#8March2020: Peasant and Rural women, organised for food sovereignty and a dignified life!
CALL FOR GLOBAL SOLIDARITY ACTION, #08March2020
Harare: This 08th March, the International Day of Women, La Via Campesina joins in solidarity and struggle with millions of peasants, workers, migrants, indigenous people, fishers, pastoralists, waged agricultural workers, housekeepers and people of all diversity among the rural and the urban working class, as well as other organized sectors, to denounce the capitalist and patriarchal system and its constant oppression of women and of our peoples.
We condemn this perverse system that hides behind the malicious facade of conservative and authoritarian neoliberalism, exacerbating workers’ precariousness, eroding our rights, eliminating public policy, and criminalizing and killing those who resist.
Massive women’s mobilizations on a global scale, such as the World Women Strike, #8M, Vivas nos queremos, as well as other actions and expressions of struggle confirm the urgency behind the demand to stop all forms of violence and oppression that women suffer throughout the world.
As La Via Campesina, we raise our fist together with our landless sisters in their 1st National Women’s Meeting to be held on March 5th to 8th in Brazil. We also salute our Zapatista comrades, with whom we shared the 2nd Meeting of Women in the Struggle in December 2019 and the comrades of Women’s March Global who are organizing their 5th Action “We resist to live, we march to transform!”
We stand with the Kurdish and Palestine women; with the women in the struggle in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Spain, Turkey, Bolivia; with the women who survive under situations of structural violence, conservatism and authoritarianism, war, occupation, dispossession, extractivist policies and racist, xenophobic and homophobic narratives that threaten the lives of women of all ages.
We also condemn “patriarchal States” that strengthen and naturalize violence against women. Instead of ensuring rights, in both rural and urban areas, they deny justice and reparations, fostering widespread impunity of the perpetrators. It is distressing to hear presidential declarations such as those of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Lenin Moreno in Ecuador trivializing rape and harassment; denying facts, such as the elevated rates of underage pregnancies from rape and feminicides when the numbers worldwide are alarming and alert to a pandemic. At the same time, they promote policies in favour of transnational companies creating more inequality, poverty and increasing the concentration of wealth in few hands.
As peasant women, this 08th March, we also stand in rejection of the industrial farming model and its system of death that everyday poisons our land, and pose serious health risks to the women who work in the fields and to the people who consume such food.
We demand the enforcement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, which guarantees the right to land, to fair prices, to a production free of toxic agrochemicals and which acknowledges the essential role of peasants in the production of healthy food and as guardians of the common goods by promoting agroecology as the path towards Food Sovereignty and cooling down the planet.
On this day, we also reaffirm our commitment to promote Popular Peasant Feminism. It is the path we have taken as a movement, born of the heat of the struggles for the defense of common goods, against imperialism, colonialism and patriarchy as the pillars that uphold a capitalist system of death and destruction, through mining mega-projects and agribusiness, responsible of the violence and dispossession suffered by the women and peoples of the world.
Peasant and Rural women awake and organized for food sovereignty and a dignified life! Against violence and agribusiness!
Mobilize!
During the week of 08th March, as La Via Campesina we are organizing decentralized actions in different countries and continents. Let’s all speak out together for fairer societies and call for an end to all forms of violence and oppression against women! We are awake and in struggle, both in the countryside and in cities. It is imperative to give visibility to this struggle and raise awareness worldwide.
Send your posters, photos, videos, event plans and press releases to lvcweb@viacampesina.org.
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