bolivian women and the women and men of different countries who made up the international delegation. Third, because the mission served as the beginning of the development of a specific working methodology, which guarantees a comprehensive focus on gender in the GCAR, and makes possible a process of women’s self-organization and training within La Vía Campesina.
As a result of the exchange of information and the awareness raised about the subject through the Bolivian mission, the GCAR began to use other forms of action to address the issue. For example, in February 2003 the Emergency Network10 of the GCAR launched an international letter-writing campaign in support of the demands of a group of landless women, principally affiliated with the peasant organization CNTC, who had occupied idle lands belonging to the Honduran State in order to pressure the authorities into parceling out those lands, thereby implementing the legislation on agrarian reform in their favor. In March 2003 the Emergency Network also launched an international letter-writing campaign in support of the national mobilization of rural Brazilian women and their demands, among which the following were included: to prioritize a wide-ranging agrarian reform policy by expropriating the land and latifundios [large estates] that do not fulfill their social function; to render the joint adjudication of lands obligatory, that is, the title deeds under the names of both man and woman in the various agrarian reform programs; to create subsidized credit lines specifically destined for rural workers; not to alter the victories and retirement rights obtained by rural working women in the current reform; and to support documentation and literacy campaigns for women at a national level.
The case of Honduran landless women continues unresolved and has been intensely followed by FIAN. In addition to helping them to obtain better legal assistance and support for further development of productive projects on occupied land, FIAN made a call to its entire network so that on October 16, 2004—the date on which FIAN celebrates Global Action Day for the Right to Feed Oneself—all members would mobilize around the Honduran embassies in their respective countries, demanding that the lands be turned over to the women, and their rights observed.
The mobilization of Brazilian rural women, in turn—though it did not succeed in broadening the agrarian reform process—was successful in making joint adjudication of land obligatory and in creating specific lines of credit for rural women. Nevertheless, the results of a recent GCAR research mission to Brazil identified problems with the implementation of these measures {FIAN, 2003 #34}. The PRONAF women’s credit program, , has not been able to overcome discriminatory practices against rural working women in the access to credit because the logic of the authorities continues to be one of “credit for families.” Women thus have no access to loans because “the family,” that is, the man, generally already has one; because many of them do not have identification documents; and because many of them still do not have title deeds to their name, which could serve as collateral for credit.
The GCAR’s most important activity in the field of gender has been the international seminar “Agrarian Reform and Gender,” which took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia in June 2003. Delegates from peasant, indigenous, and human rights movements from 24 different countries came together in Cochabamba to exchange experiences of struggle for land and for gender equity, as well as to generate accords and common work strategies in order to systematically integrate the focus on gender into the work of the GCAR. Unfortunately there was very limited participation from Asians and Africans in the seminar due to insufficient funding. Notwithstanding, the seminar was very important because it was the first time within our two organizations that the discrimination against women in past agrarian reform processes was discussed in depth and in detail, as well as the specific challenges of the current moment and the way to face them. The seminar included the participation of Carmen Diana Deere and Shamin Meer, two internationally recognized experts in the topic, who contributed valuably to the work carried out there. Below I will present some of the themes and debates that emerged in the seminar, particularly emphasizing those aspects that, in our view, have scarcely been taken up in the international debate on gender and land, and which require more reflection and development.
Cochabamba Reflections
The rights of women to land: a Trojan Horse of Neoliberalism?
Legal reforms that guarantee the equal rights of rural women to possess and inherit land, and to be beneficiaries of agrarian reform, have constituted the principal axis of the debate over gender and land. Legal discrimination and lack of recognition and effective protection of women’s rights to land are still not completely overcome and continue to seriously affect rural women in many countries. Furthermore, although women have de jure conquered equal rights to land in numerous countries, and important advances have taken place in all regions, de facto there continue to be multiple problems (administrative, institutional, cultural, etc.) that impede the effective enjoyment of women’s rights to land. An important part of the current debate is focused on analyzing these factors and determining how the reforms could be effectively implemented (Agarwal 1994, 2003; Deere and León 2002; Deininger and World Bank. 2003; FAO 2001; FIAN and Campesina 2003; Razavi 2003).
