The Network of Rural Women of Ecuador has set out to analyze the realities affecting life in their territories in light of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). This declaration constitutes a substantive tool for rural women, as it guarantees fundamental rights that enable adequate conditions to sustain a dignified life in the territories where they care for and nurture life. Having this instrument is particularly essential in the current adverse context the country is facing.

The paid and unpaid work that rural women perform creates the necessary conditions for human life, nature, and organizational capacity to continue reproducing. Consequently, when they fully exercise the rights recognized in UNDROP and in the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador (CRE), and have the dignity conditions required, that dignity is also extended to the spaces in which they operate daily. Rural women are pathbreakers; through their work “plowing the land,” in multiple ways, they make it possible for life to persist and continue flourishing in their environments, even amid structural and situational adversities. For this reason, it is imperative that they be recognized as subjects of special protection: rural women must be fully recognized as rights holders.

This report was prepared by the Network of Rural Women of Ecuador through a collective and participatory process, with the aim of making visible and denouncing the violations they face. It is an exercise in naming, denouncing, and amplifying commonly silenced violences, as well as creating spaces for strengthening, reflection, and organizational unity. Based on their voices, knowledge, and experiences, rural women prioritized the analysis of four rights enshrined in UNDROP that are severely affected and compromise their capacity for subsistence: 1) land and territory; 2) adequate food and nutrition; 3) non-discrimination; and 4) environment and water.

The document is structured in four sections: first, a brief contextual analysis; second, an argument regarding the binding nature of UNDROP within the framework of the CRE; third, an examination of the four prioritized rights, including a contextualization of their situation and an analysis of the applicable legal framework in UNDROP and the CRE; and finally, a set of recommendations directed to the Ecuadorian State.

Organizations from the Network of Rural Women of Ecuador participated in the preparation of this report, with the support of FIAN Ecuador in facilitating and systematizing the process.

Full report (Spanish only):

La entrada Rural Women as Rights Holders: UNDROP from the Perspective of Those Who Safeguard Life se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

GENEVA – October 15, 2025 – On the International Day of Rural Women, the UN Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas issued an urgent call to action, demanding States and corporations end the systemic discrimination, violence, and economic exclusion faced by rural women worldwide. Despite producing over 70 percent of the developing world’s food supply and leading climate adaptation efforts, peasant women and other women working in rural areas (rural women) remain among the most marginalized groups, facing profound violations of their fundamental human rights.

The urgent call to action highlights a series of intersecting rights violations that shape the stark realities faced by rural women worldwide. The Working Group thereby urges states, multilateral institutions, the private sector, and civil society to uphold the rights of rural women as enshrined in the UNDROP, through concrete actions within their respective domains.

See full call to action below:

La entrada UN Working Group on UNDROP Demands Urgent Action to Uphold Rights of Rural Women se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

This video was included in an article of Capire about Defending Peasants’ Rights, you can find it here. Capire is an international feminist online media that emphasize and carry the voices of feminist struggles around the world.

La entrada In defense of peasants’ rights and popular peasant feminism – Voices of Peasant Women of La Via Campesina se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

This article was first publish on Capire’s website on December 20th, 2022. You can find it here.

The Declaration of Peasant Rights was approved by the United Nations (UN) on December 17, 2018. This achievement was a big victory for the peasant movement, which had passed through a long process to build the core political bases of the Declaration, write it, and propose it as an international legal instrument. Now, four years later, some of the experiences of use of the Declaration are being tested to claim rights and propose public policies.

“It’s been four years since the Declaration’s approval; now it’s time to look back and say that we’ve advanced towards recognition of our cultural, territorial, and professional identity as peasants”, suggests militant peasant Perla Álvarez; she continues: “This diversity composes the peasantry.  The fact that they have recognized us through this Declaration is a very important step”. Perla Álvarez is member of the National Coordination for the Organization of Women Workers, Rural and Indigenous Women [La Coordinadora Nacional de Organización de Mujeres Trabajadoras, Rurales y Indígenas] (Conamuri) and of Peasant Rights Collective of La Via Campesina [Colectivo de Derechos Campesinos de La Vía Campesina].

