The women of La Via Campesina play a major role in rural people’s struggles, bringing the agenda of popular and peasant feminism to the center of the conversation. Fighting violence, defending ways of living and working, fighting hunger, building the movement, and strengthening agroecology and biodiversity are some of the pillars of women’s contributions to the international struggle for food sovereignty. In March 2023, the 1st La Via Campesina Women School was held in Maputo, Mozambique, attended by around 60 women from 39 countries and all 10 regions. The activity is also part of the preparations for the 6th International La Via Campesina Women’s Assembly, which will take place in November in Bogota, Colombia.
The video “We are going to till and study!” was produced to share the activities conducted during the event, showing what happened at the school, including poster workshops, dance performances, and panels. The video features school participants from several parts of the world who were invited to present, in several languages, the articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP).
The declaration, passed by the United Nations (UN) in 2018, is a victory of the global peasant movement and has been a fundamental political tool for La Via Campesina’s struggles to have peasants’ rights and labor acknowledged across several countries.
“We are the women who defend their territories, the women who plant and who promote the construction of Food Sovereignty in their day-to-day activities, surely we will leave here much stronger to continue sowing resistance in all our countries and continents,” Itelvina Massioli of the Pedagogical Policy Coordination of the School said. The school brought a political debate on how to advance in the organization and political participation of women and on the construction of peasant and popular feminism internationally and everywhere where La Via Campesina is organized.
