The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas: Grassroots Voices

Priscilla Claeys, Marc Edelman

    Research output: Contribution to journalEditorialpeer-review

    53 Citations (Scopus)
    343 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In December 2018, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. UNDROP is the product of 17 years of struggle by La Via Campesina, other transnational agrarian movements and allies that included NGOs, states, UN mandate holders, and academics. It recognises the dignity of rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and their ‘special relationship’ to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights to land and natural resources, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. This Grassroots Voices forum includes interviews and articles by activists in the UNDROP campaign: peasants from Indonesia, Belgium, France, Germany, Senegal and Argentina; a US farmworker leader; a women’s rights activist from Spain; a Bolivian diplomat; the Indian leader of a transnational Catholic farmers’ movement; an advocate for fishers from Uganda; a Swiss jurist; a Mexican indigenous rights leader; and human rights advocates from the NGOs CETIM and FIAN. They describe a new kind of people’s diplomacy and an innovative, bottom-up process of building alliances, lobbying, and authoring international law.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-68
    Number of pages68
    JournalJournal of Peasant Studies
    Volume47
    Issue number1
    Early online date24 Oct 2019
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2020

    Bibliographical note

    This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Peasant Studies, on 24/10/2019 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03066150.2019.1672665

    Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

    Keywords

    • peasant
    • human rights
    • UN
    • Social movements
    • La Via Campesina
    • Indigenous Peoples

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Cultural Studies
    • Anthropology
    • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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