Draft, not for citation, comments gratefully received

Agricultural imperialisms and new peasant solidarities

Presentation at Centre for Civil Society Seminar Series, September 2004
Raj Patel1

This paper traces the contours of contemporary peasant organizing, arguing that the
synchronization of global agricultural policy has provided the basis for the development of a
thoroughly modern political programme, one that offers a sustained and delicate alternative
to the prevailing politics of international agricultural capitalism. Atop a basic universalism,
the Via Campesina’s vision of food sovereignty is a call for radical local autonomy that bears
important resemblances to contemporary radical democratic traditions (Laclau and Mouffe
1994).

“The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of the this
century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the
death of the peasantry.” (Hobsbawm 1994)

Although less systematically than the intellectual right, commentators on the left have been
guilty on too many occasions of urban chauvinism in their treatment of those living in rural
areas. For Marx, the peasantry was “a sack of potatoes”(Marx 1964), for Barrington Moore,
subaltern knowledge is ‘not worth knowing’(Moore 1998), for Ranajit Guha, insurgent
peasantries past were “not [possessed of] a liberated consciousness”(Guha 1983). For these
and many other scholars, across a range of political affiliations, it has come as something of a
relief, then, that the peasantry is dying. The veteran scholar of rural change, Henry
Bernstein, reports the responses to news of this demise:

"First, there are denials of this event, and of the inevitability of processes that produce it:
views of the 'persistence' of the peasantry in the world of mature capitalism. Such
'persistence' may be celebrated in various forms of agrarian populism as the effect of
qualities of peasant resilience and 'resistance'. Or it may be regretted, in both Marxist and
bourgeois versions of modernisation. Second, the prediction of the 'death of the
peasantry' may be maintained, and again whether this outcome is regretted or welcomed,
as it is by Eric Hobsbawn albeit with a recognition that the death throes are more
protracted than once believed (and that this itself is a historical puzzle). What these
positions share, despite all their other differences, are typically essentialist views of 'the
peasantry' as pre-capitalist." (Bernstein 2003)

We might attribute this essentialism to an unfamiliarity with a certain historical or

geographical distance from the places where modern peasant organizing is happening. Yet
even as late as 1994, Bonanno and his colleagues could preface a contemporary history of

1
Note on this draft: This paper is a framework for a book project that will consolidate two years of political
economic research at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. Some of
this research has been published in working paper form, as a means of soliciting criticism. The frequent
references to and quotation from these reports ought not to be taken as intellectual narcissism, but as
indications of where these reports will be integrated, as the present paper is extended to book length.

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agricultural colonialism with the question: "Where should agriculture turn in a crisis?...
can one envision a coalition of Belgian, Dutch, French, Italian, US, Uruguayan, Brazilian
and New Zealand farmers marching on a GATT meeting in Punta del Este? And what
could they demand to benefit them all, since they are in competition with one another?"
(Bonanno, Busch et al. 1994) Perhaps they were unaware of the organizing that had
occurred in India in 1993, in which the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association mobilized
200,000 farmers to protest the draft text of what was to become the WTO in Delhi
(SUNS - North South Development Monitor 1993). They almost certainly wouldn’t have
been so desperate had they known of the organizing in Managua, Nicaragua, and later
Mons, Belgium, that led to the creation of the international peasant federation, Via
Campesina (Desmarais 2002).

To be fair the peasantry isn’t alive and well, certainly not in the sense that Marx, Chayanov,
Kautsky and, more recently, Bernstein have imagined. One lesson that history does seem to
have made fairly clear is that those looking for an undifferentiated body of pre-capitalist rural
people waiting patiently for the enlightenment, modernity, capitalism, and then socialism (in
that order) to find them, are likely to be disappointed. The death of this idea of ‘peasants’ is
one to be celebrated, for it is symptomatic of a chauvinism about rural experience, politics
and organizing that is increasingly belied by the facts. Even scholarship that aims for a more
sensitive understanding of power in rural context can end up imputing a mollifying passivity
to rural people that is, in many areas, unwarranted (Scott and Kerkvliet 1986). In many
countries, the rude shocks of neoliberal agricultural policy, and the ruder NGOs sent to
mediate these offences, have been received far from impassively by rural people and their
organisations. As we shall see in this paper, the responses have been sophisticated,
transnational and differentiated by space and history. But these organized rural-based
responses has also striven for, and found, a kind of contingent mutual recognition that we
might best term ‘solidarity’, a new kind of solidarity that has been articulated in the
international peasant movement most recentlythrough the death of a single man, Lee Kyung
Hae.

