The Creation of New Rights by the Food Sovereignty Movement: The Challenge of Institutionalizing Subversion

Abstract

Keywords

food sovereignty human rights institutionalization peasant movements peasants’ rights rights master frame social movements Vía Campesina

Introduction

For almost 50 years, sociologists were reluctant to engage in the analysis of rights talk by social movements (Hynes et al., 2010: 811) because of classical sociology’s scepticism toward normative analysis of legal institutions (Short, 2009: 93). This changed with Malcolm Waters’ embracing of a ‘social constructionist view’ of rights and his consideration of human rights as an ‘institution that is specific to cultural and historical context just like any other’ (1996: 593). Following this epistemological turn, the discipline developed theoretical and conceptual tools to study how rights ‘operate in social practice’ (Morris, 2006: 11). The analysis of the ‘mechanisms that translate social phenomena into rights disputes’ (Short, 2009: 96) became a valid objective of social science research.

This article analyses the creation of new human rights by a contemporary transnational agrarian movement, Vía Campesina. It makes the case that the movement’s assertion of new rights contributes to shaping a cosmopolitan, multicultural, and anti-hegemonic conception of human rights (Rajagopal, 2003; Santos, 1997). As human rights can be described as ‘inventions’ (Plummer, 2006: 152), due attention must be paid to the social actors involved in the creation of rights if we are to fully understand rights regimes (Short, 2009: 96). While a number of authors have documented how universal norms are appropriated and transformed in local struggles (Cowan, 2006; Cowan et al., 2001; Merry, 2006), this article takes a reverse approach. Rather than taking recognized human rights as a departure point, it looks at human rights in their pre-codified form, and aims to analyse their institutional trajectory.

This article starts by asking the question of ‘why, when, how, and under what circumstances’ (Glucksmann, 2006: 61) rights emerged as a social movement demand. It discusses the advantages and constraints of the human rights framework before analysing the creation of new human rights by Vía Campesina as a way to overcome the limitations of the ‘rights master frame’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619). In doing so, it emphasizes the crucial role of social movements in ‘shaping the outcome of political deliberation over rights’ (Morris, 2010: 323). It then explores efforts made by Vía Campesina to institutionalize new rights and become involved in the very definition of rights, following in the footsteps of indigenous peoples (Short, 2009: 104).

Grounded in an anthropological approach to human rights, this research adopts an ethnographic methodology to explore the ‘social life’ of new rights (Wilson, 2006: 77). This article draws on 65 semi-directed interviews conducted with peasant and farmer leaders and activists from Vía Campesina between April 2008 and June 2010 in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Canada, France, Belgium, and Indonesia; on participant-observation in 42 meetings with agrarian movement activists in the above-mentioned countries, as well as in Haiti, Nepal, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bolivia in the same period; and on the author’s participation in four meetings at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The research is also based on the analysis of declarations and press releases issued by Vía Campesina over the last 20 years, available through the organization’s website.¹

Why is the Transnational Agrarian Movement for Food Sovereignty Significant?

The context which gave rise to Vía Campesina² is most clearly associated with the phasing out of Keynesian policies and the generalization of neoliberal policies in the post-1970s (Dardot and Laval, 2009: 273). Its roots, however, are found in the much debated transition of agrarian economies to capitalism, a phenomenon that started in the 16th century (Beaud, 1981: 27: 36) and led to a global division of labour (Bernstein, 2010: 67–70). This (apparently unending) transformation of peasant farming culminates today with the disintegration of the resource base on which peasant modes of farming are grounded (Van der Ploeg, 2008: 263), and with the ‘commodification of subsistence’ through which once largely self-sufficient farmers come to rely increasingly on markets for their reproduction (Bernstein, 2010: 65).

Vía Campesina developed in the early 1990s as small farmers from Central America, North America, and Europe sought to articulate a common response to the free-market onslaught that had devastated their lives (Borras et al., 2008; Desmarais, 2008a; Rosset and Martinez, 2010). Since then, 148 national and sub-national rural organizations from 69 countries – mobilizing against genetic crops, dams, mining concessions, natural reserves, investment or trade liberalization – have joined forces in what some consider ‘the most dynamic’ new transnational agrarian movement (Edelman and James, 2011: 90). The movement has opposed ‘global depeasantization’ (Araghi, 1995) and the emerging ‘corporate food regime’ (McMichael, 2009). It has developed a ‘food sovereignty’ model to counterpose the dominant ‘market economy’ paradigm (Rosset and Martinez, 2010: 154). It has managed to build a common agenda across the North–South divide, and to gain the support of numerous NGOs, academics, environmentalists, and even states that today defend some version of food sovereignty.

