On April 17, NFFC joins La Via Campesina (LVC) to mark the International Day of Peasant Struggles, a day of action bringing us together to commemorate the Eldorado do Carajás massacre in Brazil in 1996, and to honor the resistance of peasants worldwide who persist in their struggle for social justice and dignity.

Today is an opportunity to celebrate and grow the resistance against the food system we have now that is dominated by multinational corporations and marked by unrestricted free trade and environmental destruction. The good news is that the food sovereignty movement is spreading! La Via Campesina, the largest international peasant movement, now has more than 180 member organizations representing 81 countries and 200,000,000+ peasants worldwide.

In 2018, the United Nations adopted the The United Nations declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP) – a major milestone protecting the rights of peasants and their unique role in protecting rural areas and contributions to food security. The UNDROP definition of a peasant is:

“Any person who engages in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence and/or for the market, who relies significantly on family, household or other non-monetarized labor and who has a special dependency on the land.”

In this definition, we see the commonalities between family-scale farmers in the US and those abroad. To move forward, we must do so in unity. Today, NFFC joins agrarian communities across the globe demanding a food system rooted in food sovereignty, not the profits of multinational corporations! Farmers in the US must be in solidarity with farmers around the globe to build power against the challenges that unite us all. From the viewpoint of the dominant industrial food system, we are all peasants.

We asked our members what they have in common with family-scale farmers globally – watch our newest video to hear what they had to say!