In Cochabamba, a particular aspect of this topic emerged in the discussion: many of the constitutional and legal reforms that strengthened the principles of equality and non-discrimination and, concomitantly, the rights of women to land in Africa and Latin America, temporarily coincided with the introduction of structural adjustment policies, and, in some countries, ran parallel to other constitutional reforms that made viable the deregulation and privatization of land and the liberalization of the economy. This led some women in Cochabamba to point out that the reforms that recognized and strengthened women’s rights to land did so in the neoliberal framework of protecting and strengthening individual property rights, and to that extent represented a doubtful, or at least ambiguous advance, because: how secure is individual entitlement to lands for peasant women in a context of privatization and economic liberalization policies that have already brought about the dispossession and loss of lands of many families and communities?13 Also, as noted by Deere and León in their research, although legal reforms have substantially increased the proportion of beneficiaries with respect to the total in access-to-land programs, what good is it if the processes of land redistribution in Latin America have practically ceased or are reduced to a minimal expression?14
The identification of strengthening women’s rights to land with strengthening women’s individual rights to private property continues to be an implicit one, and is a predominant idea in a great many public policies and in the debate over gender and land. The identification of women’s rights to land with individual entitlement of land to women has been intensely questioned and debated in Subsaharan Africa, perhaps more than in other regions, because some saw in it the intention of opening up customary systems of land tenancy to the market and to foreign investment; and because it calls into question the customary law and practices and interferes with the customary law of local governments, also guaranteed and protected by constitutional reforms (see (FIAN and Campesina 2003; Tsikata 2003; Walker 2002; Whitehead and Tsikata 2003).
In Latin America this identification has been called into question primarily by indigenous peoples. Deere and León document that in the early 1990s an Ecuadorian indigenous woman stated: “the whole issue of gender and rights to land is irrelevant, since indigenous peoples have not put forward the individual demand to land; it has always been collective from the community’s perspective” (Deere and León 2002, 305). The tension between the rights of women and the rights of indigenous peoples to preserve their traditional customary law and practices is still there, even though several steps have been taken toward reconciling the feminist vision and the indigenous vision. Indigenous women have started to question the construction of customary normative systems and the decision-making structures in their towns and communities, pointing out that they are excluded from those processes (Deere and León 2002, 323). This sphere of the debate was reflected in Cochabamba, where the hosting organizations, while presenting their experience in defending indigenous and communal lands, as well as some of their legal victories toward the recognition of indigenous territories, emphasized the following points:
Communal property, in its diverse modalities considered in the law, could become an important tool in stopping neoliberal purposes. If it is intelligently taken advantage of by peasant and indigenous organizations, it can be an instrument for counteracting the expansion of the new latifundio and, more broadly, the land market.
Communal norms, which are necessary for keeping collective property intact, signify a great defiance. In many cases it will not be enough to base a case solely on customary law and practices, so communities will also need to adapt norms, reconstruct them, or even create them, in order to respond to contemporary demands, on top of the enormous existing differences between communities and peoples. In the latter sense, this body of norms for administrating and conserving communal or collective property will have the opportunity to incorporate measures that tend toward gender equity. (Almaraz 2002, 90)
This defense of communal lands and territories as forms of land tenancy, not only for indigenous peoples but also for peasant communities and organizations, is an idea that has been gaining ground in Latin America. Following the example of indigenous peoples, an increasing number of peasant communities in Latin America reclaim their cultural identity as peasants, for whom land is not merely a commodity or capital, but the basis for the very existence of the community and the integrating nucleus of all of its fundamental rights16.
