Conclusions of the Gender and Sexual Diversities Articulation during the ECVC General Assembly
We celebrate the diversity in our soil, oceans, forests, farms, and stomachs. We celebrate our communities’ social and cultural diversity because it builds strength and resilience. As people who embody this diversity, 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.
In our societies, in rural and urban areas and in our organizations, there are people with bodies, emotions, diverse abilities and skills who have been historically subjected to more forms of discrimination than others. Some of us carry the trauma of these discriminations in our bodies, hearts and minds. Our local organizations, ECVC and LVC, must struggle for systemic transformations to dismantle these intersecting oppressions.
La Via Campesina must support 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.
Our organizations must embrace the LGBTQI+ community, collectives, migrants, cooperatives, marginalized, racialized people and people who are othered who come together in the community. We must welcome new generations, increase the resilience in farming and build all people’s potential to achieve food sovereignty. We must create safer spaces for all these groups and change our narratives and practices.
To achieve this, we need resources and tools. We need to be reflected in the entire work of ECVC, including in position papers, ways of work and across the new strategic plan. We also need more than allies. We need accomplices to demolish power imbalances for actual systemic change. We need people in positions of power to step back and make space free for us to participate meaningfully and, with this, achieve systemic transformations.
Men! Share your power with us! Landowners! Share your land with us! Elders! Be open to our fresh ideas! Peasants, Landworkers, Youth, wisdom keepers and land elders, women, people of diverse sexualities and gendered people, migrants, racialized and marginalized communities: Let’s hold hands together and make this revolution from a place of social justice, joy and revolutionary love!!!