Just like the ‘new social movements’ of the post-1960s,³ Vía Campesina opposes the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ by the state and the economy (Habermas, 1987: 318) that ‘robs actors of the meaning of their own actions’ (1987: 302). The movement shares a number of features with movements oriented towards questions of identity and lifestyle: its forms of protest are mostly sub-institutional, and its claims are not geared towards compensations that the welfare state can provide. Rather, Vía Campesina is very much about ‘defending and restoring endangered ways of life’ (1987: 392) and about ensuring that peasants regain ‘the possibility of controlling their own destinies’ (Vía Campesina, 1996b). Despite this focus on the lifeworld, numerous aspects of Vía Campesina’s claims echo demands made by old style movements. Vía Campesina deploys an anti-capitalist rhetoric close to that of capital-labour struggles and in which conflicts over distribution occupy central place.

In its attempt to articulate questions of redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 26), Vía Campesina has deployed a ‘rights master frame’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619). Rights have provided a common language to organizations which are politically, culturally, and ideologically radically different (Borras, 2008: 109), and the discourse of rights has shaped the movement (Borras et al., 2008; Houtzager, 2005; Patel, 2007; Rosset and Martinez, 2010). Vía Campesina, however, has not used existing, universally recognized human rights to frame its demands. For example, the already codified human ‘right to food’, despite gaining much legitimacy and visibility in the last 25 years has not been embraced by Vía Campesina as its rallying slogan, a role that has been fulfilled instead by the new ‘right of peoples to food sovereignty’. To the specificities of Vía Campesina’s rights talk we now turn.

On the Advantages and Limitations of the Rights Master Frame

The emergence and success of a social movement essentially depends on three sets of interrelated factors: political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and ‘framing’ processes (McAdam et al., 1996: 8). Political opportunities and movement organizations do not produce sustained social movements. A movement’s ability to develop depends on ‘meaning work’: the production of meaning for constituents, antagonists and bystanders (Benford and Snow, 2000: 612).

Since the early 1990s, an abundant scientific production has explored how frames are ‘generated and diffused’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 612). A number of generic ‘master frames’ have been identified, which are not movement-specific but rather colour and constrain the orientations and activities of a number of movements (2000: 619). The ‘rights master frame’ is a good example of a collective action frame which has been identified as sufficiently broad in interpretive scope, inclusivity, flexibility, and cultural resonance to function as master frame (2000: 619). The rights master frame was mobilized by the civil rights movement (McAdam, 1996; Valocchi, 1996) and later adopted by gay and lesbian rights groups (Hull, 2001; Plummer, 2006). It is prominent in pro-life vs pro-choice debates and in struggles over workers’ rights, mothers’ rights and welfare rights (Reese and Newcombe, 2003), as well as women’s and migrants’ rights (Elias, 2010).

The advantages of mobilizing a rights master frame have been well documented. Human rights can be used by activists to transform ordinary perceptions of what is just and unjust (Agrikoliansky, 2010: 229). Reference to ‘universals’ facilitates the international export of claims (2010: 232) and allows social movements to frame demands in a way that does not emphasize particular interests. Human rights appear to be compatible with moral systems – including duty-based systems – that are centred on concepts other than rights (Renteln, 1988: 360). Rights allow for a flexible and open master frame (Mooney and Hunt, 1996: 179) that facilitates the integration of multiple ideologies. A rights master frame combines easily with other master frames, and allows for the constitution of a very potent multivocal frame. Vía Campesina’s ‘food sovereignty’ frame has been a very successful organizational frame: it mobilizes the rights master frame but also a number of other master frames, such as the ‘cultural pluralist’ and ‘environmental’ master frames (Benford and Snow, 2000: 619) and the ‘producer’ and ‘agrarian’ master frames that run through agrarian mobilizations (Mooney and Hunt, 1996).

