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Table 1.
Issues and Challenges for Agrarian Reform


La Via Campesina:
Peasant-led agrarian reform and food sovereignty


by Faustino Torrez

Managua, Nicaragua

Table 1. Issues and challenges for agrarian reform

1. Refine concept of new integral agrarian reform

  • Initiate a process of consultation with the grassroots about land tenure, as part of a different educational project
  • Understand titles and how they were obtained historically
  • Launch an informational campaign and a public debate with society
  • Incorporate the issue of gender
  • Pass laws that ban large estates
  • Develop the concept of ‘integral’ reform

2. Space, land and territory

  • Defense of space and territory
  • Balance agricultural, forestry and livestock and other land uses by rural peoples
  • Individual property vs collective property
  • Secure collective tenure

3. Occupation, recuperations and defense of land and territory

  • Carry out simultaneous land occupations in various provinces
  • Mass mobilization
  • Recover the spiritual and symbolic values of land and territory
  • Take action to expel the large corporations that occupy our agricultural land

4. Gender and youth

  • Hold debates on strategies that ensure equity and parity

5. Resistance to privatization, agrarian counter-reforms, and neo-liberal policies

  • Fortify our informational spaces to communicate our analyses and actions
  • No to the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund

6. Resistance to the dominant model of production and development

  • Opt for a model of local peasant production
  • Food sovereignty
  • Fortify the exchange and development of alternative production experiences

7. Resistance to criminalization of social protest and militarization

  • Inform about repressive actions against our people to bring them into the light on the world scene
  • Work on the collective conscience to resist military repression
  • Coordinate our actions

8. Build alliances

  • With indigenous people and peasant organizations
  • Establish alliances with organizations that have a clear struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and with urban sectors and other social forces
  • Alliances that contribute to the project of agrarian reform and the new agricultural model.
  • Alliances that fortify the articulation of social movements
  • Alliances with NGOs but identify these as tactical, not strategic
  • With intellectuals, agricultural technicians, small farmers, consumers, universities
  • Use La Via Campesina as a good example of a policy of alliances to be established in other sectors

9. Put an end to land grabbing

  • Ban land speculation
  • Prohibit private ownership of large tracts of land

Published in In Motion Magazine March 27, 2011.

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