The participants in the Cochabamba seminar advocated communal forms of land tenancy17, and it remained clear that this did not exclude also advocating women’s individual rights to land, as a personal right and under equal conditions with men. The question is therefore how to strengthen women’s rights to land in different systems of land tenancy and not only as individual private property18. The discussion of how to develop concrete proposals for protecting both women’s rights to land, and also alternative systems of land tenancy and production that guarantee effective protection to peasant and indigenous communities, and which adjust to the specificities of different contexts and situations, was left pending and will surely be a field of work for the coming years. The drafting of proposals will have to take into account that, from the perspective of gender equality, the proposals of alternative systems of land tenancy and production must be linked to the demand for land redistribution, at least in countries with a high concentration of land property.
Bina Agarwal recently studied the problems of women’s individual access to land markets, and presented the experiences of purchase, rental, and collective work of the land by groups of women in Andra Pradesh, India, as a possible way of solving these problems (Agarwal 2003). Although Agarwal does not address the broader context of neoliberal agrarian and agricultural policies in which land markets function today—something we consider imperative to do—the idea is interesting, not only for exploring alternative ways in which landless women gain access to land by way of the market, but also through processes of land redistribution conducted by the State. In this process of drafting concrete proposals from mixed and women’s organizations, it will be very important to intensify the exchange of experiences among Latin American, African, and Asian movements, and to deepen the understanding of the impacts of agrarian, agricultural, commercial, macro-economic, and international policies in the matter of gender and agrarian reform so as to find effective ways to confront them (Patnaik 2003).
The new rurality
Another aspect that was discussed in Cochabamba, and which is a very characteristic trait of La Vía Campesina, is the revalorization of the peasant identity, as a general group, and of peasant and indigenous women in particular. Many of the declarations made by La Vía Campesina address this issue, but here I will only cite the preamble to the declaration of the Fourth International Congress in 2004, in which it is expressed in a clear and concise manner: “We meet to reaffirm our determination to defend our cultures and our right to continue existing as peasants and peoples with our own identity.”
The women of La Vía Campesina have made clear that their struggle is not only economic and class-based, but also for the revalorization of their culture and their traditional wisdom in the production of food, the selection and management of seeds, the breeding of animals, and in caring for the earth and nature.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to participate in La Vía Campesina events knows the central importance that the “mística”—a moment of symbolic expression of peasant and indigenous values and ideals—has for developing and illuminating all of their work, for strengthening ties of solidarity, and for identifying themselves and nourishing a spirit of struggle. It is worth noting that the preparation of the mística is principally the task of women.
The mística of La Vía Campesina has been criticized from various points of view. For social actors who are secularized and close to Western rational thought, the term “mystic” is a cause of irritation for its religious connotation, and seems out of place in public forums. For some indigenists, in contrast, this “mystic” seems to be a fabricated and artificial ritual taken out of the context which gives it meaning. Following Iris Marion Young’s analysis of social groups (Young 1990), the “mystic” of La Vía Campesina would be the most tangible expression of peasant men and women’s demand to define themselves, more as a creation and construction than as a given essence, to give positive meaning to that group difference, and to demand effective recognition and representation in the public space which, until now, has oppressed and marginalized them.
La Vía Campesina could thus be understood as a class movement which struggles against poverty, exploitation and oppression, and to that extent, struggles for the redistribution of productive resources and economic autonomy. At the same time, it can be a movement that struggles against the predominant cultural standard, which considers urban values to be superior to rural ones; against the paternalism of other social actors toward peasants (NGOs, academics, development agencies, governments); and for the recognition of peasant identities and cultures, and the right to continue developing them autonomously22.
I emphasize the twofold character of La Vía Campesina’s struggle for redistribution and for recognition, to use Nancy Fraser’s categories of social justice(Fraser and Honneth 2003), because it seems to me that the latter aspect is one which tends to be ignored in studies of land and agrarian reform and in public policies, with disastrous consequences. For example, it is a well known fact that the making of decisions concerning the countryside and rural development is dominated by masculine urban groups for whom urbanization is practically natural law. In this way, agrarian reform, if it is even considered an option, appears as a mere transitory social policy for mitigating unemployment and the lack of sources of income of the rural population until it can move to the cities in search of “better life opportunities”.
