When people think of popular protests in the past decade what comes to mind for many people are the WTO action in Seattle, the FTAA actions in Quebec City and Miami, or the protests in places like Genoa, Cancun, and at the annual G-8 Summits. These kinds of large-scale demonstrations take a great deal of planning and organizing by individual and organizations that we often don't hear about. One of those groups is La Via Campesina.

La Via Campesina (Spanish for The Way of Those Who Work the Land) is an organization that was founded in 1993 and became known to the world at its first conference in Belgium. Annette Aurelie Desmarais, a Canadian activist, does a great job of presenting the history and organizational politics of this international movement in her book La Via Campesina. The subtitle, Globalization and the Power of Peasants, acts as a spring board for providing readers with the context that gave birth to this movement of those who work the land--the small farmers and peasants of the world.

La Via Campesina devotes several chapters to analyzing the historical shift in food production from small or subsistence farmers to agribusiness. One statistic from the book that was quite instructive in this shift is "In 1920 the US had 6.5 million farmers; by 2002 the number had fallen to 2.13 million." The author goes on to say that this means there are "more prisoners in the US than there are farmers." This trend of fewer and fewer small farmers is the same all around the globe, where more of the rural population has migrated to urban areas and less people are directly involved in food production. This globalization of agriculture, what was once called the Green Revolution, is what the author calls a "war on subsistence." The factors that have caused this shift in food production have been increased reliance on machinery, forcing neo-liberal markets on developing countries, bio-technology and shifting production away from meeting the needs of local populations to exports.

The author goes on to discuss how the policies of the WTO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and even conferences like the United Nations Food Summit have never included the voices of small/subsistence farmers or campesinos - those who worked the land. This was not surprising to those who began to organize as campesinos since they were the ones who were most affected by the policies of corporate global agriculture.

La Via Campesina traces its origins to a series of discussions that took place in Nicaragua in 1992 with organizations from Central America, the Caribbean, Europe, Canada, and the United States at the second congress of the Union Nacional de Agricultures y Ganaderos. The author states that "The Via Campesina emerged in explicit rejection of the neo-liberal agricultural policies and as a direct response to the GATT negotiations' exclusion of the concerns, needs, and interests of people who actually work the land and produce the world's food." Out of this 1992 meeting came three broad principals that the new organization agreed upon:

* The right of small farmers to a living in the countryside; this implies the full right of farmers to their own autonomous organizations and the recognition of their social importance in the definition and implementation of development in general, and rural development in particular.

* The right to a diversified agriculture which guarantees, as a matter of priority, a supply of healthy, high quality food for all peoples in the world, based on a profound respect for the environment, for a balanced society and for effective access to the land.

* The right of every country to define its own agricultural policy according to the nation's interest and in concertacion with the peasant and indigenous organizations, guaranteeing their real participation.

Once the organization created and agreed to shared principles, they evolved into a dynamic and engaging organization. La Via Campesina has made their presence known and has participated in the mass demonstrations that I mentioned earlier, but particularly took a leadership role at the Fifth Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Cancun, Mexico. Their organizing in many ways disrupted and shut down the proceedings that resulted in the conference being a failure. According to La Via Campesina:

"The collapse of the WTO is a result of a profound crisis within the neo-liberal model. It is urgent that we continue to strengthen our movements, our alternative proposals. Creating an open, transparent and constructive dialogue among ourselves is all the more necessary to advance in our strategies of struggle."

During the Cancun action, one Korean farmer committed suicide as a protest against these very policies that La Via Campesina has organized against. In memory of the Korean farmer's death, Lee Kyung Hae, April 17 is now the International Day of Peasant Struggle.

The last major theme addressed in La Via Campesina is how the organization functions and what challenges it faces in becoming a real voice for change. Like many that have organized around global issues, La Via Campesina has also struggled with being more inclusive of both indigenous voices and women's participation. According to the author, these issues were addressed early on in the organization's formation, so they have made progress in that arena, but they have also recognized the need for constant discussion and self-evaluation to foster a fully participatory climate.

La Via Campesina is an important book for those interested not only in understanding how the small farmer/peasant communities around the world have responded to neo-liberal policies, but also for those seeking a good analysis of community-based organizing and the desire of people all around the world to value the land, food production, and participatory democracy.

Annette Aurelie Desmarais, La Via Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants, (Pluto Press, 2007).