Global Movements for Food Justice - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 718

farmers, sharecroppers, agricultural wage laborers, and the landless (Naranjo 2012,
232).heyhavesoughtto“[Build]UnitywithinDiversity”throughdirect,opendis-
cussion and deliberation on “issues of gender, race, class, culture, and North/South
relations”(Desmarais2007,27).Foundedin1993byfarmleadersfromeverycontinent
butAustralia,LVCiscurrentlycomposedof148peasantorganizationsinsixty-nine
countries(Desmarais2007;LaVíaCampesina2008).hroughitsmemberorganiza-
tions,LVCclaimstorepresenttheinterestsofatleast200 millionfarmersandhasbeen
argued to be the largest, and one of the most important, social movements in the world
(Chomsky2003;HardtandNegri2004;Perfectoet al.2009).However,asRossetand
Martínez-Torres(2005)argue,socialmovements'constituents“otencannotbepre-
ciselyidentiied...Movementparticipantsmayneverrecognizethemselvesassuch”(4).
Peasants, in their own day-to-day struggles within their own communities or countries,
maynotrecognizethesestrugglesaspartofatransnationalsocialmovement—“yetthat
doesnotmeanthattheyarenotpartofit”(4).
AkeytounderstandingLVC,“theinternationalpeasants'movement,”isunderstand-
inghowitdeines“peasant.”InEnglish,“peasant”tendstoconnotenotjustlowsocial
statusbutotenbackwardnessandalackofsophistication.InSpanish,however,the
roughly equivalent word campesino does not necessarily carry the same negative over-
tones.ForLVCandtheirallies,campesinos,orpeasants,arecharacterizedmostbywhat
they do , and the context they do it in:
A peasant is a man or woman of the land, who has a direct and special relationship
with the land and nature through the production of food and/or other agricultural
products. Peasants work the land themselves, rely above all on family labour and
othersmall-scaleformsoforganizinglabour.Peasantsaretraditionallyembeddedin
their local communities and they take care of local landscapes and of agro-ecological
systems. The term peasant can apply to any person engaged in agriculture,
cattle?raising,pastoralism,handicrats?relatedtoagricultureorarelatedoccupation
inaruralarea.hisincludesIndigenouspeopleworkingontheland.hetermpeas-
antalsoappliestolandless[ruralpersons].
(LaVíaCampesina2009,6-7)
Van der Ploeg (2008) further qualiies that for peasants, “[p]roduction is oriented
toward the market as well as toward the reproduction of the farm unit and the family,”
(1).hesedeinitionsbridgetheartiiciallyrigidseparationsomescholarshaveplaced
between peasants, who farm for their own subsistence, and entrepreneurial farm-
ers, who farm for profit: small-scale producers around the world have long engaged in
varying degrees of cash cropping and long-distance trade alongside local provisioning
(Edelman2005;vanderPloeg2008).5 his is not to say that notable wealth and class
disparitiesdonotexistwithintheclassofpeasantfarmers(Naranjo2012,232-235).But
condensingallofthesegroupsintotheterm“peasant”allowsLVCtoincludemillionsof
farmersinthe“MinorityWorld”(theindustrializedcountries/GlobalNorth;seeAlam
2008),whomaybe“farmorepeasantthanmostofusknoworwanttoadmit”(vander
Ploeg2008,xiv),andmanyofwhomaremembersofLVC.6