Brazilian rural sociology has done much work in recent years on the rural-urban dichotomy that has relegated the rural to oblivion, or to a position of antithesis and opposition to the urban and the modern(Sauer 2002). In Brazil there has been a resurgence in the theoretical analysis of rural issues in contemporary society’s current moment and in the context of globalization, a resurgence detonated, without a doubt, by the actions of strong social movements that are “recreating” the countryside through the struggle for land. In addition to improving material living conditions, the struggle for land in Brazil encompasses cultural and symbolic transformations that engender new values and social representations, and which democratize society’s structures of political power (Heredia and al. 2004). In that sense, the struggle for land does not signify backwardness or a return to archaic forms of life condemned to disappear, but rather the contrary: it is gestating a new rurality which redefines urban-rural relations and has an impact of reinvention of the whole society.
Environmental problems and ecological movements, illnesses produced by a food system that is heavily dependent on farm chemicals, social problems and the deterioration of the quality of life in the world’s great urban centers, atomization, consumerism, the lack of solidarity and meaning that are perceived in contemporary societies—all of these factors have also converged in the resurgence and revalorization of the rural, not only in the south but also in the industrialized societies of the north. It therefore seems pertinent to redimension the debate over gender and agrarian reform in these terms as well.
Women’s rights to land from the human rights perspective
From the beginning of the 1990s the women’s movement called attention to the fact that the international human rights system had not paid sufficient attention to the promotion and protection of women’s human rights. Even though the standards and procedures of international law on human rights are perceived as “neutral” from the gender perspective, that neutrality in practice meant not paying attention to or ignoring violations of the human rights of women(Tomaševski 1999).
Feminist movements have questioned not only the international system of human rights in practice, but also central notions of human rights such as “universality” and “equality.” Indigenous peoples throughout the world have done the same by refuting the notion of “universality”—from the standpoint of cultural relativism—the notion of individuality, and the disavowal of collective rights. Rights are social conquests and, as such, all of these criticisms and debates have enriched and improved the standards and procedures of human rights. Although important steps have been taken toward integrating these diverse perspectives, much work remains to be done.
I make note of the above in order to highlight the fact that the approach of human rights, and especially of economic, social and cultural rights, is an approach that is in construction, and that our challenge today is to see how existing human rights instruments can be put to the service of the struggle for land with a gender perspective.
The human rights approach introduces a new nuance to the justification and legitimization of women’s rights to land27. Human rights are those rights possessed under equal conditions by all people by virtue of their humanity and for no other reason. To conceptualize rural women’s access to land in terms of human rights means to acknowledge that right for women solely on the basis of their humanity, and not as a function of their specific social role as producers and providers of food, or to increase the efficiency of agricultural production, or to improve the welfare of their daughters and sons. The human rights approach does not render these arguments less important, nor is it incompatible with them, but, in some circumstances, it has a broader reach: What would happen if studies were to demonstrate that women are not efficient agriculturists? Would they lose their right to land? What happens with women who have no sons and daughters for whose welfare to look after? Do they have no right to land?28 The focus on human rights is then closer to, and in some cases intersects with, the justifications that are treated in the literature under the rubric of achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment.
In many cases the lack of access to and control over land by women constitutes a human rights violation. Qualifying these situations in this way grants them a relevance that would not be attained if we described them solely as unjust or disadvantageous. The reason for this relevance lies in the terms on which it is based, as I will now explain.
To speak in terms of human rights is to speak about the obligations of States to their citizens. In that sense, action or lack thereof with regard to gender and agrarian reform is not a question of the State’s goodwill, but rather a binding juridical obligation. Legal obligations also make possible the demand of rights before courts of law, and open up the possibility of keeping vigilance over the State’s performance and submitting it to public scrutiny29.
