CHRISTMAS 2016, MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES. Armed men lounged at the entrance to a banana plantation. Nearby, a sign read “Intruders Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again.” Inside the gates, displaced farmers were seven months into an occupation demanding the return of lands that had once been theirs. Philippine land reform officials had ruled for the farmers. But Lapanday Foods, which ships twenty million crates of bananas annually, refused to comply. On Mindanao, home to the largest rubber, banana, and pineapple plantations in the Philippines, disputes are often solved with bullets. Lapanday guards had already shot and wounded ten occupiers. Now, as the farmers ate breakfast with their children, toxic pesticides rained down on them from crop-duster planes.1
On New Year’s Day, the occupiers were finally driven out. The year 2017 began with bloodshed. By February, five Mindanao activists were dead. Each had fought expansion of banana and palm oil plantations, some on ancestral indigenous lands. One of the murdered men was sitting with his four-year-old niece when gunmen attacked. She was shot, but not fatally.2
A thousand miles north, on Hacienda Luisita, the Philippines’ largest sugarcane plantation, migratory sugar workers met secretly over the Christmas holidays with UMA Pilipinas, a militant farmworkers’ union. The plantation, owned by the family of former Philippine presidents Corazon Aquino and Benigno Aquino III, has been infamous since 2004, when police and troops approved by then-president Gloria Arroyo shot into a picket line of strikers, killing seven, wounding many more. Hundreds were arrested.3
Twelve years later, sugar workers charged Luisita, Lapanday, and Dole Philippines with human trafficking and labor slavery. Over the holidays, UMA mounted daring rescues of migrant workers who wanted to go home but said they were being held against their will. The response was swift. Armed men descended under cover of night and burned worker huts, gardens, and their few possessions.4
Many of the workers at Luisita had come from Mindanao to find work and to escape an onslaught by federal troops. Indigenous Lumad communities had been under attack since 2015. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, Benigno Aquino’s government had sent in armed soldiers. They occupied elementary schools, warning teachers to leave or be killed. Philippine Special Forces assassinated five people, including two teenagers they claimed were armed “rebels.” A fourteen-year-old girl was raped. A teacher was found with his throat slit. Two indigenous leaders were sprayed with bullets in front of their neighbors. Homes and corn granaries were burned. Three thousand Lumad were forcibly displaced. Aquino was making war on his own people.
Eight hundred Lumad, led by women elders in traditional clothing, caravanned to Manila that November. They set up camp in a churchyard, met with reporters and sympathizers, students and legislators, and demanded an end to assaults on their communities. They also announced a civil disobedience campaign called REAP—Resist Expansion of Agricultural Plantations. Despite the government’s insistence that it was fighting terrorists, Lumad leaders said the military on Mindanao was attacking land rights activists, farmers, and teachers of Lumad culture.
Not far from the Lumad camp, President Barack Obama met with nineteen Asian heads of state for the 2015 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) trade negotiations. The Lumad and their allies marched in protest. Police blasted them with “sound cannons,” playing bad pop music at earsplitting volume. No bullets were used as the ASEAN leaders sang the praises of free trade and global agribusiness. Out of sight, violence continued on Mindanao.
The 2017 murders of Mindanao activists were but skirmishes in a longer war between farmers and the Philippine elite. In April, protesters marched across the Philippines demanding that Duterte and local government officials “Stop Killing Farmers.” They carried signs with photographs of the 1987 Mendiola massacre, in which Corazon Aquino’s troops had shot into a farmers’ demonstration, killing thirteen.
These killings and the protests they sparked were not limited to the Philippines. In the spring and summer of 2017, farmers and farmworkers rose around the world. Infuriated by land expropriations, forced migration, and slave-like conditions for the people who plant and harvest food, self-proclaimed peasants, smallholders, and the landless were on the march everywhere.5
In São Paulo, Brazil, on March 7, fifteen hundred women farmworkers carrying machetes and wearing red and black bandannas shut down the Vale Fertilizer plant. They had come to protest the Brazilian government’s plans to freeze or cut public services for twenty years. The women vigorously rejected President Michel Temer’s assertion that Brazil was hurting financially because its social insurance programs were too generous.6
The real problem, they insisted, was government concessions to foreign corporations.