Yet the rights master frame is associated with a number of constraints. Merry argues that the rights framework has ‘individualizing’ and ‘western’ implications and may alienate activists from their ‘own local cultural understandings’ (Merry, 1997: 32). It overemphasizes the obligations of states towards their own citizens, obliterating transnational issues even though it deploys a universal rhetoric (Elias, 2010: 44). Its fundamentally liberal character tends to place emphasis on economic liberty – understood as individual appropriation of, access to, and control over economic resources – at the expense of equality of outcome/welfare (Charvet and Kaczynska-Nay, 2008: 11–12).

In order to deploy a rights master frame that serves the movement’s goals, resonates with activists’ worldviews and encourages them to take action, Vía Campesina members had to develop an alternative conception of rights that emphasizes the collective dimension of claims; that targets the various levels where food and agricultural governance issues ought to be deliberated; and that provides the tools to fight neoliberalism and capitalism in agriculture. In doing so, movement activists had to tweak the movement’s rights master frame just enough to overcome its limitations without jeopardizing its legitimacy.

This article contends that Vía Campesina’s main way of dealing with this tension has been to ‘create’ new human rights. Two categories of new rights are presented in this article: the ‘right of peoples to food sovereignty’ and ‘peasants’ rights’. Taken together, these claims constitute a good illustration of the dual face of the movement, which dialectically combines ‘instrumental’ – political, economic, or social – demands with an ‘expressive’ dimension oriented towards norms, values, identities, and lifestyles (Stammers, 1999: 985).

Creating New Rights to Oppose Global Capitalism and Neoliberalism

It is generally acknowledged that ideas and practices around human rights developed over centuries and in large part through social movements’ struggles. Yet, the contribution of social movements to the making of human rights is rarely acknowledged in the human rights literature (Rajagopal, 2003; Stammers, 2009). International human rights lawyers Steiner, Alston, and Goodman link the origins of economic and social rights to philosophical analyses and political theory from authors as diverse as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls (Steiner et al., 2008: 269).

Other authors associate the emergence of social rights to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the concurrent strengthening of private property rights and individual freedom, and the insecurity brought by industrialization (Gaston v. Rimlinger, 1983: 53).⁴ Social rights, which enjoyed increased protection from the 1880s onwards, saw an intense period of institutionalization in the interwar years as the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted a number of international minimum standards (Steiner et al., 2008: 269).

Attempts by agrarian movements to create new rights could be analysed as one contemporary case in the long expansion of human rights (Edelman and James, 2011: 81). The recent addition of new categories of rights-holders such as women, children, migrant workers, and people with disabilities, to which the category of peasants could potentially be added, supports this interpretation. Yet such a reading would fail to fully capture the rupture with existing conceptions of human rights that is introduced by peasant movements’ rights claims.

As Vía Campesina’s ambivalent approach to the ‘right to food’ demonstrates, the worldviews of peasant activists are quite at odds with both the liberal and social-democratic approaches to human rights. The social-democratic approach, associated with the reformist socialist current of the 19th century and with the work of Keynes and Beveridge and the New Deal in the USA, calls on the intervention of the liberal democratic state to curb the inequalities generated by the capitalist market economy (Stammers, 1995: 488). As such, it cannot be a source of radical change because it brings conflicts under the ‘instrumental-rational procedure of the system’ and encourages their resolution through legal channels and material compromise (Habermas, 1987: 356).

The considerable influence of the social-democratic approach on the ‘right to food’ – responsible for its conceptualization as access to compensatory policies such as social programs (Künnemann, 1984: 95) – helps explain its lack of appeal for radical agrarian movements. By claiming the ‘right to produce food’ (Saragih, 2005) instead of the right to food, Vía Campesina activists insist on regaining control over a part of the societal product and over the associated authority to organize production. They defend the sovereignty of ‘producers’ and resist the transformation of citizens into ‘consumers’. Rejection of the right to food can also be explained by tensions between NGOs and rising small farmers’ organizations from South and North (McKeon, 2009: 12): ‘Objection to the right to food was strong because it felt like it was imposed from outside … The objective of the movement was its independence from NGOs, to consolidate itself.’ Member organizations wanted ‘their project, their human rights’.⁵

The Right of Peoples to Food Sovereignty

The ‘right of peoples to food sovereignty’ is probably the most emblematic ‘invention’ of Vía Campesina. The ‘food sovereignty’ frame first emerged in Central America in the mid-1980s in response to drastic structural adjustment programs, the deliquescence of state support for agriculture and the arrival of US food imports (Edelman, 1999). As early as 1993, it was formulated as ‘the right of every country to define its own agricultural policy according to the nation’s interest and in concertacíon [sic] with the peasant and indigenous organizations, guaranteeing their real participation’ (Vía Campesina, 1993). It made its appearance on the international scene in 1996, at the occasion of the World Food Summit (Vía Campesina, 1996a).