II

“… Once I went to a house where a farmer abandoned his life by drinking a toxic
chemical because of his uncontrollable debts. I could do nothing but listen to the
howling of his wife. If you were me, how would you feel?..

“Widely paved roads lead to large apartments, buildings, and factories in Korea.
Those lands paved now were mostly rice paddies built by generations over
thousands of years. They provided the daily food and materials in the past. Now
the ecological and hydrological functions of paddies are even more crucial. Who
will protect our rural vitality, community traditions, amenities, and environment?

“I believe that farmers' situation in many other developing countries is similar.

We have in common the problem of dumping, import surges, lack of government
budgets, and too many people. Tariff protection would be the practical solution.

”I have been so worried watching TV and hearing the news that starvation is

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prevalent in many Less Developed Countries, although the international price of

grain is so cheap. Earning money through trade should not be their means of
securing food. They need access to land and water. Charity? No! Let them work
again!

”My warning goes out to all citizens that human beings are in an endangered
situation. That uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big
WTO Members are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane,
environmentally degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be
stopped immediately. Otherwise the false logic of neoliberalism will wipe out the
diversity of global agriculture and be disastrous to all human beings.”

from a pamphlet authored by Lee Kyung Hae, distributed by him on the day of his suicide

On September 10, 2003 at the World Trade Organization Ministerial meeting in Cancún, Lee
Kyung Hae, a Korean farmer and peasant organizer, carrying a sign saying “the WTO kills
farmers”, climbed a ladder propped against the razor-wire fencing surrounding the WTO
conference zone, produced a small pocket knife, flipped open the blade, and stabbed himself
in the heart. Within two hours he was pronounced dead. Within days, from Bangladesh, to
Chile, to South Africa, to Mexico, tens of thousands of peasants mourned (see, e.g.(AFP
2003) and Appendix 1), and marched in solidarity, their own calls for national support for
agriculture interspersed with the chant: “We Are Lee”.

This global collective identification should give us pause. We are familiar with the
occasional, but genuine, widespread collective grief that follows the death of our age’s icons
– think of the death of John F Kennedy or Martin Luther King or, for that matter, Princess
Diana. But the kind of mourning that followed Lee Kyung Hae’s death had a different tenor.
Lee was, after all, not a celebrity. Although recognized as a leader in his field and well
respected within the circuits of peasant organizers, his was not a face well known outside
South Korea, and little better known within his home country.

The mourning for Lee was to be sure, a collective grief for a fallen comrade. The WTO
protests in Cancún in 2003 were profoundly shaped by Lee’s death, and those who were there
speak of transformation following the news that he died, of a collective experience that
rippled the ruffled crowd into unity. What’s striking about this is how those ripples spread,
both how far away, and how across distance and culture and history, the comradeship
extended.

Of course, news of the immolation didn’t cross the waves spontaneously. Those present at the
protests spread the news, sending word via the internet to their organizations back home,
wherever that was. We may be familiar with the deaths of protesters in the line of peaceful
protest, of the sacrifices of Rachel Corrie or Carlo Guiliani. But unique to Lee was the
character of action in requiem. The adoption by a range of peasant organizations of the
slogan “We are Lee”, chanted in English, is a symptom of a new kind of rural globalization.
Lee’s photo is to be found in the NGO offices of Washington, and Brussels no less that the
paddy fields of China, the tribal forests of India, the Amazon, the cotton plantations of
Georgia, the Transvaal, Chiapas. He has been transformed into an icon of a new kind of

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peasant solidarity and, if the activism that invokes him succeeds, a turning point in the
international struggle to reconstruct a socially just and environmentally sustainable food
system.