Vale owed Brazil’s social security fund $88 million. Together, public and private corporations owed Brazil $150 billion in social security taxes. “The main victims in the social security reform are women of the field.” Why, they asked, must the poor always pay for the rich?7
International Women’s Day has been energetically observed in Brazil since 2006. Each year, Women Without Land, members of the Movement of Landless Workers (MST), has occupied and shut down plantations, factories, and ports. Hundreds have been arrested asking the same question: Why do our taxes go to subsidize foreign corporations while millions of Brazilians live without land or permanent homes? The solution was obvious, protesters said: Brazil should invest in small farms, not industrial plantations that destroy habitat and cause desertification.
Brazil’s struggles over land are not new. MST was founded in the 1980s. In a series of occupations, they have moved four hundred thousand landless families onto thirty-five million acres in twenty-four of the country’s twenty-six states, establishing subsistence farming communities. When evicted by soldiers and police, they find other vacant lands to farm. The targets of their actions have shifted since the 1980s, says activist Ana Hanauer. Originally, MST battled large Brazilian landlords. In the twenty-first century, she says, they are fighting “multinational agribusiness corporations which are taking over land that should be used for agrarian reform.”8
Meanwhile in India, battles raged over free trade, farmer debt, and GMO seeds. In March 2017, 170 farmers trekked thousands of miles from Tamil Nadu to Delhi. They asked to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand blanket forgiveness of small farmers’ debts. Some activists carried human skulls, remains of a few of the four hundred farmers from their region who, deeply in debt and facing eviction, had committed suicide over the past six months. A few protesters posed with dead rats in their mouths to dramatize hunger and desperation among farm families. They were not seeking handouts, they insisted, but policy change.9
Small farmers must have a voice in Indian trade pacts, they insisted. In 2009, an ASEAN–India trade deal had removed tariffs on coffee, tea, pepper, rubber, coconuts, cashews, and coconut oil. Farmers from the state of Kerala fought the pact vigorously. Hundreds of thousands participated in the largest human-chain protest ever. Manmohan Singh, then prime minister, promised he would consider small farmers in the final agreement. He didn’t, and commodity prices plummeted across India, ruining many small farmers. Now, the country’s leaders were negotiating more trade agreements and protests escalated anew. In June 2017, police shot and killed five farmers at a protest for price supports and debt forgiveness.10
Some Indian farmer-activists blame bioengineered seeds for their troubles. Before hybrid seeds were widely adopted in India, they claim, Indian crops were free of the pests that farmers now must fight with chemical pesticides. Vandana Shiva, India’s foremost advocate for small organic farms, provocatively refers to “suicide seeds.” Because they require expensive pesticides and fertilizers, she argues, bioengineered seeds deepen farmer debt—and increase desperation.
Scientists and government officials insist that GMO and hybrid seeds are good for India because they produce higher yields on large irrigated farms. Whether they do or don’t—and that is debatable—most Indian farmers are “smallholders,” reliant on rain to water their crops. As large, irrigated farms drain the country’s groundwater, droughts are becoming more frequent.11
So are protests against industrial farming, extractive industries, and land expropriations. On March 30, 2017, “Day of the Landless” actions took place in India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Thailand. Led by the Asian Peasants’ Coalition and Pesticide Action Network–Asia Pacific (PAN AP), transnational farm and fishing networks mobilized to retain or regain land and water rights. “Smallholders,” unwilling to wait any longer for their governments to fulfill promises of “agrarian reform,” called for “land reform by the people.” Sarawak in Malaysia held rituals cleansing their farmlands of “foreign money power.” Sri Lankan fishermen rallied on boats to demand their rights to ancestral waters.
Many of the protesters were women because women grow 80 percent of the food in Asia and Africa. Any attempt to fight world hunger must begin with women, they say. In India and Thailand, women’s farm groups argued that dispossession of small farmers is a women’s issue because governments fail to honor women’s customary title to the lands they farm. In Mali, Antoinette Dembélé’s garden was destroyed by a Libyan company that built vast rice paddies, then abandoned them. “My garden was very important. It produced a good yield. I depended on no one to eat and pay my taxes,” she said. Multiply her story by hundreds of thousands.