Furthermore, the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights—that is, that in exercising a right another right cannot be impaired, and that the enjoyment of a right depends on the exercise of other rights—allow for an integral approach to the question of gender and land. The rights to legal identity, property, education, freedom of association and expression, are fundamental to women’s struggle for their own means of living. Similarly, the right to an adequate standard of living is fundamental for the exercise of the right to participate in cultural life and enjoy one’s own culture, and to participate in the direction of public affairs.
The challenges to applying this approach and making it effective in reality are enormous, starting from education and training in economic and social rights with a focus on gender, to the documentation of rural women’s human rights violations, so as to denounce them and make them visible, through to the litigation of these cases in the courts. Without going into the complexity posed by the defense of rural women’s human rights in systems of customary law, as analyzed by Tsikata in the case of Tanzania, the defense of the economic rights of rural women confronts FIAN with new challenges. I will illustrate through a practical example: in an international conference on agrarian reform an agriculture minister listened to the denunciations that were made with respect to the discrimination that peasant and indigenous women suffer in his country. Among the many kinds of discrimination, the discrimination against women in peasant associations and organizations was mentioned, to which the minister responded: “Freedom of association is also a human right. How can you ask the government to intervene in associations to guarantee the equality of women?” Without a doubt, this could prove fatal. Nevertheless, it is not right that the State simply wash its hands of it like that. In the case of domestic violence, the State also used to say at first that it could not intervene in the private affairs of a couple. In this sense and in addition to confronting the State and other parties, like employers and businesses, for their direct violations of the rights of women, we should also explore ways in which the State could support rural women in their struggle against discrimination that occurs within the private sphere of their families, communities and mixed associations, and which impede the full enjoyment of and control over their own means of living.
Some critics of human rights work point out that they see no real sense in waiting for the State to guarantee the rights of women, given that the State itself is the main agent of neoliberal policies, and therefore, the violator of rural communities’ human rights, par excellence. The old Marxist critique that the State is simply an instrument of domination of the bourgeoisie, and that formulating a social demand in terms of the bourgeois State amounts to playing by the rules of the system, somehow resounds in this criticism.
It is beyond a doubt that States and legal codes are dominated today by national and transnational oligarchical interests, which have not only been dismantling the economic and social rights guaranteed by communist States, but also the Welfare State, which was the fruit of worker victories and of the pact between capital and work that came about in Western capitalist countries and in some countries of the south. The State and the law are therefore a crystallization of the correlation of social forces, and in that sense, they are contingent historical products. Struggles for rights—from the struggle against monarchical absolutism, through to the workers’ struggles and the struggles against racial and gender discrimination—have all been struggles to defend people from power, be it political or economic. In this sense, the struggle for economic and social human rights today is part of the different social efforts to radically democratize the economic sphere and the international order. This struggle implies, therefore, a profound transformation of political institutions like Nation-States and the United Nations, and of the capitalist economy30.
Final observations
I would like to end this article by making reference to the main challenges that lie ahead and the tasks that we have assumed for the future.
The Cochabamba Declaration endorsed once again the demand of the women of La Vía Campesina for gender equity in the decision-making of their organizations, communities, and families, and for 50% female representation in all of their organizations and events. Recently, at the World Forum on Agrarian Reform in Valencia, Spain, in December of 2004, close to 45% of the more than 500 participants were women. Guaranteeing gender equity in the Forum caused much conflict within the organizing committee. Although parity was not achieved in the general participation and the various panels, the intense discussions were positive in that they mobilized the women within the Forum, and many of their positions and viewpoints were gathered in the final Valencia declaration (FMRA 2004).
The Cochabamba Declaration also contains a commitment to work toward changing the norms of customary law and practices that discriminate against women in communities and organizations. It also calls for developing mechanisms within organizations that allow them to denounce violations of the rights of peasant and indigenous women at a national and international level. However, there have yet to be discussions as to how we could do this.
