Peasants' Movements

Peasants' movements have been important expressions of the formation of the modern world, and they still are. Whether resisting colonization of the commons, protesting capture of their granaries by merchants and rulers, disputing land claims, contending with centralizing states over the unequal terms of their incorporation, or joining millenarian struggles, peasants have been compelled to respond to the array of forces attending the development of capitalist property relations. Why should this not be the case today? Conventional wisdom would have it that the world's peasantries are destined to disappear in the face of competitive pressures from capital-intensive agriculture, expelling them into burgeoning urban labor forces. This development scenario embodies a modernity trope that modern civilization is centered on the city, as an escape from parochialism and the drudgery of rural life. Peasants, here understood in a wider sense as agricultural smallholders or laborers, but also including pastoralists or fishermen, are still a social force to reckon with. In the following, some of the regional and transnational forms are discussed that have gained a voice addressing major issues such as food security, ecological sustainability, and biodiversity.

While certainly the demographic composition of the world's population is now majority urban, and peasant agriculture is evidently increasingly marginal in global-market terms, each of these indicators is deeply problematic. And it has taken the rise and consolidation of a contemporary peasants' movement to underline the shortcomings of such seemingly commonsense observations. At present, there are more than 1 billion slum dwellers across the world, accounting for one in six of the world's population. While many of these seemingly redundant people do work in sweatshops at the extreme end of corporate supply chains, or recycle urban waste, they are not absorbed by the urban-industrial jobs predicted by the development paradigm. Furthermore, the displacement of peasant agriculture is largely due to the withdrawal of protections and the opening up of domestic markets to cheap, subsidized (at below production cost) foodstuffs from the cereal-exporting regions of the global North and the role of Southern states in diverting land use for agro-exporting as a condition of debt rescheduling.

The role of agro-exporting has shaped agricultural policy in a neoliberal world, where food security has been redefined from a social-contract function to a global-market function. The shortcoming of this policy shift became clear during the 2007–2008 food crisis, when governments found national food security compromised by the interruption of their food import dependence. But the transnational peasants' movement had already identified this problem, opposing neoliberal arguments for food security provided by food traders with the concept of food sovereignty, which proclaimed hunger as a problem of rights not of means. Initially, food sovereignty was defined as a territorial right to produce food premised on the notion that food is a source of nutrition first and only secondarily a trade item. This intervention underlined the vulnerability of agricultural producers to subsidy schemes favoring corporate agriculture in a highly uneven global market, maintaining that neoliberal multilateral and national policies privilege the rights of food traders and agribusiness over peasants and low-income consumers. And it made visible the dramatic dispossession of smallholders everywhere by the liberalization of agricultural trade.

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