The South Asia Women’s Articulation of La Via Campesina held a meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from August 12–14. The meeting used a participatory methodology, with sessions analyzing the current political and social situation, discussions sharing experiences from the ongoing struggles faced by peasant women in the region, and the development of a clear action plan to strengthen both national organizations and the regional women’s articulation.
Representing the peasant movements of India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, the participants co-organized sessions that deepened their assessment of patriarchal practices within their societies, which are even reflected within the social organizations they are part of.
Land inequality remains a major concern across the countries, and the lack of ownership, access, or control over farmland also denies peasant women recognition as farmers, further reflected in their exclusion from agricultural policies in the region. The group also recognized that this is a significant concern even for gender-diverse communities in rural areas, who face ostracism and exclusion and struggle to be recognized as people with rights, including land rights.
Testimonies from women who attended the gathering emphasized that despite forming a large share of the agricultural workforce, unionizing and organizing peasant women, who also carry the added burden of care work, remains a major hurdle in South Asia.
Increasingly erratic weather events, a direct consequence of global warming, often manifesting as prolonged drought, heat waves, or flash floods, also place a huge burden on rural women workers and peasants, as they remain on the frontline and end up as the first victims.
The increased use of chemicals also has a direct health impact on women who spend substantial time in the fields. For farmworker women, precarity also extends to their wages and working conditions, including a lack of basic facilities in the workplace. With rural youth migrating out, the burden of managing the family farm and caring for children and older persons falls on peasant women.
The high rate of household debt in the region also has a particular impact on women, who are vulnerable to harassment and abuse from lenders when they are unable to repay. Across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the participants cited how they have organized people to resist the abusive lending and recovery practices of private microfinance firms, which often operate within a lax regulatory framework with little oversight.
Further accentuating the crisis are the ongoing large-scale infrastructure projects in the region, which are built on agricultural land or in coastal areas. Peasant women from rural families cited how decisions on land use and sale often exclude them and their views, and pointed to several examples in which they led the struggle against such blatant farmland grabs.
Within this context, the groups also agreed on some clear action plans to be implemented within their organizations and across the region.
- Recognition within State Policies: Members also agreed to continue campaigning for peasant women’s recognition as farmers and small-scale food producers within state policies, including insisting on their ownership, access, and control over farmland. The campaign will also include demands for social security measures (such as pensions) for peasant women, single women, and gender-diverse communities.
- Push for Agroecology and Seed Saving: It was agreed that member organizations will carry out agroecological training activities within their movements and promote seed-saving and adopt-a-seed campaigns to preserve and protect native varieties of seeds. The organizations also agreed to continue campaigning against harmful chemicals and agrotoxics and to expand agroecological practices favorable to both soil and human health.
- Build Evidence: The participants also emphasized the importance of collecting and building evidence to support the economic viability, and the environmental and health benefits, of agroecological practices, which could help boost their efforts to convince the state to transition out of chemical farming practices.
- Cooperatives: It was also agreed to hold peasant-to-peasant exchanges within and across organizations, based on experiences with cooperative management, market access, and direct marketing models already practiced in the region. It was agreed that concrete steps would be taken to push for peasant and Indigenous women’s economic independence.
- Peasant Feminism and Policy Schools: Within this framework, members agreed to develop spaces and schools for peasant women and young people in rural communities, where dialogues on inclusive public policies that factor in the realities of peasant women could be debated and developed. By building alliances with other feminist organizations and social movements, spaces will be created for leadership training of peasant women, and conditions will be created within the organizations for members to attend such spaces of formation. In these spaces, it was agreed to include special training modules on international human rights law and other declarations and conventions, such as UNDROP, UNDRIP, and CEDAW.
- Deepening Social Justice: Peasant feminism should be looked at not only through the lens of gender and class but also through the lens of caste-based hierarchies. The articulation recognized the need to build peasant feminism that ensures the meaningful inclusion of Dalit women and Indigenous women in all movements, actively working to break caste barriers. This also means expanding alliances beyond women-only spaces to include other oppressed communities in joint work and shared decision-making processes.
- Increased Representation of Women Leaders within Organizations: It was generally agreed that across all member organizations in the region, the articulation will continue to push for 50% representation of women in decision-making and leadership roles. It was also proposed that a policy on care, safe working space and a grievance redressal mechanism must be built within each national movement to enable wider participation of women organizers from peasant families.
- Recognition of Diversities among Peasants: Members agreed that they must facilitate, within their organizations, educational dialogues demystifying non-binary and intersex identities; build support mechanisms for legal documentation and healthcare access; and replace tolerance with empathy, ensuring every member lives openly, safely, and equally. There was a consensus that as women in the movement, equality, respect, and acceptance should be extended to all oppressed people.
- A Regional Campaign against Microfinance Lending: Build solidarity across the region and highlight the issue of rural women facing rising household debt and being subject to harassment and abuse by microfinance firms. The articulation proposed to publish a situation analysis and use that report while calling for substantive policy changes regarding debt, lending, and financial sovereignty.
It was also noted that in regions where large-scale deforestation is leading to loss of habitat for wild animals, often resulting in situations where people, especially peasant and Indigenous women and children, become victims of animal attacks, special efforts should be made to work with the state on developing compensation policies, as well as on addressing the root causes of such incidents.
