No Food sovereignty without feminism? Negotiating gender equality in the UNDROP

Abstract

This chapter analyses the drafting history of the provisions on gender equality and the rights of rural women in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). It charts the evolution of the gender dimensions of the text, from the radical claims of feminists within transnational agrarian social movements to an inter-governmentally negotiated outcome grounded in ‘agreed language.’ This process is analysed against the backdrop of the debates on rural women’s rights and gender equality happening contemporaneously in international human rights mechanisms and within agrarian movements, such as La Via Campesina. Using an approach that deploys textual analysis and participant observation, we map the inclusion, exclusion, and transformation of feminist and women’s rights proposals over the course of the Declaration’s development. Our argument is that the final version of the Declaration does not reflect specific feminist claims made during the negotiations in relation to women’s equal rights to inherit land, equality within marriage and the family, women’s rights to sexual and reproductive autonomy, and non-discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation. If it is to fulfil its emancipatory promise, the UNDROP will need to be reinterpreted from an explicitly feminist and intersectional standpoint that transcends the confines of existing international gender equality law.