In the early years of its existence, the right to food sovereignty dealt mainly with trade and the WTO.⁶ Over the years, food sovereignty expanded to include agrarian reform and access to land, access to resources, territory, seeds, local knowledge, local markets, cultural identity, and so on (Nyeleni Food Sovereignty Forum, 2007). In the words of a French peasant woman, ‘food sovereignty is what we have in our guts’.⁷

The right to food sovereignty is not an individual right: rights-holders include individuals, communities, regions, peoples, territories or nations. It presents both external and internal dimensions (Jones, 1999: 102). In its internal dimension, this right expresses claims that are close to people’s internal self-determination; i.e. the right of a people to freely choose its own political, economic and social system. It expresses peasant activists’ widespread perception that they have no voice in decision-making. Food sovereignty ‘is a way to reaffirm our anchoring in society and the control of peoples over policies. It is a reaction to something that escapes us’.⁸ The right to food sovereignty conveys a call for smaller political units within a world society, ‘the search for a more intuitively plausible scale of community’ (Felice, 1996). In that sense, it is kin to the right to autonomy or self-government which has been recognized in the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Golay and Özden, 2010: 24).

In its external dimension, the right to food sovereignty evokes a number of collective human rights – the right to self-determination, the right to permanent sovereignty over natural resources, the right to development – that motivated decolonization in the interwar period. Vía Campesina reactivates these rights, which have somewhat fallen in oblivion, but applies them to a changed international context: ‘We are not talking about political independence but economic independence. Today, decolonization is not about a state in relation to another, but about a state in relation to transnational corporations.’⁹ For activists, southern countries have the right to develop their agriculture but have neither the ‘right to grow’ nor the ‘right to export’. While the Declaration on the Right to Development (UN General Assembly, 1986) essentially saw development as the state’s responsibility, the movement does not consider the state as the main driver of social change.

Finally, whilst the right to food is premised on a ‘highly state centric’ (Stammers, 1995: 507) approach, definitions of the right to food sovereignty leave duty-bearers most often unspecified. Rather than monitoring states’ activities to ensure enforcement of human rights – a tactic which runs the risk of sustaining existing power structures (Stammers, 1999: 996) – Vía Campesina seeks to force public debate and to repoliticize food politics (Patel, 2007: 91). The right to food sovereignty is to be ‘recognised and implemented by communities, peoples, states and international bodies’ (Nyeleni Food Sovereignty Forum, 2007). Such language is typical of third-generation rights which can be realized ‘only through the concerted efforts of all actors on the social scene’ (Maggio and Lynch, 1997: 53).

The Rights of Peasants

While the right to food sovereignty has been Vía Campesina’s reference frame, a number of other new rights have also found their way into the movement’s vocabulary. In March 2009, the International Coordinating Commission of Vía Campesina¹⁰ adopted the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Peasants’. The very first draft of the Declaration was elaborated in Indonesia in 1999. Following the end of President Suharto’s regime (1967–98) which was marked by violent repression of rural protest, a number of movements for rural democracy emerged in the countryside, mostly mobilizing around land issues with the support of urban-based activists (Bachriadi, 2009: 6). Henri Saragih, the current General Coordinator of Vía Campesina, belonged to the student movements before he joined Vía Campesina’s member organization Serikat Petani Indonesia.

The ‘Peasants’ Rights Charter’ (Fakih et al., 2003: 153) was one of the end results of a participatory action research project carried out by the International Institute for Environment and Development. The project involved peasants from 24 provinces, universities, and NGO activists. ‘It came from the village meetings. (…) Peasants ask: “what is our right? how to fight for our right?” (…) Many people talk rights at that time. Peasants ask: “what is rights to us?”’¹¹

The initiative was subsequently ‘externalized’ onto the international level (Tarrow, 2005). It was discussed within the movement’s International Working Committee on Human Rights, and submitted to the consideration of all member organizations. Despite numerous internal consultations on the draft text, appropriation of the idea by activists in all regions, in particular in Latin America, is still to be achieved.

