Global recognition ‘opens doors’ for peasants’ rights

Across the globe, rural workers and rights groups are testing an international agreement they say could help hundreds of millions of people protect their right to own and use land. In Ukraine this month, land rights advocates sought to use the legal tool, known as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, to push back on a major planned liberalisation of farmland they say would leave millions vulnerable. In Colombia, activists say it could be used to nurture the country’s continued transition from half a century of civil war.

And as the European Union discusses its Common Agricultural Policy, some say the agreement could help bend governments’ priorities away from market forces and towards those whose livelihoods are linked to land.

On Tuesday, rights groups marked the one-year anniversary of the agreement’s adoption at the United Nations, which for the first time recognised the rights of rural groups at the international level and acknowledging them as needing special protections.

“That recognition is very important — it’s the start of everything,” said Ramona Duminicioiu, a Romanian farmer and regional coordinator for La Via Campesina, a movement representing about 200 million farmers and others, and a key backer of the declaration.

The declaration seeks to protect rural populations from potential rights violations such as forcible evictions, land degradation and displacement.

It also covers issues like land discrimination and the legal recognition of customary land tenure rights.

The agreement has given traditionally marginalised smallholders, fishing communities and other rural workers a powerful new way to force conversations with officials, Duminicioiu said.

“It opens doors,” she said by phone from her farm in Transylvania, Romania. “Now we have something to talk about with governments that was achieved at the highest levels in the UN and (that) we want to bring home.” A NEW IDEA The declaration, which was adopted in December last year by 121 countries — a majority of UN members — is voluntary and needs to be translated into numerous national laws to be formally implemented.

No country has done that so far, but backers say the agreement is a key step in the emergence of a new idea: a human right to land.

The agreement makes an explicit reference to a “right to land”, making it the first major UN declaration to do so, said Kaitlin Y Cordes, head of the land and agriculture programme at Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment.