Organizations, Peasant

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peasants—and peasant organizations—exhibit enormous diversity across time and space. Since the origin of state societies, smallholders, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, squatters, and landless laborers have participated in local organizations—some formal and others informal—to coordinate planting, cultivation, and harvesting; to administer irrigation systems; to exchange labor; to acquire inputs and market harvests; and to demand from those in power fairer prices, lower taxes, and access to land and other resources. In many parts of the world, peasant insurgencies against elites and colonial powers involved thousands or even millions of rebels drawn from among the rural poor. Twentieth-century peasant wars—such as the Mexican and Chinese revolutions and the Vietnam War (1957–1975)—brought massive social upheavals and reshaped geopolitics at the world level. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, organizations of peasants and small farmers helped to stall global trade negotiations and to reformulate policies in such areas as poverty alleviation, genetically modified crops, agrarian reform, and environmental sustainability.

Peasant and farmer cooperatives have existed in Europe and the Americas since at least the late nineteenth century. Most have been organized around the production and marketing of particular commodities, but many have involved machinery services, input purchasing, savings and credit, transport, and retail businesses. Cooperatives in most countries are barred from political advocacy activities, but many national- and international-level cooperative federations attempt to work for their members’ interests in governments and multilateral institutions.

Peasant and farmer associations that lobby or employ pressure tactics to defend their members’ interests are found virtually everywhere, including in developed countries where only a small portion of the economically active population works in agriculture. Unions of agriculturalists in France, the United States, and Canada exercise substantial political influence. In poorer countries, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, peasant and indigenous movements contributed to toppling national governments in the early twenty-first century. Even in China, where the government does not tolerate independent political organizations, rural unrest is widespread and has led to major administrative reforms, such as reductions in the taxes agriculturalists pay to local governments.

Scholars and activists have long debated the role of outsiders in forming peasant organizations. While rural people have had improved access to education in recent decades, through either government programs or nongovernmental organizations, a broad consensus exists that effective peasant associations usually require some outside leadership, at least in their initial stages. At the same time, it is now widely recognized that many rural people are increasingly cosmopolitan, with experience in urban areas and abroad that equips them for organizing and leading peasant movements.

Social scientists once distinguished between farmers, who had a commercial orientation, employed hired labor, and operated with advanced technology, and peasants, who were subsistence-oriented and used family labor and rudimentary technology. These ideal types have proven problematical as the rural poor adopt modern technologies, as agriculturalists in developing and developed countries collaborate around issues of common concern, as rural residents migrate to cities, and as peasants and farmers themselves emphasize their commonalities and downplay differences. Moreover, in many languages the terms equivalent to peasant —the French paysan or the Spanish campesino, for example—are more inclusive, meaning simply “people from the countryside” and including many farmers.

Transnational peasant organizations have a long history. The Farmers’ Institutes extension program originated in Canada in the 1890s and spread to the United States and Britain. Following World War I (1914–1918), peasant political parties—termed “the Green International”— held power in several eastern European countries. The Associated Country Women of the World was founded in 1933 and claims a membership of nine million in 365 participating societies in seventy countries. The Paris-based International Federation of Agricultural Producers, formed in 1946, includes many organizations of large farmers and some peasant associations. The global farm crisis of the 1980s, marked by plummeting commodity prices and skyrocketing prices for fossil fuel–based inputs, sparked a new wave of cross-border peasant organizing, much of it directed against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and later the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Vía Campesina, or Peasant Road, a militant international peasant and farmer organization that emerged in the early 1990s, has been in the forefront of campaigns to take agriculture out of the WTO and to implement “food sovereignty” policies. The Vía Campesina has nearly one hundred member organizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. These include the Brazilian Landless Movement, the U.S. National Family Farm Coalition, the National Farmers Union of Canada, the Peasant Confederation of Peru, the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, the Nepal National Peasant Women’s Association, and the European Farmers Coordination.

SEE ALSO Peasantry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooper, Frederick, Florencia E. Mallon, Steve J. Stern, et al. 1993. Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Edelman, Marc. 2003. Transnational Peasant and Farmer Movements and Networks. In Global Civil Society 2003, eds. Mary Kaldor, Helmut Anheier, and Marlies Glasius, 185–220. London: Oxford University Press.

McKeon, Nora, Michael Watts, and Wendy Wolford. 2004. Peasant Associations in Theory and Practice. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Wolf, Eric R. 1969 Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper.

Marc Edelman