In Ghana, angry women farmers confronted owners of a jatropha cooking oil plantation that had uprooted hundreds of shea nut trees and displaced traditional landholders. “The nuts I collect . . . give me cloth for the year,” one woman said, “and, also, a little capital.” Her shea nut income paid for farm animals. “In a good year, I can buy a cow. Now you have destroyed the trees and you are promising me something you do not want to commit to. Where do you want me to go?” In Mozambique, a single Chinese-owned rice plantation displaced eighty thousand farmers. Without formal land titles, small farmers find little relief from courts.12
No place in Asia has been harder hit than Cambodia, where hundreds of thousands of farmers were evicted after 2003 to make way for rubber and sugar plantations. Foreign and local elites, supported by government troops, barred rural Cambodians from traditional hunting and fishing grounds. Farmers say these lands once enabled them to live decently. Modern land enclosures have reduced them to hunger and migrancy.
In the spring of 2017, women battled with police in Phnom Penh, protesting the destruction of entire neighborhoods to make way for “tourist infrastructure” and lodging for employees of foreign corporations. In “cursing rituals,” they dragged effigies of plantation bosses and government officials through the streets, sprinkling them with chilies, salt, and dust. In February 2017, a Cambodian court sentenced protest leader Tep Vanny to two and a half years in prison. As protests increased in frequency and intensity, so have government crackdowns.13
Farmers marched in the Americas as well. In Mexico and Paraguay, farmers and farmworkers marched for land reform and decent working conditions. From March to May 2017, “Peasant Marches” took place in Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington State. Protesters demanded an end to immigration raids that splintered families. They called for bans on toxic pesticides and for overtime pay and minimum wage protections for field-workers. And in North Carolina, where the Farm Labor Organizing Committee had won pioneering agreements between labor, growers, and food processors, protests erupted after a new Democratic governor signed a bill curtailing their rights to unionize.14
There are many places where these battles over land and farmworkers’ rights have turned violent. PAN AP recorded 231 murders and 4,685 human rights violations related to land conflicts globally in 2015–16. “The cases include displacements, killings and frustrated killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, filing of trumped-up charges, threats and harassment, and enforced disappearances. . . . Despite this,” PAN AP argues in a film about the subject, “peasant resistance . . . is growing.”15
In March 2017, Via Campesina, the global farmers and farmworkers’ federation, hosted a Global Peasants’ Rights Congress in Swäbisch Hall, Germany. They gathered on the site of a sixteenth-century Great Peasants’ War, during which farmers fought enclosures and drafted the first declaration of peasant rights. Five hundred years later, farmers’ groups from around the world issued their own manifesto. “Who we are fighting for,” Elizabeth Mpofu of Zimbabwe said, “is every single peasant farmer . . . on the planet. People are eager to join hands in building a global voice.”16
Corporate land grabs and mass dispossessions of farmers are endangering global food supplies, congress participants argued, sparking mass migrations and generating “new forms of slavery.” Attendees at the summit vowed to protect “rights to land, water and natural resources, to seeds, biodiversity, decent income and means of production. . . . Our collective future,” they wrote, “and the very future of humanity, is bound up with the rights of peasants.”
They called for global unity. “Although we come from countless different backgrounds, we suffer intersecting forms of oppression and must stay in solidarity with each other. South and North, women and men, elders and youth, rural and urban, peasants, migrant and seasonal workers, indigenous people, fishers, pastoralists and beekeepers . . . If one of us loses, we all will lose.” For that reason, peasant-activists insist, they cannot lose. “Like a river, our forces will flow together in a mighty stream of life!”17
On April 17, the International Day of Peasant Struggle, there were protests by farmers and fishing people in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In May, Via Campesina, the IUF, and other global unions and women’s and peasant groups came to Geneva to hammer out a UN “Declaration of the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.” As the meetings came to an end, they released this statement: “The relationship with Mother Earth, her territories and waters is the physical, cultural, and spiritual basis for our existence. We are obliged to maintain this relationship with Mother Earth for the survival of our future generations. We gladly assume our role as her guardians.”18