The recognition of the rights of peasants at the United Nations General Assembly is the result of the work and solidarity of peasant organizations in the Global South. We interviewed Elsa Nury Martinez, president of Fensuagro and protagonist in this process of the international peasant movement. Through her, we will learn about the transcendental role that Latin American women have played on a global scale in this movement and its victories.

Fensuagro is one of the oldest peasant organizations in Colombia. It has brought together national and local organizations around the struggles of the peasant movement. It is part of the group of organizations that founded the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC) and La Via Campesina, two platforms of the international peasant movement that were fundamental to the construction of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. 

To begin with, tell us about yourself, Nury, and about Fensuagro… 

I am Elsy Nury Martinez and I have been part of Fensugaro since I was very young, since the late 80s. From 2009 to 2015 I was secretary of “Women and Childhood”, in 2015 I was the secretary of “Natural Wealth and Environment”. In 2019 I was appointed president, the first female president that the organization has had and now I am in my second term as president. 

Fensuagro is present in 27 of Colombia’s 32 departments and we have 111 affiliated grassroots organizations. In addition, much of our work is linked to the international peasant movement through CLOC and Via Campesina. Our objective as an organization is the defense of peasant rights and agrarian reform. 

Nury, how did the work come about between Fensuagro, a national organization, and CLOC and Via Campesina, international platforms? 

Since the late 1980s, as Fensuagro, we began to build relationships with the peasant movement in other countries. Come and I will show you one of my great treasures: in this booklet are the memories of the First Meeting of Peasant and Indigenous Women of Latin America and the Caribbean, which preceded the creation of La Via Campesina. 

There we stated that the rural communities of the different Latin American countries had a common enemy: the neoliberal model. 

Then, in 1992 we held a gathering in Guatemala to give continuity to what had been done in 1988 and there we decided to create the Vía Campesina. It was called Via Campesina [The Peasant Path], because it was proposed that the solution to the problems of the countryside, the road, the path… was peasant. The solution to resist the neoliberal model was peasant unity and we did not want other voices that were not peasant voices to speak on our behalf. We wanted to speak for ourselves. 

The following year, in 1993, in Mons (Belgium), Via Campesina was formally constituted. I believe that an important founding event was that we took over the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations) to claim food as a right and not as a commodity. What was happening was that the WTO (World Trade Organization) included food in its work on the basis of an agreement on agriculture and this meant that food was treated as a commodity and not as a right. That is where we began to build the concept of food sovereignty from the Via Campesina. 

We cannot speak of Via Campesina without Latin America because its foundation came from this continent. That is why we decided to create the CLOC the following year, in 1994. La Via Campesina began in Latin America and Europe. Then Africa and Asia joined. Today there are more than 200,000,000 peasants in La Via Campesina and each continent has regions and secretariats per region. This is how we organize ourselves. 

Creating peasant networks in these 4 continents must not be an easy task. Why do you think that working with the peasantry of other countries is fundamental? 

Let’s talk about Fensuagro’s experience. We have been a stigmatized and criminalized organization. At the beginning we were told that we were the political arm of the FARC-EP, now they say the same thing, but in relation to the ELN [both are guerilla groups]. Here in Colombia, the issue is to have an excuse to stigmatize and this has serious consequences for the organization. 

I am from the small farmers’ union of Cundinamarca, a grassroots organization in Colombia. When I joined the board of directors, 6 of the 10 members were detained. At the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s Fensuagro went from having a presence in almost the entire country to having a presence in only 6 departments. Entire grassroots organizations disappeared due to the displacement, assassination and disappearance of comrades.  

Our voice was never heard in Colombia. It was only through what we could do at the international level that we were able to begin to speak. The NGOs that had a seat at the United Nations gave us time to speak, campaigns were created to bring people out of exile and also to denounce what was happening here in Colombia. Speaking to other countries was what helped us to rise from the ashes. Not to mention everything we have done with the La Via Campesina Charter on the rights of peasants, which was the basis for what is now the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants.

Let’s talk about this Nury, what was the process of the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants and what was the role of La Via Campesina in this document which is practically the first charter of the rights of peasants? 

In 2004, a Charter of Peasants’ Rights was planned at the initiative of an Indonesian organization belonging to La Via Campesina. We had called it the Charter of Peasants’ Rights. Several drafts were sent to the UN but the response was not immediate. In fact, the first effort was fruitless; there was no response.  So we made an advocacy plan with allies such as CETIM (Europe-Third World Center) and FIAN (FoodFirst Information and Action Network) and until 2012, the United Nations Human Rights Council took the base document created by Via Campesina to start discussions. 

For me, the first defeat was that they erased women and put “other people living in the countryside”. From then on, everything was negotiation. For example, negotiating with the indigenous people because there was always a question that if the rights of peasants were recognized, the rights of indigenous peoples would be reduced. That is why in the introduction there is a principle that states that the rights of the peasantry do not diminish other rights.  

The documents were discussed in Geneva and then sent down to the Via Campesina organizations. For this reason, a collective was created exclusively dedicated to study and follow up on these documents that went from top to bottom. This is how we accompanied the debates until the Declaration was adopted on December 17, 2018. The Declaration was not made only by the will of the United Nations, but it was a process that communities living in the countryside in various parts of the world pedaled. 

What does it mean for the peasantry to have this Declaration? 

The declaration is not binding and that is why we are still working to build a document, a treaty, a convention that is binding. However, the declaration already spurred things in terms of public policy in favor of peasants and we have united as peasants in the world around the Declaration. 

At first we said: they took away a lot of what our original charter said and we thought of it in terms of defeat. But now I see that the declaration is very significant. It touches on fundamental issues such as women’s and children’s rights, food sovereignty, agroecology, land restitution, reparations, and agrarian reform. 

We believe that if these international instruments are not implemented at the local level, they make no sense. That is why today La Via Campesina is taking stock of the implementation of the instrument and we have made progress. For this we have translated the Declaration into more than 20 languages. At La Via Campesina we speak more languages than the UN, we have produced a manual to reach people and we carry out internalization exercises to then influence public policy and the norms of the countries.  

In addition to the implementation of the Declaration, what are the challenges facing the international peasant movement in the short term?

We will soon be holding COP 16 in Colombia, and one of the challenges is to formalize a permanent forum on peasant biodiversity or peasants and biodiversity. The existing forum is an indigenous one and although we have tried to get them to give us a voice we have not succeeded. 

COP30 continues and a pre-meeting of Amazonian countries is planned and we consider that in order to talk about the climate crisis we have to talk about land redistribution and peasant production. The agro-industrial production matrix contributes a large percentage to global warming. So we have to strengthen peasant agriculture to protect the environment and stop climate change. 

As La Via Campesina we believe that we need to participate in these future COPs.

Finally, why is peasantry an issue of local, national and global importance? 

One can live naked, without light, but no one survives without food. The peasantry in the world is the protagonist of food, it is their social work. The peasantry produces food for everyone. The neoliberal model is directed by large corporations and this makes international policies that affect several countries. That is why our actions must also be global. For example, the fact that agriculture is within the WTO is a problem because food cannot be merchandise. The problem of hunger is not solved with food in supermarkets, but with poor people having access to food. In other words, it is not only about food production but also about access, and as long as food is only seen as a commodity, this will be a problem: access. That is why a movement like La Via Campesina is so important. It brings together peasants from all over the world from our diversity and continues to grow around our rights and struggles that should matter to everyone, such as food sovereignty. 

Thank you very much Nury, for your time and for sharing your valuable experience with us.