Also highlighted in the Cochabamba Plan of Action is the commitment to continue research on gender in the rural sphere, in collaboration with researchers committed to the struggle for agrarian reform with a gender perspective, in order to spread this knowledge, exchange experiences, and enrich reflection within the organizations. Similarly, the importance of developing mechanisms for grassroots training was emphasized. Currently, the women of La Vía Campesina and the Land Research and Action Network (LRAN) are discussing a joint work proposal that would include three axes: documentation of the struggles and organizational processes of the women of La Vía Campesina; research on topics of gender and agrarian reform that the women of La Vía Campesina identify as necessary; and the drafting of grassroots training material, based on their documentation and research work.
Separately, in November 2004 the First International School for Sociopolitical Training was carried out in Temuco, Chile for the women responsible for the work on gender in the organizations that make up the CLOC and La Vía Campesina. The central objective of the course was to strengthen the peasant leaders’ capacity to analyze and comprehend social and political reality, as well as to make proposals for change in the construction of the society to which they and their organizations aspire. This first course was a complete success. The second course of the itinerant school will take place in Nicaragua, in September 2005.
Additionally, the GCAR faces the challenge of guaranteeing that all of its forms of action focus on gender, getting closer to more rural women’s organizations and strengthening their joint work with the gender commission of La Vía Campesina. Another key challenge is to further integrate the women’s movements of Asia and Africa.
I want to end this article with the words of Shamim Meer in Cochabamba: “The task is to build strong women’s movements, and to build among activists—women and men— strategic skills that are based on an understanding of the history of the dispossessed, and of the current moment of globalization. An essential part of the construction of this movement has to include an end to the oppression of women and to gender inequality in the access to and control over resources, as well as in the exercise of authority” (Meer 2003). I think that La Vía Campesina and the GCAR are on this path. The space for articulation and action that La Vía Campesina represents for rural women across the world is a novel space that is already contributing to the advancement of rural women’s liberation struggle.
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End notes:
4 The presentation I make in this section is based primarily on (Desmarais 2003; Desmarais 2003). Currently, La Vía Campesina brings together close to 150 organizations from eight regions: Africa, Central America, North America, South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Northeast and Southeast Asia, and Europe. Each region elects two representatives, a woman and a man, who make up the International Coordinating Committee of La Vía Campesina, the executive organ of the movement in addition to the International Operative Secretary.
10 The Emergency Network is one of the main instruments of the GCAR for promoting solidarity with all peasant women and men who are victims of human rights violations. The Network intervenes internationally with letters of protest when peasant groups suffer violations of their right to food or their civil rights in the framework of their struggle for land. The network is comprised of members of La Vía Campesina, sections and coordinating offices of FIAN, and organizations and people who sympathize with the GCAR. See {FIAN, 2003 #33}.
13 Land administration policies (cadastre, registry, demarcation, entitlement, etc.) enforced in the past few years with the endorsement of the World Bank have not contributed to a higher degree of security in the tenancy of land by women or poor rural communities. On the contrary, in many cases they have made them more vulnerable to lose their land. In order to fully understand the effects of these land administration policies, it is necessary to analyze them in conjunction with agrarian and agricultural policies and with the general macro-economic context. What we then observe is that with the promise of regularizing, formalizing, and making the tenancy of land more secure, processes of land entitlement were started—in most cases on an individual basis—while, simultaneously, agrarian commerce was liberalized and the state dismantled its support services for small- and medium-scale agriculturists. The consequent bankruptcy of many farmers, who counted on title deeds now alienable and subject to embargo, allowed creditor banks to keep those lands. In other cases, adverse conditions for the peasant family economy, the impossibility of producing, and, concomitantly, the dramatic deterioration of living conditions, forced many peasants to sell their lands to large agro-exporters in order to have a few ephemeral pesos in their pockets. On the effects of entitlement programs, see (El-Ghonemy 2001) and the chapter on Thailand in this section.