The attempt to make sense of Lee’s death, demands something of an understanding of his
life, an extraordinary one, by any measure. His Seoul Farm, in Jangsu, South Korea was
founded on unforgiving country, not the sort of land on which Lee’s neighbours thought
he’d be able to realize his modest cattle farming ambitions. Yet Lee went to agricultural
college, where he met his wife, and then returned to start farming. He installed a mini
cablecar to pull hay up the hill in winter. He started a trend in electric fencing. He poured
himself into the land, and into farming. Seoul farm became a training college, and in
1988, the United Nations recognized him with an award for rural leadership. It might
have ended happily ever after. Except that the Korean government decided to lift
restrictions on the import of Australian cattle. The Australian government has been a
strong supporter of the export beef industry – Australia is the largest beef exporter in the
world - and the concession to increase sales to Korea was a victory not only for
Australian corporations like Stanbroke and AustAg, but for the large distribution
companies like Cargill Australia and Nippon Meat Packers, owned by U.S. and Japanese
interests respectively.

The Korean government knew that the price for cattle would plummet with the entry of
the cheap Australian beef, and so encouraged Korean farmers to make ends meet by
swelling the size of their herd, the extra cattle being paid for with loans. Following
government advice, this is what the Lees did. But the price of beef stayed low and flat,
and in order to pay off the interest on the loans, they had to sell cattle. Even shrinking
their herd by a few head per month, using the cash to pay the loans, the Lees were unable
to keep their land. In the end, Lee Kyung Hae lost his farm. It was the first time that
anyone had seen him cry. They found him in a cinema, in tears, ashamed to be seen in his
grief.

A decade later, Lee Kyung Hae’s tears were cried by his mourners, by farmers, students,
and the landless.

Now, let’s not romanticize. It is clear that, even after his death, many haven’t heard of
him, or of Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation that was responsible for
bringing the Korean Peasant League and the Korean Women Farmers’ Association to
Cancún. And it would be unreasonable to pretend that the protests that happened in
predominantly urban areas were some moment of ‘collective effervescence’, unplanned
and spontaneous. Marches take planning, organization, logistical support and, most of all,
commitment by those marching. But by the same token, the overwhelming support and
identification with Lee, while having received a great deal of institutional encouragement
since his death (see appendix 2), could not have been planned. Protests against the WTO
were certainly on the cards in many cities, but the specific form of the protests, and
specifically the articulation of local and national demands with an international
biography, reflect the contemporary politics of an alternative globalism for which Lee
gave his life. This politics has been articulated through the international peasant

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movement, Via Campesina, and it is to the political context of the genesis of this
movement that I now turn.

III

Annette Desmarais has produced important and valuable history of Via Campesina, from
which I draw with gratitude (Desmarais 2002). She locates the formation of the Via
Campesina in a political economy dominated by a range of organizations claiming to
speak on behalf of farmers and landless people, but without any kind of mandate. These
organizations ranged from billion-dollar donor institutions, to the NGOs that offered to
service these donors’ needs by brokering interactions between them and the rural poor.
The profiteering from this representation, and the concomitant undemocratic
misrepresentation of the needs of rural people, prompted the Via Campesina to ban NGOs
from ever being members of the federation, as a founding constitutional principle (Via
Campesina 1993).

The troubling politics of NGO misrepresentation is not the subject of this paper, however
(see Petras and Veltmeyer’s ongoing thoughts on this for more (Petras and Veltmeyer
2001; Petras and Veltmeyer 2002; Petras and Veltmeyer 2002)). The purpose of this
paper is more modest – it is to suggest that the condition of international peasant
solidarity has, to some extent, been shaped by a homogenous export-oriented agricultural
policy. This is not to say that a single policy has led to a single experience of agrarian
change, which has led to the possibility of a single united peasant solidarity. It is, rather,
to suggest that despite the multiple and always-history-bound instances in which agrarian
change has been experienced, there is a sufficient basis for shared understanding to build
a fairly substantive, though not fully programmatic, alternative for agrarian change.
Indeed, as I conclude, the in-built decentralization in decisions about agrarian policy
reflect a reasoned response to the monomaniac logic, and multiple instantiations in
policy, of capitalist agriculture.

Export agriculture, has blown like a sour wind across rural societies. It involves what
McMichael (McMichael 2004) has helpfully called a ‘synchronization’ of agricultural
policies. This synchronization has a long history. Mike Davis has made one of the most
forceful cases, and his subtle ecological and economic historical analysis can serve to
represent a long and growing body of work detailing the historical capitalist
transformation of agriculture (Friedmann and McMichael 1989; Walton and Seddon
1994; Watts 1996; McMichael 1998; Araghi 2000; Heffernan 2000; Magdoff, Foster et
al. 2000; Wood 2000; Davis 2001; Watts 2001; McMichael 2004). The key argument is
that by instituting a market system for the transfer of food, with the concomitant
sweeping away of feudal duties of care and the replacement of these distasteful support
mechanisms with no mechanisms at all,

"Millions died, not outside the ´modern world system' but in the very process of
being dynamically conscripted into its economic and political structures. They
died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism"(Davis 2001)

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The Victorian experience of agricultural modernization came had its own cultural forms
and subversions, forms that have striking corollaries today. The imperial faith in the
superiority of the market, for example, remained unshaken despite mounting and later
incontrovertible evidence to the contrary;

"Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from 'timeless hunger',
more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878
study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted
thirty one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen
recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia." (Davis 2001)

But we would be surprised if such evidence were to substantially change the course of
imperial agrarian policy. The processes of agricultural modernization weren’t driven by
their success or failure in rural areas, after all, but by the demands of the urban
industrialists and traders, under cover of the myth of ‘development’ (Bock 1979). Many
of the features of historical agricultural development have their analogues in the
contemporary experiences of capitalist agriculture. It is to these that I turn now more
explicitly, for it is in the suite of synchronized agricultural policies that we are able to
find the political economic context for the organization of sustained resistance to
agricultural capitalism, a double-movement in the fields of the late twentieth century
(Polanyi 1944). And Karl Polanyi is the theorist to reference here. As (Burawoy 2003)
notes, Polanyi is centrally concerned with the way that the market is experienced, with
what it feels like to experience the wrenching privations of the market, and what one does
in order to protect oneself. In looking at the range of similar experiences mapped onto
developing and developed country agrarian economies, we are, I suggest, able to find
threads of similar responses.

The historical enforcement of standard agricultural policies on the third world in

particular is easily explained through colonialism. The British, French, Dutch, Germans,
and Portuguese variously used the colonies as sources of cheap raw materials and as
markets for manufactures or goods from other parts of the empire. In contemporary
international politics, while the descendants of the gunboats that enforced British trade
policy have never fully retreated, there are more sophisticated mechanisms for the
enforcement of international trade policy. Institutions such as the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund and the Export-Import Bank of the United States
(Goldzimmer 2003) have created structures of coercion and consent within the fractured
class bases of donor countries (Poulanztas 1976) to advance a sophisticated economy of
rural transformation. The key features of this are concentration, dumping, rural poverty,
consolidation, deskilling, dispossession and amnesia.

IV

Concentration: The vertical integration of the food system, such that a few corporations
control the production of the vast majority of food production. In the US for example,
corporations have succeeded in a subtle strategy of control not through ownership but
through subcontracting – a process that allows them to exercise sovereignty, without
responsibility or risk (Heffernan 2000). The results have been impressive:

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The CR4 is the concentration ratio of the top four firms in an industry relative to
100 percent. According to the 2002 update of a report to the National Farmers
Union (NFU) on food and agriculture system consolidation, the CR4 for the beef
packing industry, which was seventy-two percent in 1990, has now reached
eighty-one percent. The pork packing industry’s CR4 has risen from thirty-seven
percent in 1987 to fifty-nine percent, while the broiler industry’s 1986 CR4 of
thirty-five percent has risen to fifty percent. The soybean-crushing industry’s
current CR4 of eighty percent is up from seventy-one percent in 1987 and sixty-
one percent in 1982. (Memarsadeghi and Patel 2003)
This concentration is not limited to production, but to retail distribution (Murphy 2002;
Schwentesius and Gomez 2002), with concomitant effects on consumption patterns and
obesity (Nestle 2002).

Dumping: This technical economic term refers to the practice of selling goods in foreign
markets at less than the price in the home market. It describes the practices of US and EU
agricultural policy very well, but not completely. This is because, for key agricultural
goods in the US and EU, the domestic price is lower than the price of production. The
vast agricultural subsidies given to agribusinesses (the 2002 Farm Bill alone appropriated
$180bn over 10 years, heavily frontloaded – EU figures are similarly high, with the most
often cited example being the subsidy to cattle producers in the EU amounting to $2 per
cow per day) have created massive surpluses that are redistributed through predatory
dumping and food aid (Lappé, Joseph Collins et al. 1998). For example, international
corn prices are currently $1.74 a bushel and the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture
figures show production costs at about $2.66 a bushel. In Mexico this has had profound
impacts on agrarian societies, and led to a massive restructuring of Mexico’s economy
involving displacement, migration, and the construction of a new agrarian economy in
which Mexican labour remits income from low-skill work in the United States to support
the newly pithed Mexican rural societies

Increasing rural poverty: With the fall in world agricultural prices (from a mean of 100
in 1975 to 61 by 1989 - (McMichael 2004), came increasing rural poverty at the same
time as cheap urban food. Trends across the world have been similar. With an
intensification of export agriculture comes increasing poverty for the poorest agricultural
workers. In India, an example often heralded by proponents of neoliberal policy during
the 1990s, rural-to-urban poverty gap has jumped from 1.1 to 1.4. Moreover,
“malnutrition increased during the 1990s, with a declingin average calorie intake among
India’s poorest. Today, 233 million Indians are undernourished, suffering from
inadequate intake of calories and micro nutrients. There has been no improvement in
health for women and children, who suffer from higher rates of anemia than their
counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Production of some of the most important staples has
declined as agricultural land is increasingly used for export crops. Net availability of
foodgrains per person plummeted to levels unheard of since the 1930s
economic depression under British colonial rule.” (Müller and Patel 2004).

Consolidation: Yet not all agricultures are in crisis. The creation of export markets for
third world agriculturalists has systemically benefited those agriculturalists with access
land, capital and government protection. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is

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Brazil. “The Brazilian government support for its soybean sector has been lauded as an
example for other developing countries to follow. Because of government support,
soybean earnings jumped from US$393 million in 1980 to US$2.7 billion in 2001, and
Brazil is now the second largest producer of soy in the world… while soybean production
is capital-intensive, it requires very little labor. A 1000 hectare soybean farm employs
only three people. Two consequences of this type of production deserve note: first, the
growing profits from soybean production remain in the hands of relatively few already
rich producers, and second, soybean production fails to fill the social need for
employment in the countryside and thus stem the tide of urban immigration.
Contrary to the aims of the government, the expansion of soybean production has actually
diminished food security. The government’s stated aim in its initial subsidy of soybean
production was to bolster food security by providing an inexpensive component of
poultry feed, which would in turn make chicken a more affordable source of animal
protein for Brazilians. There was a problem with this; officials apparently overlooked the
fact that soybeans would compete with food crops for land use, and the farmers who
grow them. In the first years of soybean production (1970-1973), 90% of soybean
expansion displaced other crops such as rice, beans, manioc, potatoes, and corn. While
later expansion often involved cultivating new land, soybeans have continued to compete
with (and often replace) production of staple food crops.” Yet the hegemony of Brazil
soy farmers has received increasingly effective criticism from Brazil’s Landless Workers
Movement (MST) (Wright and Wolford 2003). The state sponsored metonymy, in which
the benefit of a few farmers is touted as the benefit of all, is wavering. Nonetheless, for
the time being, the MST’s successes have been counterbalanced by the Lula
government’s ultimate commitment to neoliberal policy. (Cassel and Patel 2003)

Deskilling: The processes of concentration of production has also extended to control

over seed. The Green Revolution was supported by the producers of pesticides and
industrial chemicals without which the revolution’s productivity bursts would have been
impossible (See (Shiva 1989) for more on how these gains have proven, in the longer run,
to be ashen). These pesticide companies have now developed seed that integrates
pesticides, and they are busily in the business of promoting these products. Altieri and
Rosset make the case that these seed are unlikely to end hunger (Altieri and Rosset 1999),
though see (Stone 2002) for the opposing view). Whatever the merit of the seed, it
remains the case that the rationale for genetically modified crops is fundamentally
Malthusian (Ross 1998) – “the technology is in the seed” is an oft-quoted mantra in the
world of GMOs. It is intended to suggest that the seed is so simple to use, anyone can
benefit from it. The corollary, however, is that farming is so simple, that few skills are
necessary in order to perform it. The image of an indolent and fecund peasantry, whose
traditional rural pursuits will almost certainly be inferior to those engineered by
modernity, is alive and well in the stratagems of the life sciences industry.

Dispossession: Industrial agriculture requires scale economies in order to be

economically viable. And this means that industrial agriculture requires a great deal of
land. In some countries, notably Brazil and South Africa, the longer historical inequalities
of land have been consolidated by the advent of industrial agriculture (Cassel and Patel
2003), (Müller and Patel forthcoming). In others, such as the United States, the transition
has been a little more rapid (see graph below), and in the Iberian states, it has only been

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in the past forty or so years that agriculture has dwindled in economic

significance(Hobsbawm 1994).

Amnesia: Even in states that historically have placed a high premium on rural
constituencies, such as China (Eisenburger and Patel 2003), we see the beginnings of a
turn towards export oriented agriculture and dispossession. And, as (Kynge 2004) notes,
this is beginning to have impacts inconceivable ten years before: total imports of farm
produce in the first half of the year have risen 62.5 per cent to $14.35bn, while strategic
grain stocks have fallen because of declining annual harvests every year since 1998. This
is a story strikingly similar to that in India. Although official figures are extremely
unreliable, one can only hope that the effects on hunger and poverty are dissimilar to the
Indian case.

This catalogue is gloomy, but helpfully so. It’s a corrective to dominant portrayals of
success, and a reminder that the cheap food on our plates is bought very dear. The point
of painting this picture, however, is to note that trends worldwide are extremely similar,
even if specific circumstances vary. These synchronized ‘pathologies of development’
are in fact symptoms of the development project. Indeed, the development establishment
has been quick to seek to remedy these symptoms, either through public relations
strategies (Narayan, Patel et al. 2000), or through more serious attempts to quantify and
pacify the threat of widespread violence posed by increasing rural inequality (Pons-
Vignon and Lecomte 2004). Again, Desmarais (2003) has traced more fully the origins of
the Via Campesina’s origins in these synchronized machinations, and hers is a superlative

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analysis. I want, however, to observe some features alternative to the export industrial
model of food production is called “food sovereignty”. The definition runs like this:
“Food sovereignty is the peoples', Countries' or State Unions' RIGHT to define their
agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-à-vis third countries. Food
sovereignty includes :
• prioritizing local agricultural production in order to feed the people, access of
peasants and landless people to land, water, seeds, and credit. Hence the need for
land reforms, for fighting against GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), for
free access to seeds, and for safeguarding water as a public good to be sustainably
distributed.
• the right of farmers, peasants to produce food and the right of consumers to be
able to decide what they consume, and how and by whom it is produced.
• the right of Countries to protect themselves from too low priced agricultural and
food imports.
• agricultural prices linked to production costs : they can be achieved if the
Countries or Unions of States are entitled to impose taxes on excessively cheap
imports, if they commit themselves in favour of a sustainable farm production,
and if they control production on the inner market so as to avoid structural
surpluses.
• the populations taking part in the agricultural policy choices.
• the recognition of women farmers' rights, who play a major role in agricultural
production and in food.
(Via Campesina 2003)

This is a systemic challenge to the predominant neoliberal mode of food production,

perhaps best conceived in opposition to “food security” – a term with origins in the food
rights movement which has since been successfully coopted by neoliberal institutions.
Food security is a minimal second generation right, defined as the situation that obtains
when “access to food is available to all people, at all times, in order to have an active,
healthy life.” Note that the definition of food security is agnostic about the system of
production and distribution through which its condition would be fulfilled. To put it
slightly differently, a situation of food security is theoretically compatible with an
economy of full employment in which everyone were consuming McDonald’s everyday.
The agnosticism within food security, in other words, gives support for an export
agricultural model of production and consumption purchase. It is the model itself,
according to Via Campesina, that militates against the achievement of food security. The
food sovereignty model contrasts with the food security model in a number of ways (see
table below). Note, however, that this is emphatically not cast as a conflict between the
global North and the Global South, but rather between two models, and the blocs that
support them.

