WP 4 : case study report : La Via Campesina

In the 90s, the initiative of La Via Campesina (‘the way of the peasant’ - LVC) emerged as an international movement of peasants with the main objective of opposing the prevailing global economic system - neoliberalism - and to defend the inclusive rural development. Gradually, the peasant movement created or rebuilt a proposal for proactive intervention based on agro-ecology as a “peasant way of life". The movement is based on the Cuban experience (ANAP) which developed the teaching-learning ‘farmer to farmer’ (‘campesino to campesino’) methodology to learning by doing and by interacting. Currently, the LVC initiative is extended territorially in 73 countries and about 164 organizations. And local manifestations differ substantially in the way they have generated social innovations to achieve social transformation. These case studies describe the emergence and development of the global social movement La Via Campesina (LVC), and two local manifestations of small scale family farmers’ groups:

• Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE) in Argentina, which is the main peasant organization that supports and develops an intervention model based on agroecology.
• National Association of Hungarian Farmers’ Societies and Co-operatives (MAGOSZ) in Hungary, which was earlier a registered observer member organisation under the coordination of the European peasant and rural organization, Confédération Paysanne Européen (later renamed as European Coordination of La Via Campesina) that joined the global movement of La Via Campesina.

This report has two main sections. This first section is a brief introduction to the study of the social movement to be analyzed. The second section refers to the methodology that was used to conduct this report. The third section describes and analyzes some relevant aspects of the case of the social movement internationally - La Via Campesina. Later, in the fourth section of this paper, we describe and analyze the Argentinean case of the Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE-LVC). And then, the Hungarian case, the MAGOSZ was analyzed. The last section provides a summary.

Citation

Juarez, P., Balázs, B., Trentini, F., Korzenszky, A., and Becerra, L., (2015) WP 4 : case study report : La Via Campenina, TRANSIT: EU SHH.2013.3.2-1 Grant agreement no: 613169.