The United Nations Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas: possibilities for the formation of a rural Latin-American historic bloc

Abstract

ABSTRACT Worsening conditions due to the COVID-19 crisis hit rural and agricultural communities in Latin America hard. Paradoxically, this happened when the specific rights of those communities were recognised in a newly adopted international instrument, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants or UNDROP. UNDROP departs from most universal human rights instruments negotiated in the UN by speaking for a group defined by social class and not gender, age, ethnicity, or other categories. In this sense, UNDROP appears to be inspired by a return to class, like instruments negotiated within different international organisations, more precisely the International Labor Organization. The reconsideration of class as a social category is not an endpoint for transnational peasant and agricultural workers’ legal activism; it may create broader spaces for legal mobilisation. Such legal mobilisation may come in the form of class solidarity on issues such as gender in rural spaces, access to seeds and land, or the broader concept of food sovereignty. Nevertheless, historic bloc formation is contentious, and these same issues may be contingent, as exemplified in the Lhaka Honhat Association Case.