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Source: (Rosset 2003)

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If we look at the heart of the definition for food sovereignty, there are two striking
features. First, the substance of the call itself covers a very wide range of government
policy, from intellectual property to state credit provision to land reform to gender. This
is crucial - too often the protests at the WTO have been slandered as crude calls for tariff
protection. Certainly there’s a need for national support for agriculture in which tariff
protection will play a part, argues Via Campesina, but the food sovereignty programme is
far more comprehensive than that. In fact, its scope matches that of the neoliberal
programme it seeks to supplant. Between the various development institutions and
government departments involved in agricultural production, everything from production
health and safety standards to microcredit has fallen under the regulatory shadow of what
Rosset calls ‘the dominant model’. Equally significant, the politics and policies
advocated by food sovereignty are not an unreconstructed return to some bucolic ideal:
It is important to stress that the peasant model advocated by the Vía Campesina
does not entail a complete rejection of modernity, technology and trade
accompanied by a romanticized return to an archaic past steeped in rustic
traditions. Rather, the Vía Campesina insists that an alternative model must be
based on certain ethics and values where culture and justice count for something
and concrete mechanism are put in place to ensure a future without
hunger.(Desmarais 2002)

But there’s an important addition to the food sovereignty counter-hegemony – a radical

and fractured call for autonomy. In defining food sovereignty as a right attributed to
“peoples', Countries' or State Unions'” Vía Campesina is inviting a charge of
contradiction, not in the logical positivist sense but in a charged democratic one (Mao
1955; Gramsci 1971). To ascribe rights to different scales of collectivity is to invite a
series of conflicts - within each of these levels of analysis, power is multiply contested
and fought over, not least by the very blocs that food sovereignty attempts to counter.
Between these blocs, conflict is magnified further. No one people, country or state union
has a unique vision of food policy, and to suggest that these constituencies each have
simultaneous and unalienable rights is to open the door to a great deal of contention over
priority, jurisdiction and authority.

This is precisely the point.

One of the explicit goals of food sovereignty is to politicize an agrarian policy that has
for too long been depoliticized, and rendered a merely technical exercise (Ferguson
1990). In demanding the creation of domains of contention that are autonomous from the
imperial international institutions responsible for neoliberal agricultural policy, the Via
Campesina policy takes a calculated risk in the possibility of a permanent and radical
agrarian politics, a politics as Stuart Hall would say, without guarantees (Hall 1996). The
success of the Via Campesina model is contingent on a faith in a radical democratic
political imaginary in which even, especially, the deepest relations of power come to be
contested publicly. And this is where the component of womens’ farmers rights, which
can be read as an afterthought in the definition of food sovereignty, comes to be the acid
test of the policy. As Meer et al (Meer 1997) and (Agarwal 1994) argue, capitalist
agrarian policy depends centrally on women’s paid and unpaid labour. Within many
peasant movements, even those few that are making some advances towards equality in

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gender representation in management, this fundamental fact remains to be addressed. It is

by no means guaranteed that the system of food sovereignty will allow it to be, to be sure.
But food sovereignty offers an important opportunity to address patriarchy in peasant
organizations, and one that demands more attention than it has so far received.

VI

And so we close with Lee. His biography, of a lived experience of creative and
sustainable agrarian livelihood, betrayed by the exigencies of export agriculture, and
ended at the gates of one of the major institutions responsible for his struggle, has found
unusual resonance in a range of national movements. The story’s familiarity and power
has been mobilized by the Via Campesina secretariat, who have used Lee’s image as a
vector for the creation of a new international solidarity (appendix 2). The peasant
movement is an exceptionally democratic space, deeply conscious of the dangers of
authoritarianism, frequently erring on the side of caution and stasis than pushing forward
with centralist projects. But the memory of Lee has found purchase in a range of national
campaigns, with local, democratically deliberated demands being articulated with
contingent international recognition of similarity. One would like to think he might have
approved.

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Appendix 1: Across the world, voices were raised in protest

Will they ever understand? Katharine Ainger, New Statesman, Sept 22, 2003

It was not only in Mexico that the protests against the WTO were heard. Millions who
were unable to travel to the summit - either because they couldn't get visas or because the
journey to Cancun was prohibitively expensive - held protests around the world that went
largely unreported in the media.

India In Bangalore, 35,000 Indian farmers took to the streets, drawing attention to more
than 200 peasant suicides in the state of Karnataka so far this year due to spiralling costs
and falling prices as a result of 'liberalisation'. Forty farmers wrecked furniture and
windows in the offices of Monsanto's former research facility and 'served the company a
notice to leave India'.

