Reply: solidarity

Abstract

During the past two decades, nation-states in developing countries have been transformed by a triple "squeeze": globalization, (partial) decentralization, and the privatization of some of their functions (Fox 2001). Although central states remain important, they have been transformed. Different actors have contested the scope, pace and direction of the transformation, including its agrarian restructuring component. The changing international-national-local linkages that structure the terms under which people accept or resist corporate-controlled global politics and economics present both threats and opportunities for the world's rural population. The co-existence of threats and opportunities has prompted many rural social movements to both localize further, in response to state decentralization, and to internationalize, in response to globalization. The seemingly contradictory social political pressures of globalization and decentralization that are transforming the nation-state are also changing rural social movements. More horizontal solidarity linkages and "polycentric" rural social movements are emerging and struggling to construct coherent structures for the coordination of greater vertical integration. La Via Campesina is the largest and most politically coherent of all current transnational agrarian movements (TAMs). Via Campesina is an international movement of poor peasants and small farmers from both the global south and north. Initiated by Central, South and North American peasant and farmers' movements and European farmers' groups, Via Campesina was formally launched in 1993. Existing transnational activist networks located in peasant movements and nongovernmental funding agencies in the North facilitated the contacts between key national peasant movements that emerged primarily in the 1980s. By 2008, Via Campesina represented more than 150