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THIRD WORLD NETWORK INFORMATION SERVICE ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE Dear Friends and Colleagues UNDROP: A Landmark Recognition of the Dignity and Rights of All Peasants Peasants and other people living in rural areas are among the most vulnerable in the world. In 2015, an estimated 736 million people in the world lived in extreme poverty, of which 589 million – 80 per cent – live in rural areas. On 17 December 2018, after 17 years of struggle, the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). The Declaration represents a landmark achievement for millions of peasants around the world. It provides an inclusive international recognition of people working in rural areas as right-holders. It also reaffirms in a single comprehensive document, the rights and internationally agreed standards relevant for peasants. UNDROP recognises the dignity of the world’s rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and the ‘special relationship’ they have to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates human rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights to land and natural resources, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. The Declaration is not only crucial for people living in rural areas but for societies as a whole. It lays the foundation for international and national policies that harness the significant contribution of small-scale farmers, fishers, and pastoralists to sustainability and food security. In the light of the rapidly evolving consequences of a globalized world, the concentration of wealth in few hands, increasing climate disasters and vulnerability to external shocks, the Declaration proposes a different approach and an opportunity to revitalize development strategies by promoting a dignified life in rural areas. For the Declaration to be effective, it will need to be implemented at the national, regional, and international levels through coordinated and mutually supportive strategies. At the national level, the participation of peasant organizations in strategies will be crucial to identify their specific needs and opportunities, as well as the possible actions to be taken. Relevant UN Agencies should coordinate on how to support countries in the implementation of the Declaration, and should take it into account when defining their priorities and programmes. Peasant movements also advocate for the establishment of a new special procedure, such as a Special Rapporteur or a Working Group of experts, that would be mandated to monitor the implementation of the Declaration. With best wishes, Third
World Network —————————————————————————————————————- Item 1 RESEARCH PAPER 123 THE UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF PEASANTS AND OTHER PEOPLE WORKING IN RURAL AREAS: ONE STEP FORWARD IN THE PROMOTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS FOR THE MOST VULNERABLE Maria
Natalia Pacheco Rodriguez and Luis Fernando Rosales Lozada Abstract Peasants and other people living rural areas are among the most vulnerable in the world. In 2015, an estimated of 736 million people in the world lived in extreme poverty, of which 589 million – 80 per cent – live in rural areas. Despite increasing urbanization in the last decades, almost 45 per cent of the global population still lives in areas defined as rural, and most of them are among the poorest of the world. The situation is most likely worsening because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas by the supporting vote of a vast majority of countries. There are many reasons to consider the Declaration as one of the most relevant actions in the realm of human rights law taken by the United Nations in recent years. Some of them are the recognition of peasants as specific subjects of rights; the reaffirmation of existing standards tailored for the reality of people living in rural areas; and the development of international law to address existing gaps in the protection of their rights in complex subject matters such as the right to land, the right to seeds, and the right to means of production. In underscoring the importance of the Declaration for the world, this research paper narrates the process of construction of the Declaration, its contributions to international human rights law and stresses on its potential for poverty reduction and food security, in line with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the strategies of the UN Decade on Family Farming. ————————————————————————————— THE UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF PEASANTS AND OTHER PEOPLE WORKING IN RURAL AREAS Priscilla
Claeys & Marc Edelman [EXCERPT ONLY] Editors’ introduction Seventeen years of struggle. That’s what it took for the United Nations to adopt – on 17 December 2018 – the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP 2018). UNDROP recognises the dignity of the world’s rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and the ‘special relationship’ they have to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates human rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights to land and natural resources, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. Readers of this Grassroots Voices forum will encounter some of the key actors that made the Declaration happen: peasant activists from Indonesia, Belgium, France, Germany, Senegal and Argentina; a farmworker union activist from the United States; a women’s rights activist from Spain; a Bolivian diplomat; the Indian leader of a transnational Catholic farmers’ movement; an advocate for small-scale fishers from Uganda; a Swiss jurist; an indigenous peoples’ rights leader from Mexico who had participated in the negotiations of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); and human rights advocates from CETIM[i] and FIAN International, two organisations that played key supporting roles in the process. Together they describe a new kind of people’s diplomacy and an innovative, bottom-up process of building alliances, lobbying, and authoring international law. As Henry Saragih, Melik Özden and Florian Rochat describe below, the process in the UN began in 2001, when La Via Campesina (LVC) first called for peasants’ rights in debates on the ‘right to development’ in the UN Human Rights Commission (CETIM, WFDY, and LVC 2001).[ii] Its roots, however, go further back, to the brutal repression in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, and to LVC’s 1996 decision, at its Second International Conference in Tlaxcala, Mexico, to bring its ‘objectives to the international arena of the FAO, IMF, WB, WTO and other international forums of the United Nations and the ILO’ (LVC 1996). While LVC historically kept its distance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which it views as adversaries, it has long pursued engagement with various UN bodies and agencies, with an emphasis on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) (Edelman and Borras 2016, chap. 6). Before the creation, in 2012, of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group tasked with the drafting and negotiation of the UNDROP, LVC had only marginally engaged with the UN Human Rights Council. It had focused on the internal process of framing its claims in human rights terms, leading to the adoption, in 2008, of the movement’s Declaration of Rights of Peasants, Women and Men. The phrase ‘women and men’ signals the dynamic involvement of women activists throughout the process (an aspect highlighted in Sandra Moreno’s contribution below). Building on the momentum of the 2008 global food crisis and boosted by the 2007 adoption of the UNDRIP, LVC succeeded in bringing its Declaration for debate to the Council thanks to strategic alliances with states,[iii] NGOs and key UN bodies and mandates, notably the Special Rapporteur on the right to food. Negotiations started in 2013 with Bolivia as Chair, and diplomats discussed a total of five drafts before formally adopting the UNDROP in September 2018. The UNDROP’s final adoption by the UN General Assembly occurred in December of the same year, marking the conclusion of a unique exercise in law-making from below. The UNDROP contains a preamble and 28 articles and is available in the six UN official languages.[iv] It enunciates the individual and collective rights granted to peasants and other people working in rural areas, stating explicitly that peasants should enjoy these as individuals but also ‘in association with others or as a community’ (Article 1). It clarifies states’ obligations to respect, protect and fulfil these rights, and to take all necessary measures to ensure that transnational corporations and business enterprises that states are in a position to regulate, respect and strengthen these rights as well. [i] CETIM stands for Centre Europe-Tiers Monde (Europe-Third World Centre). [ii] The UN Human Rights Commission was the predecessor of the UN Human Rights Council, which was created in 2006. [iii] The core group of states supporting the UNDROP process consisted of Boliva, Ecuador, Cuba and South Africa. [iv] See UNDROP. 2018. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas A/RES/73/165.” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1661560/files/A_RES_73_165-EN. pdf.
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