Declaration of the 1st International Meeting of Diversities and Supporters

From the 1st Meeting of Diversities in the 8th Conference of La Via Campesina, we, LVC peasants who identify ourselves as sexually and gender diverse, and our allies, want to celebrate the creation of this space. Here, we meet to exchange ideas, debate and reflect on a reality that drives us, as an international organization, to continue transforming the ways we relate to one another in order to end all the discrimination, prejudice and all forms of violence that gender non-conforming people experience.

We are certain that a new society free of all oppression on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, diverse abilities and class will only be possible when all the people who make up La Via Campesina can treat each other with respect, guaranteeing basic human rights, peasant rights, as well as the rights that have been historically denied to sexually and gender diverse persons and that aim at creating emancipated human relations.

We celebrate the diversity in our soil, waters, forests, farms, and territories. We celebrate our communities’ social and cultural diversity because it builds strength and resilience. As people who embody these diversities, we do not ask to be tolerated; this is not about pity or charity. This is about knowing that a socially diverse movement for agroecology and food sovereignty is a stronger movement and that the liberation of everyone is intertwined with the liberation of our societies.

We want to keep working the land and strengthening our organizations, just as many of us always have been doing; to confront the interlocked systems of oppression of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism. We are convinced that Food Sovereignty, Agrarian Reform, Agroecology, Peasant and Popular Feminism, Peasants rights, climate justice and solidarity between peoples is the only possible way for peasants to confront dehumanization.

La Via Campesina must approach the concept of family farming as a peasant model of farming, coming from a place of revolutionary love. We call for the need to broaden the definition of ‘family farming’, re-imagining family farming and including our chosen families, a diversity of people and ways of living and working together.

We have a path taken as LVC Diversities and the challenges are already marked. We need to continue expanding the understanding of our organization’s bases and peasant leaders, when we talk about the oppressions and exploitation of those of us who are part of the working class. We need to create training spaces on gender and sexualities that allow us to understand humanity in which gender identities, sexual orientation and corporalities are included.

Our existence in the countryside must be guaranteed, free from stigmas and discrimination, increasingly strengthening the active participation of people of Diversity in the collectives of LVC and training schools, as well as creating spaces of self organization.

The peasant struggle must promote respect for all ways of being, living and loving, of human diversity, being consistent with the fight to defend a dignified life in all territories and that they may be free of all oppressions. May the LVC struggle contemplate all of us as equals in that new society that we are building and which we want to reach.

We exist and we resist!

Our political engagement must always be linked to love, supportive love for our comrades. The love that builds revolutions is also a tool to confront the dehumanization and the project of death that reigns in capitalist relations.

Sowing the seed of revolutionary love and confronting everyday hatred is a permanent task. Agroecology is diversity and as such we are part of the principles we defend. We must strengthen the grassroots work; adding colors to the political formation, and to the autonomous values to popular organization — against patriarchal violence. We must advance the actions of the collective in the fight for the affirmation of human rights, of our existence, of our survival, not only as individuals but as a collective, and of the existence of our families, our communities and colleagues who are in the same condition of not having access to land and other natural goods, work, housing or adequate food.

Diversity is at the heart of Food Sovereignty, in all territories! With Diversities there is revolution!