The Declaration starts by reaffirming existing human rights, including the right to food, and then recognizes new rights. A large number of these rights emphasize redistribution and access to resources: the ‘right to land and territory’, the ‘right to means of agricultural production’, the ‘freedom to determine price and market for agricultural production’, and the ‘right to biological diversity’ (Vía Campesina, 2008a).

The other new rights claimed by the movement contest the commoditization of labour and emphasize recognition.¹² The ‘right not to disappear’ opposes trade, investment, and development policies that negate the very existence of the peasantry. The ‘right to produce’ is the expression of a demand to form a full part of society. The ‘right to be a peasant’ and the ‘right to the protection of agriculture values’ express the belief in an alternative, less urban, less technological, less industrial and less western, modernity and the quest for a ‘natural’, ‘pre-capitalist form’ of existence (Brass, 1997: 218).

Rights talk (understood as ‘meaning work’) plays a key role in the ‘reflexive process’ of collective identity building (Gotham, 1999: 334). The active construction of a shared collective identity is crucial for mobilization because the unity of ‘people of the land’ cannot be assumed (H. Bernstein, 2010: 120). But identity is itself a goal of social movement activism (M. Bernstein, 1997: 535). In an effort to gain acceptance for a stigmatized identity, Vía Campesina activists have called themselves ‘peasants’ despite the pejorative connotation of the term (Desmarais, 2008b, 139).

Towards Autonomous Lawmaking?

Vía Campesina’s incursions into rights creation illustrate the tension between human rights and popular sovereignty that is described by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. In his effort to integrate the moral and the legal side of human rights, Habermas defends a ‘system of rights’ in which ‘the addressees of law are simultaneously the authors of their rights’ (1998: 104). Only by ensuring ‘participation in the practice of politically autonomous lawmaking’ (1998: 121) can the conflict between Kant’s idea of human rights – as moral rights that precede and constrain the will of the sovereign lawgiver (1998: 101) – and Rousseau’s principle of popular sovereignty – according to which human rights have a binding character for a political community only as elements of their own consciously appropriated tradition (1998: 100) – be solved in a satisfactory manner.

Do peasant movements suggest a Habermasian way of solving this tension? This is far from certain. For Habermas, ‘citizens can come to enjoy the rights that protect their human dignity only by first uniting as authors of the democratic undertaking of establishing and maintaining a political order based on human rights’ (2010: 473). If Vía Campesina’s involvement in the elaboration of new rights indeed suggests an interest in ‘self-legislation by citizens’, the movement appears to insist more on the community as subject of rights than on the rights of equal participation for each person (Habermas, 1998: 127). In that sense, Vía Campesina’s emerging conception of rights does not seem to offer the ‘alternative to both atomistic individualism and a strong version of communitarianism’ that Habermas attempts to find (Flynn, 2003: 452).

Nevertheless, the contribution of peasant movements to the emergence of a global ‘political community’ in which human rights could acquire the ‘quality of enforceable rights’ (Habermas, 2010: 475) appears undeniable. Habermas sees an active public sphere as offering a space for the extension and radicalization of existing rights (1998: 370). Applying Habermas’ framework to the international context, one could argue that human rights require institutionalization within the framework of a ‘cosmopolitan legal order’ if they are to be more than a ‘weak force’ (Flynn, 2003: 435–6). How are peasant movements contributing to shaping this new legal order? Are they eager to see their new rights institutionalized?

The Rights Challenge for Social Movements: How to Institutionalize Subversion?

Rights confront peasant movements with the ‘paradox of institutionalisation’ (Stammers, 2009: 102). The first and well-known aspect of that paradox has to do with the institutionalization of social movement organizations (Tarrow, 1998) and their engagement with the institutional world. The second aspect of the paradox has to do with the fact that the institutionalization of human rights constantly threatens their subversive potential. These two aspects are explored in relation to the trajectories of the new ‘right to food sovereignty’ and new ‘rights of peasants’ respectively.

