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Peasants' Rights and the UN System

Quixotic Struggle Or Emancipatory Idea Whose Time Has Come

Author : Edelman, M., and James, C.

Publisher: Journal of Peasant Studies

Place of Publish: United Kingdom, London

Year: 2011

Page Numbers: 27

Series: Vol 38

Acc. No: 72-S

Category: Soft Documents

Subjects: Agriculture

Type of Resource: Pdf

Languages: English

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The transnational agrarian social movement V´a Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.