Call for April 17: International Day of Peasant Struggle

Stop Land Grabbing – land to the tillers!  

Use the poster attached!

 (Jakarta, 2 March 2012) April 17 is the International Day of Peasant Struggle, commemorating the massacre of 19 peasants struggling for land and justice in Brazil in 1996. Every year on that day actions take place around the world in defence of peasants and small-scale farmers struggling for their rights.
In recent years, we have suffered from the implementation of new policies and of a new development model based on land expansion and land expropriation, commonly known as land grabbing. Land grabbing is a global phenomenon led by local, national and transnational elites and investors, with the participation of governments and local authorities, in order to control the world's most precious resources.

La Via Campesina and the International Women’s Day

March 8th International Women’s Day, is the day upon which we honour the memory of the many women workers, both rural and urban, who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for their rights, for justice and to put an end to all discrimination and the social, economic and political inequities that have given sustenance to global capitalist development. It is also a day for celebration because of the important progress that has been achieved in women’s struggles for emancipation.

March 8th is a day of mobilisation and reaffirmation of the relentless commitment to not rest in the struggle to end the patriarchal capitalist system that is more oppressive to women, regardless of their place in society all over the world. . This hugely important struggle continues to drive reflections on the part of of both men and women in La Via Campesina on how best to progress with the urgent struggle to for social change toward the kind of system we want. We must design the type of society that we wish to build, with a new balance of power in social relationships between men and women and where men and women shall have equal opportunities, rights and duties.