Institutionalizing the Right of Peoples to Food Sovereignty

Attempts by Vía Campesina to institutionalize the right to food sovereignty have been particularly successful at the national level. A series of states, in alliance or under the pressure of peasant movements, have initiated efforts to recognize this right in national laws or constitutions and translate it into public policies. Constitutional recognition of the right to food sovereignty has been achieved in Ecuador, Bolivia, Nepal, and Venezuela while Mali and Senegal have adopted food sovereignty policies.

Public policies for food sovereignty generate much enthusiasm within Vía Campesina, although they usually fail to cover crucial dimensions such as trade, access to land, seeds, marketing or state support. Such policies also generate frustration because of the gap between the instruments that their implementation would require and their often declaratory nature: ‘A few countries make legislative efforts but it looks more like a communication exercise. Is there a real change in agricultural policy?’¹³

At the international level, efforts by the movement to build an alternative global governance framework for food and agriculture have focused on the difficult issue of bringing ‘the WTO out of agriculture’ (Vía Campesina, 1999). Around 2000, the idea that the right to food sovereignty should be enshrined in an international convention started to circulate in social movements and NGO networks (Our World is Not for Sale, 2001). Ten years later, Vía Campesina’s prominent demand that agriculture be placed under the auspices of a reformed UN (Desmarais, 2003: 22) has faded away.

Why did efforts to institutionalize the right to food sovereignty stall in the mid-2000s? Changes in perceived ‘legal opportunity structures’ (Israël, 2003: 62) – in particular, the victory won by social movements at the 2003 WTO ministerial conference in Cancun and the absence of any progress in the Doha Development Round in the years following – may explain why the movement gradually stopped emphasizing the trade-related aspects of food sovereignty. Other potential explanations are to be found in the movement’s internal dynamics. Efforts to move ‘from protest to proposal’ (Edelman, 1999) have been constrained by debates on whether or not institutionalization was the most appropriate strategy. Activists within the movement who want to ‘transform food sovereignty into a right’ that would be ‘guaranteed in legally binding international law’ have had a hard time convincing other groups within the movement who are suspicious of these ‘reformist temptations’.¹⁴ This latter group of peasant activists believes that efforts should be directed at truly alternative, more feasible or reactive strategies, such as ‘defending territories’¹⁵ or developing ‘the urban aspects of food sovereignty, such as food safety and food quality’.¹⁶

In this debate over the pros and cons of institutionalizing the right to food sovereignty, the fear that a legal strategy would have a demobilizing effect played a significant role. Indeed, the legalization of social struggles carries a number of potentially negative impacts that the movement is well aware of: the transformation of the movement’s struggle in technical debates to be solved in specialized arenas, the demobilization of movement activists, and the loss of autonomy. Well documented in the context of judicial struggles (Newell and Lekhi, 2006), these concerns largely apply to the institutionalization of new rights. The challenge therefore consists in keeping alive repertoires of action (Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 1986) that are somewhat in conflict: mobilization and protest, but also advocacy and political dialogue.

Overall, Vía Campesina has been wary of institutionalizing the right to food sovereignty at the international level. In order to avoid containment and cooption, it has focused its efforts on undermining the legitimacy of despised institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and international financial institutions. This appears to somewhat contradict Stammers’ assertion that social movements’ struggles construct human rights claims in ways that demand their institutional instantiation (2009: 106).

Institutionalizing the Rights of Peasants

In contrast, Vía Campesina has worked actively over recent years to ‘bring’ the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants ‘to the UN Human Rights Council’ (Vía Campesina, 2008b) with the support of two NGOs, the Centre Europe Tiers-Monde (CETIM) and the Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN). Acknowledging the importance of the matter, the Human Rights Council has granted the mandate to its Advisory Committee to undertake a study on ways and means to further advance the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (Human Rights Council, 2010).

Will the ‘emancipatory thrust’ of human rights be sustained through this process of institutionalization (Stammers, 2009: 106)? This strategic question is of particular relevance to Vía Campesina considering its alliance with ‘human rights translators’ (Merry, 2006: 42). Human rights experts helped elaborate the final text of the Declaration. The draft was made to follow the structure of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Golay, 2009: 15) and underwent a series of revisions to be closer to ‘UN language’. There is a risk that peasants’ claims will be further ‘translated’, ‘rationalized’ and constrained by ‘hegemonic languages of expertise’ (Shamir, 2005: 115) as the process moves on. Moreover, it is likely that the rights which most directly confront the corporate food regime, such as rights to exchange traditional seeds or to intervene in markets and set prices, will be set aside in institutional debates (Edelman and James, 2011: 97).

