Peasant Politics in Global Arenas

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In diverse world regions such as the Americas, Europe and South Asia, free-market policies have forced small-scale farmers to transform their productive strategies or face economic ruin. Peasant and small-farmer organizations that once were oriented almost exclusively toward national-level efforts to obtain local-level benefits are now increasingly seeking allies across national borders, attempting to affect global forces which impact their rural livelihoods. In some cases this has resulted in violent actions such as the French peasants' destruction of a McDonalds restaurant in a protest against "fast food"; and Indian farmers burning a field of genetically modified cotton as a protest against agribusiness. This anthropological project studies a new international peasant and small farmer organization called Via Campesina, or Peasant Road, which was founded in 1993 and has affiliates in about sixty countries. The project will interview small farmer activists and donor NGO personnel in five sites: Brussels, the headquarters of the European peasant confederation; Saskatoon, Canada, where the network's Technical Secretariat is based; Tegucigalpa, Honduras, headquarters of the network's Organizational Secretariat; Managua, Nicaragua, the base of a Central American small farmers' network that helped found the Peasant Road; and Bangalore, India, home of one of the most active of the network's constituent organizations. In each site the interviews and analysis of documentary materials will focus on the political formation of activist individuals, the histories of organizational consolidation, and the mobilization of resources and alliances. The project will examine what movements defending economically marginal constituencies gain and lose by forming part of global civil society, as well as how new varieties of transnational politics have shaped peasant and small farmer identities, both within the agriculturist organizations and in relation to their NGO backers and antagonists. The new knowledge generated by this proposal will advance our understanding of how comparable grass-roots and global organizations function.