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Subject: Birthing Justice - Via Campesina Leads for Women's Rights
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BIRTHING JUSTICE: WOMEN CREATING
ECONOMIC & SOCIAL ALTERNATIVES
VIA CAMPESINA - ADVOCATING FOR
RIGHTS TO FOOD, LAND, WATER, SECURITY +
Beverly
Bell
June 20, 2012
Welcome to Birthing Justice: Women Creating Economic and Social
Alternatives.
The series features twelve alternative social and economic models which expand
the possibilities for justice, equity, and strong community. They are based in
the
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Juana Ferrer is a member of the national
board of National Confederation of Women Farmers (CONAMUCA) in the
One of Juana’s priorities in life is to end violence against small-farmer communities, especially the women within them. She and others in Via Campesina, together, are making slow but steady headway. As for physical violence against women, Via Campesina has made an aggressive commitment to eliminate it.
The coalition also challenges structural violence, the result of economic and political systems which systematically harm rural and landless peoples. One way is through aggressively promoting food sovereignty, which is the right of a nation to feed itself through domestic, small-scale, environmentally healthy agriculture. Instead of food serving the profits of global corporations, food sovereignty privileges the right of small farmers to own land and to produce. It is based in part on the democratic participation of the population in shaping food, trade, and development policies.
Juana Ferrer |San Cristobal, Dominican
Republic
Women have historically been promoters of agriculture and
the ones who saved seeds, too. We women have a very spiritual and very
political commitment that’s been passed down to us by our ancestors – a
commitment to better conditions for our families, our community, our people.
We face really harsh realities with the food crisis and
the environmental crisis. It affects us all, but especially the women. We women
carry it all on our shoulders, but it’s not just our responsibility. We’ve had
to unite women and men to provide solutions to our situations. We’ve had to
work really hard.
In the early 90’s, when we were building Via Campesina,
women’s participation – especially at the international level – was practically
invisible. We women came with all our commitment, with all our history in
[social] movements, but it wasn’t reflected in the organization or their
decision-making.
A lot of the women that helped start the movement were
pregnant. Imagine that. We were nursing children while giving all we could in
our local, national, and
international political work. Some people might think
that’s marvelous, but the level of sacrifice each of us had to make was
very big. We had the double burden of raising a family and doing political
work.
A really important thing for us has been valuing our
responsibilities, because it’s not the same when a woman goes out to struggle:
we have to make breakfast for the children, make coffee, clean the house, see
if Grandmother is doing okay. The men go out anywhere they want.
In the course of it all, we women have gained more of a
place in our houses, in our families, in our communities, and in our
organizations. But it’s not like everything is fine now. And it’s not
because the men in the organization gave us space; we’ve worked for it.
We in Via Campesina assume that food sovereignty is our
right as peoples. We have the right to have access to resources, to produce the
food we need, to decide what we want to produce. Women are present in that
struggle.
The seed campaign of Via Campesina, for example, was
primarily introduced by the women. All that has to do with human rights, rights
of the campesinos and campesinas [small farmers]. Women have taken so much
responsibility in confronting the neoliberal economic and agriculture model and
constructing the international campesino movement that our men in Via Campesina
have had to recognize it.
One of the things we do in Via Campesina is oppose a
culture of patriarchy, discrimination, and oppression. We’ve been able to plant
the struggle against all the things that oppress us women as a responsibility
of women and men in Via Campesina. Like: Via Campesina originally had a
Commission on Gender, but it was all women while all the rest of the
commissions – agrarian reform, food sovereignty, human rights, and others –
were only men. Now we have an International Commission on Women, with men and
women in it. On the International Coordinating Committee, we’re nine men and
nine women. But what we’ve struggled for isn’t equality in numbers, but in
participation and decision-making.
In 2005, Via Campesina launched a campaign to eliminate
all forms of violence against women in rural areas, and to work with other
sectors of society to do it. It’s not a question of improving the situation of
violence; it’s about eliminating it. We’ve gotten the men in Via Campesina to
put their money where their mouth is, because they’ve figured out that
violence against women directly affects the whole family – daughters and sons,
too. Our position is that the government has to assume responsibility, too.
At the international level of Via Campesina, one
achievement has been to get women’s right to access to land recognized, to fight
for an agrarian reform that benefits men and women. In some countries
like the
And then, campesinos and campesinas have little access to
productive land with access to water, where we can grow food, to begin with.
The rest is in the hands of big producers, multinationals, politicians,
government functionaries.
We’ve achieved a lot, not just in words but also in
action. We’ve provided a lot of solutions to human rights violations that women
face – violence within families, economic violence, political violence.
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