A separate challenge facing the institutionalization of peasants’ rights relates to the central issue of ‘who are the peasants’ (Harriss, 1982: 24). In an attempt to demonstrate the specificity of ‘peasants’ as rights-holders, the Declaration attributes social and cultural characteristics to the peasantry – the centrality of subsistence, the existence of a way of life based on household and community, the harmony with nature, the specificity of peasant behaviour – and describes it as undifferentiated (Lenin, 1982; Shanin, 1982). While this could be interpreted as an instance of strategic deployment of expressions of identity (M. Bernstein, 1997: 535), it could also be a typical instantiation of ‘peasant essentialism’ (Bernstein and Byres, 2001: 6). By failing to depict the complex and evolving identity of contemporary rural families who often combine rural and urban, agricultural and non-agricultural, wage employment and self-employment (H. Bernstein, 2009: 73), Vía Campesina runs the risk of alienating potential allies, such as rural labourers, and of losing resonance for member activists.

To Conclude

To a large extent, decisions over what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable forms of institutional engagement appear to explain why the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’ have had distinct trajectories. The first requires a total revamp of global governance of trade in agriculture and constitutes a direct opposition to the (inimical) WTO framework. The second requires that the (inoffensive) UN human rights system acknowledge the existence of a new group right.

Over recent years, Vía Campesina members have had to deal with the arrival of new hot issues on the international agenda, such as climate change and land grabbing, and have struggled to cope with an increasingly difficult social and economic environment. Peasant activists have invested less time and effort in their once central anti-WTO deligitimization strategy, and have put more work into reinforcing the movement from within (Rosset and Martinez, 2010: 151) and in developing grassroots strategies. These strategies aim to build food sovereignty ‘from below’, by reinforcing the link with consumers through community-supported agriculture, by developing ‘bottom up experiments’ with production, knowledge, innovation and marketing (Friedmann and McNair, 2008: 410) or by switching to agroecological practices (Holt-Gimenez, 2010), in the South but in the North as well. To some extent, this ‘localist’ turn is indicative of the ambiguous attitude of the movement vis-a-vis the role of institutions in the construction of an alternative, post-neoliberal society.

Some activists find the current situation frustrating because they feel that the local aspects of the right to food sovereignty are developing at the expense of its political and redistributive aspects: ‘Is food sovereignty only about relocalizing production?’; ‘I don’t believe in food sovereignty islands in a neoliberal ocean.’¹⁷ In Europe, where a lot of work has been put into proposing an alternative Common Agriculture Policy in the context of the 2013 reform, the emphasis is on building alliances, in particular with consumers: ‘We risk being accused of defending our own interests if we focus on food sovereignty’; ‘Food sovereignty is part of the solution but if I say it is the right to be a farmer, I am dead in my environment’.¹⁸

Building alliances globally with indigenous groups in the South, consumers in the North, agricultural and industrial workers all around the globe will certainly be critical to advance the proposed new rights, from above (through constitutional changes, public policies, institutions) and/or from below (through alternative food and farming practices). But building alliances may become useless if too much of the movement’s rights rhetoric revolves around peasants’ distinctiveness, and their quest for recognition (Morris, 2010: 324). Then, Vía Campesina might be confronted with a lesson already learned by others: rights, when framed as absolutist claims, may inhibit the necessary political dialogue with other fragments of society (Glendon, 1991: 18). How Vía Campesina will take up the challenge to keep advancing new rights while making them relevant for the whole of society is a matter of great intellectual excitement, as well as crucial social relevance.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jean De Munck whose support and thoughtful contributions were invaluable. I am grateful to Isabelle Ferreras, Patricia Nanz, Geoffrey Pleyers, Julie Ringelheim, Olivier De Schutter, Nadia Lambek and Carole Samdup for their useful suggestions. I also thank the three anonymous Sociology referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

Priscilla Claeys is a PhD student in Social and Political Sciences at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. She divides her time between the Centre for Philosophy of Law (CPDR) and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity (CriDis). Her research interests include peasant movements, food and agriculture, human rights, and economic globalization. Before joining the team of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food in May 2008 (), she worked for a number of human rights and development NGOs.

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