Agroecology and food sovereignty are important issues and practices for women and feminist movements across history. They are ways to reorganize life, labor, and the relationship with the land, and to point to a horizon of equality. Patriarchy and capitalism directly affect rural women’s lives as they resist every day. Through peasant, grassroots feminism, these women struggle for the end of patriarchal, capitalist, and racist violence, in defense of biodiversity and food sovereignty.
In 2018, women with La Via Campesina gathered in the city of Güira de Melena, Cuba, for the Global Encounter of Agroecology Schools and Formation Processes. This meeting resulted in the video below, which brings together peasant women from different parts of the world sharing their stories and experiences. Through an internationalist lens, “Popular Peasant Feminism and Agroecology” by La Via Campesina displays what rural women’s struggles have in common to nurture a world free from fences, toxic chemicals, violence, injustice, and inequality.
The development of agroecology allows us to regain this fundamental value that we, women, have in the process of building a society based on human values
says Miriam Huaiquilao, from Chile’s National Assembly of Left-wing Mapuches (Asamblea Nacional Mapuches de Izquierda), from Chile.
“The feminism of peasant women is a solution to the problem of gender as well as class. This is why we are working to solve these problems. Under patriarchal conditions, Korean peasant women have been struggling to achieve gender equality in rural areas and their communities”
says Mi Jeong Park, from South Korea.