Thailand In Bangkok, farmers, labourers and students held a week of anti-WTO protests.
One protester tied himself to a cross holding rice plants in each hand, his mouth gagged
shut. Kingkorn Narintarakul of Thai Action on Globalisation explained: 'Thailand's poor .
. . face the effects of unfair trade agreements and feel the need to raise their voices in
opposition . . . They said that if we do not come to join the protest we will have nothing
left to eat.'

Philippines A caravan of 50 'jeepneys' full of peasants from the northern province of

Luzon converged on Manila and was greeted with cheers by service workers, fish
workers and the urban poor to create an 8,000-strong protest on the city streets. When
two other caravans from Laguna and Bicol were stopped on their way to the capital, they
blockaded the highways.

South Africa Campaigners from the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the Soweto Electricity
Crisis Committee planned to go to Cancun. Instead, they stayed in Johannesburg to deal
with developments in the city's water wars. The water company was installing new pre-
paid meters in Phiri, which would scupper the residents' non-payment campaign against
unaffordable price rises.

Ghana In Accra, the General Agricultural Workers' Union marched to the Ministry of
Finance to demand it that it speak out against the rich countries' agricultural policies and
against the patent rules that make Aids drugs unaffordable in poor African countries.

Elsewhere Cotton farmers from Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali and Senegal sent a 200,000-
signature petition to the summit to demand the elimination of US domestic subsidies to
farmers. There were solidarity protests in Honduras, Belize, Brazil and many other places
in the Americas. Protests and teach-ins were held in 60 US cities, as well as in many
European countries. Protests in Madrid and Barcelona were accompanied by Spain's first
'crop-pullings' against genetically modified organisms, held simultaneously across the
country to coincide with the WTO meeting.

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Appendix 2: Vía Campesina press release, dated 27 August 2004.

Call for action for 10th of September

TO CONMEMORATE LEE WHO SACRIFIED HIMSELF

TO STOP THE TERROR OF NEO-LIBERAL "FREE" TRADE !

In Cancun the WTO Ministerial ended in complete failure, the institution WTO coming close to a final
collapse. Mass mobilisations in Cancun and other parts of the world have brought the destructive effects of
trade liberalisation to broad public attention and many governments were under pressure and encouraged to
stop the train of destructive trade liberalisation. The sacrifice of our friend Lee on the 10th of September in
Cancun animated, strengthened and radicalised our struggle. We want to commemorate Lee, his courage
and ideals and his commitment to stop the destruction of peasant agriculture.

Now the European Union (EU), the United States (US), Brazil and India claim victory after the July
negotiations in Geneva and the impression is given that "WTO is back on track". This "victory" however is
nothing more than a public relations act, orchestrated by the main trading powers to make the world
believe that things have changed, having this time the Brazilian and Indian government on their side. In
reality nothing has changed: the same destructive policies continue to threaten the livelihoods of more that
half of the world population working in agriculture.

The EU and the US imposed their deal. The Brazilian government claimed the end of export subsidies as a
victory, but in reality no concrete commitments exist on the direct export subsidies and under the current
deal the indirect support for export by the EU and US can even increase. The Brazilian government
betrayed the interests of their own peasants, accepting among others, some additional sugar import quota
from the US for their agro-industry. The Indian government did not achieve the protection of their more
than 200 food crops. Asian government will remain under pressure to further liberalise their rice markets.

Therefore this "cry for victory" is an incredible insult to Lee and peasants worldwide. As the key
problems are not addressed, this will deepen our frustration and resistance against these policies. WTO
therefore, despite the media noise, is still in crisis, unable to resolve fairly the fundamental concerns of
peoples worldwide. Therefore Via Campesina calls to continue worldwide actions against WTO and the
governments and Transnational Corporations that impose their policies. Together with the Korean
peasant organisations we call for action on the 10th of September to commemorate Lee and show our
continued resistance to neo-liberal trade policies.

Take the WTO out of agriculture, food and fisheries!

WTO kills farmers! Towards Peoples Food Sovereignty!

International Co-ordinating Commission of Via Campesina

27th of August 2004

Contacts in Corea: KPL (Korean Peasant League) [email protected] , KWFA (Korean Women
Farmers Association) [email protected]

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