14 The Cochabamba Declaration picked up this debate in the following form: “During the last few years women’s movements have achieved in some countries a formal advancement in terms of gender equity within policies of access to land, which shaped processes of constitutional and legal reform. However, the neoliberal policies that unleashed processes of re-concentration of lands and resources in few hands pulverized this achievement. We observed that in many cases formal advancements in gender equity tend to benefit middle-class women; thus the importance of understanding how race, class, ethnicity, and gender combine to impede the fulfillment of our rights, as poor, indigenous, peasant, and black women.” (FIAN and Campesina 2003)
16 In Colombia, for example, “peasant reserves” are a particular form of land tenancy inspired by the experience of indigenous peoples. The 2002 Proyecto de Ley 107, drafted by peasant organizations to promote new policies for agrarian reform and the reconstruction of the agrarian sector, sought to strengthen and broaden peasant reserves as a central element of that strategy.
17 The Cochabamba Declaration states: “We demand the implementation of a family-oriented agricultural model that is protected by communal/collective forms of organization that provide more security and control over the land.”
18 The Cochabamba Declaration states in this respect: “The human right to land and to feed oneself is a consecrated right of every woman and man. To guarantee women’s access to and control over land we will struggle for the co-ownership of land, or the individual guarantee to the man and the woman, be it within collective/communal or individual forms of land tenancy. The effective guarantee of women’s access to land has to address legal, institutional, cultural, and structural exclusion mechanisms.”
22 The Movimiento de Mujeres Campesinas de Brasil (MMC), for example, has developed a clear vision of gender, class, and popular project, see (Movimiento de Mujeres Campesinas de Brasil 2004).
27 Agarwal puts forth four arguments on the importance of gender and the right to land: efficiency, welfare, equality, and empowerment (Agarwal 1994). Different authors emphasize and elaborate on one or another justification.
28 In Cochabamba, a Brazilian woman brought up for discussion a case they had had in a shanty settlement. It concerned a woman who had abandoned her family and gone with another man. The community wanted to take from this woman the land that belonged to her, until someone asked: What would happen if this woman were a man? Would we take his land? If a man does not lose his right to land for leaving his family, why should a woman have to?
29 The PIDESC, for example, demands that States apply the basic criteria in the observance of economic, social, and cultural rights. Within these criteria, we find the immediate guarantee of the minimum content of rights (in the case of the right to food, the minimum content is to be free from hunger), non-discrimination, the participation of affected parties in the design of public policies, the obligation to identify and protect vulnerable groups, the utilization of maximum available resources, and the obligation of progressiveness as opposed to retrogressiveness in the observance of rights. Based on these criteria, it could be demanded that the State identify sex-specific need for land, that it draft, with the real and effective participation of those affected, an agrarian reform plan with verifiable goals (how many women and men will be landed within what period of time), that it create independent monitoring mechanisms and organisms to keep vigilance over the implementation of the programs, guaranteeing the equal participation of women in those organisms, etc.
30 In the opinion of the Italian jurist, Luigi Ferrajoli, “[...] the simultaneous crisis of the Estado de derecho, the social State, and the national State today imposes a reflection on the seats of constitutionalism, that is, on the seats of the rigid guarantees imposed constitutionally on all powers in defense of fundamental rights. It is true that historically the guarantees of these rights have been born and until now have remained bounded to the form [...] of the sovereign State as «Estado de derecho». But this historical nexus between State and fundamental rights is contingent, because the guarantor paradigm of the Estado de derecho is applicable to any legal code. This crisis can be overcome in a progressive sense if only the seats of constitutional guarantees are transferred to the new political and decisional seats, and the entire system of fuentes is congruently reformed: reinforcing local autonomies with an inversion of the hierarchy of fuentes that guarantees its primacy with respect to those of the state; democratizing and subjecting to new constitutional bonds the various seats of international power; placing on the vertex of the entire system of fuentes, and therefore rigidly withdrawing from the market as well as from politics—local, state, international—the guarantees of fundamental rights [...]”(Ferrajoli 1999)
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