Editorial of the 2014 volunteers brochure

The work spread over ten consecutive years over ten countries (european and mediterranean ) have enabled to make an alarming analysis. This assessment, shared by both academic researchers, trade unionists -workers or peasants-, highlights the accelerated erosion of peasants and land workers rights, whatever their status, their origins and their life story .
It was for us, in this time of enlargement of the European community and renegotiation of the Common Agricultural Policy, to drive a “social corner” in the body of liberal policies. We felt it was necessary to alert all-out on the social consequences of scientistic discourse productivists worn by economic performance promoters, largely distilled by staff in Brussels and relayed nationally by the lobbies of the food industry and its vassals.
Over the last years, the impoverishment process of the peasant communities in the world and in Europe has accelerated and the export function of agriculture – whose industrial qualification takes each day a little more sense – continues to be heavily subsidized at the expense of small farms, rural and peasant populations.
These processes identified and denounced are now reinforced by two “new” phenomena (at historical scale …) : firstly land grabbing and the establishment of “innovations” in terms of labor commodification in particular seasonal seasonal labor. These two weapons, land grabbing and posted workers and / or provision of international services now complete the eradication process against peasant and family farming. Bankruptcies organized by imposing international unfair competition were not enough to predators. They had to create the conditions for an impossible return to land, to decent working conditions, all this with the active complicity of national political powers.
Thus deprived of their lands and their status, hundreds of thousands of men and women are condemned to wandering, easy prey for slavers of the 21st century.
Obviously, in many cases, the language barrier, the violent competition, sometimes between communities, isolation, do not facilitate the minimum solidarity work. But at a time of repeated attacks, more and more violent against social actors, whether trade unionists or associatives, as against social gains, it is urgent to revive a French and European network of active solidarity that can both denounce “local” attacks to the rights of each other, to encourage and participate to the mobilizations and contribute sharpening the trade union weapon represented by the law.

Nicolas Duntze, peasant.

Joint work of members of the Via Campesina, Confederation Paysanne with the support of many European volunteers working in international solidarity with the association Echanges et Partenariats.