Our Conferences
Press Kit of the VIth Conference now available on line
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- Published on Friday, 17 May 2013 04:43
La Via Campesina will hold its VI International Conference in Indonesia this coming June
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- Published on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 21:36
Media Advisory - La Via Campesina
(Jakarta, 14 May 2013) About 500 peasants, who are members of more than 150 organizations spread throughout 70 countries across the world, will convene in Jakarta, Indonesia between the 6th and the 13th of June for the VI International Conference of La Via Campesina. This conference will be preceded by the International Youth Assembly and the International Women's Assembly.
These international conferences are held every four years, and consist of the highest body through which collective decisions are made and debates held, giving way to the creation of a common mobilization agenda for the peasant movement.
Read more: La Via Campesina will hold its VI International...
"Feeding the world and cooling the planet": La Vía Campesina's Fifth International Conference
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- Published on Thursday, 15 October 2009 09:14
By Luis Hernández Navarro and Annette Aurélie Desmarais
Briarpatch Magazine, January/February 2009
They numbered almost 650, from 86 countries and five continents, when they arrived in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. They were delegates, support teams and special guests of the Fifth International Conference of La Vía Campesina, which took place from October 16 to 23, 2008. To reach Maputo, most of the delegates had made a considerable economic and human effort. Maputo is not a city you get to easily. At a moment when the world economy had yet to come up for air, in which the credit, environmental, food, trade and finance crises were colliding against one another and shaking the international economic architecture, farm leaders from many regions of the planet gathered together to collectively analyze the global food crisis and its relation to the financial crisis, and to show the world why food sovereignty - the democratization of the global food system - is a viable and necessary alternative.
Read more: "Feeding the world and cooling the planet": La...
A Glimpse of the Peasant and Small Farmer
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- Published on Wednesday, 17 December 2008 13:36
Association Movement in Mozambique
Being in a field in southern Niassa province, in Mozambique, listening to a group of women and men members of a peasant and small farmers’ association sing a cappella while they wield their hoes is both thrilling and supremely humbling. Particularly when you realize that the song is being improvised and that they are singing about their association movement and thanking you for dropping by.
I was in Mozambique because I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the Fifth International Conference of La Via Campesina in Matola, a suburb of the capital city Maputo. La Via Campesina is an organization of organizations, a powerful aspect of the growing movement of peasants, family farmers, indigenous and landless people of the world. My goals were to help record the conference by interviewing some of the delegates and to learn more about the campesin@ way of life and how that way is crystallized in a call for and a practice of food sovereignty. In particular, I wanted to learn what that means to the peasants and small farmers of Mozambique.
Members of the First of December farmers' association, which works with the national organization UNAC (União Nacional de Camponeses / National Peasants' Union) in the Sanga district, near Lichinga, in the Niassa province of Mozambique. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.
Press Release in Support of French Anti-GMO Activists
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- Published on Friday, 05 December 2008 16:17
(Matola, 22 October 2008). The 600 delegates of Via Campesina gathered in Matola, Mozambique for the 5th Conference of the international peasant movement express their support for the 12 anti-GMO activists who were sentenced today by a court in Bourdeaux (France) to three months in prison with suspended sentence for uprooting GMO maize two years ago. Among those charged is Jose Bove, who was also fined 12,000 Euros for having participated to this act of civil disobedience to eliminate Monsanto's BT maize. In the wake of such actions taken by workers and citizens, it is currently prohibited by law to cultivate this GMO maize in France.
Are our comrades guilty of being right two years too early? We call for wider actions in solidarity and resistance to eliminate all genetically modified plants.
Resistance is also found in cultivating and exchanging farmers' own seeds so that peasants, both men and women, can reclaim the biodiversity now endangered by transnational companies.
Only the farmer's own seeds can guarantee respect for the environment and the health and dynamism of rural communities. They are indispensable for food sovereignty.