La Via Campesina: A Digital Toolkit for Peasants’ Rights and Global Climate Justice

The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.

Jacques Derrida

In his essay “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Jacques Derrida unpacks the notion of an archive by tracing its linguistic origins back to the Greek word, arche, which simultaneously means a historical beginning and a place from which order is given. An archive is thus, “ . . a place where they [documents, more specifically pertaining to this essay, audio-visual materials] dwell permanently,” [marking an] institutional passage from the private to the public . . .” (1996: 9-10). What Derrida calls the archive drive (in Freudian parlance) is a drive to conserve and shield against forgetfulness.

La Via Campesina is an international peasant movement comprised of local farmers from around the world dedicated to fighting against corporate agriculture and promoting everyone’s right to healthy sustainable food. Specifically the movement’s priorities are to reclaim lost lands from the hands of multinational industrial farming organizations, cultivate the earth in sustainable traditional ways to reduce hunger, alleviate poverty, and battle climate change. In May 2023, La Via Campesina celebrated its 30th year since its original founding in Mons, Belgium in 1993 as a response to multinational, neoliberal changes to the structure of global agriculture systems ushered in the year before. The movement would go global, so to speak, at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, where it formed alliances with other activists, becoming an official part of an international anti-corporate movement. La Via Campesina’s website forms an easily accessible digital archive of this global movement’s extensive collection of historical documentaries and pedagogical and informational films in a variety of media formats, including live-action, animation, and new technologies such as online meeting platforms. The archive is also home to publications, La Via Campesina TV, radio broadcasts, and podcasts. A recurring demand across the many films in this archive is global food sovereignty, which entails the removal of corporate intervention in the food chain, a practice that has not achieved its initial promises to end world hunger through high-tech agribusiness. In this essay, we will discuss a few of the many videos produced by La Via Campesina, starting with its feature-length documentary, L’Esperánce Paysanne/Globalize Hope/La Esperanza Campesina (2020).

Globalize Hope documents the activist history of La Via Campesina using archival video footage from dozens of conferences in which resolutions are drafted and mobilizations in cities like Seattle, Hong Kong, Porto Alegre, and others. Building on a 500-year history of struggle against colonization in the Americas, in conjunction with peasant struggles in Europe, the film tracks different pivotal moments in the resistance to land expropriation. Throughout Globalize Hope, it is inspiring to see the collective coming together in a diverse array of protests, as they organize meetings to advocate for legislative changes. A particularly moving moment centers around footage of Lee Kyung Hae’s candlelight vigil in Cancun, México in 2003. Lee, part of a Korean farmer’s delegation, immolated himself outside a conference meeting for the WTO. Lee, wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers,” intended for his death to be understood as a sacrifice to bring attention to the plight of peasant farmers and underscore the urgency of the food sovereignty movement. The film also features the work of dozens of simultaneous interpreters who facilitate the seamless flow of communication between peasant farmers from different parts of the globe at the various events featured. We see farmers exchanging seeds, sharing agricultural practices, and strategizing for actions across multiple regions. Moreover, the film demonstrates the power and necessity of globalized action and efforts to bring together peasants from all continents.

UNDROP (2018) is an animated short film designed to teach, in simple terms, what a peasant farmer is and how they play a critical role in feeding people and protecting life on the planet. As earth defenders, peasant farmers claim the right to land and demand the universal right of all people to be free of hunger. UNDROP stands for the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Peasants, a declaration that was passed in 2018 holding nations accountable for the rights of peasant farmers. This film points out that La Via Campesina has an international conference every four years designed to share strategies and develop new future directions. For example, at the 4^th conference, a massive inclusion of peasant farmer organizations from Asian countries took place. The film also explores the successful internal struggle to achieve 50/50 equanimity between genders in La Via Campesina’s structure, and its campaign to stop violence against women. The film concludes that “market-driven economic policies are leading to the feminization of poverty.” This film shows footage of La Via Campesina activists joining the marches of solidarity for women around the world.

¡Juntxs podemos enfriar el planeta! #Es Tiempo De Transformar (2015) is a short, animated film (illustrated by Iván Zigarán) that teaches people of all ages about the connections between climate change, corporate agriculture, and food processing. Simple but compelling vignettes tell dangerous stories about a global reliance on industrial farming, characterized by the unsustainable use of pesticides, industrial fertilizers, long-distance food transportation, massive refrigeration, and their resultant food waste. To cool the planet, the film offers five steps (demands) to citizens of the world: 1) take care of the land, 2) stop using toxic chemicals, 3) reduce the transport of food, 4) give the land back to peasant farmers, and 5) dispense with false solutions (such as greenwashing and carbon trade) that don’t address the causes of climate change.

If as Derrida (1996: 19) suggests, “archives are formed in response to the threat of aggression and destruction,” La Via Campesina has done a service to international social and climate justice movements by establishing a fortress against memory oblivion and a repository of accessible educational videos that record the organization’s political victories. The La Via Campesina archive of audiovisual materials resonates with what Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha commends as useful, informative, and educational films. In his critique of European approaches to representation, Rocha (2022: 48) advocated for a new type of ethical, demystifying cinema rooted in Marxist praxis, “a method of abstraction for the analysis of historical phenomena.” The extensive La Via Campesina audiovisual archive documents the truths of the organization. Its audiovisual materials form a didactic epic that is still in the process of becoming, as farmers around the world battle the “recolonization of the South by the Northern countries but also internal colonization by multinational organizations” (L’Esperánce Paysanne/Globalize Hope/La Esperanza Campesina). As we write this short piece, New York City is engulfed by smoke from Canadian wildfires. We can’t help but reflect on the urgency of La Via Campesina’s unflinching demands and their decades-long opposition to corporate and capitalist interventions.