“We’re very grateful for the struggle of these four years”, says Martha Elena Huertas Moya, who is a member of the Human Rights Collective of Latin American Coordination of Peasant Organizations – CLOC-La Via Campesina [Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo] and also member of the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives [Federación Nacional de Cooperativas Agropecuarias – FENACOA]. “La Via Campesina has been developing a very important plan of attendance, pressure, and diplomacy with the United Nations, the different governments, and institutional spaces for recognition of peasant rights”.

According to Perla, this has only been possible thanks to a political alliance strategy, which is to be kept and strengthened. Guaranteeing that the Declaration is widely taken into consideration and used also depends, according to her, “on us, as organizations, having a deep understanding of the Declaration; assuming it as an instrument in our struggle, and disseminating our challenges”.

Martha explains that the process of implementing the Declaration of Peasant Rights in Latin America and Caribbean had several stages, the first one being precisely its disclosure within the organizations members of CLOC, through meetings, seminars, among other training and discussion activities that have been highly relevant to strengthen the organization itself and its proposals. “The recognition of the Declaration has always been part of the political alignment we had in the CLOC organizations in Colombia, defining our discourse around the rights to be recognized, the process to achieve this, and the path we should follow to be able to make it happen”, explains Martha.

“One of our challenges is how to implement the Declaration in public policies”, summarizes Perla. “We want the policies related to land and territory to be based on the concepts applied in the Declaration: the peasant actor; the right to land, to territory, to natural goods for production; the right to organizing and respect for fundamental freedoms”. There is also the challenge to advance into the creation of an institutional mechanism capable of guaranteeing, within international agencies, that the Declaration is being followed up, “so that it may be used to talk of young people in rural contexts, of women, of development, of seed production”, she defends.

The proposals of use of the Declaration differ from place to place according to the degree of political disputes involved. “In Colombia, we knew we had to start by disclosing the Declaration in the Legislative Branch, in addition to requesting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Agriculture to incorporate it into their portfolio”. Peasant organizations gained more space to make political propositions with the recent victory of Gustavo Petro’s and Francia Márquez’s administrations, under project “Colombia: Global Power of Life”.

Within this new political context, the first National Peasant Convention happened and was attended by 2,500 peasants. According to Martha, “the government talked to peasants about the implementation of agrarian and rural public policies, and this is all based on the Declaration”. Negotiations are laying the foundations of three key elements: full rural reform, restitution of lands, and creation of a rural and agrarian special jurisdiction. “It’s important to discuss restitution because expropriation was one of the fundamental denounces of acts that undermined the country”, the militant says.

A key element proposed in the National Peasant Convention was the creation of the Peasantry Assembly, at which public policies for the administrative structure of Colombia will be defined in departments, municipalities, and locations. “In short, the Declaration that La Via Campesina created, conceived, struggled for, and positioned in Colombia is a reality now that gives us hope of a new condition for Colombian peasants”, says Martha.

There are already several experiences of actual use of the Declaration around the world. In Latin America, there is also the case of Paraguay: the Declaration has been used as a valid argument to sanction the country as a violator of peasant rights in the event of death by pesticide poisoning. In Argentina, it also served as argument to give back territories to peasant and Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, in Cuba, the Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutrition Safety Act has been enacted, coming into force on October 28, 2022, inspired by the Declaration of Peasant Rights, as stated by Adilen Roque, spokesperson of the National Association of Smallholders [Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños – ANAP], member of La Via Campesina.

Other countries are using the Declaration in the recognition of the peasant actor, who has been historically set aside by laws. In Asian countries, such as Indonesia and India, the Declaration has been used to guarantee peasant rights in terms of production, market assurance, and their recognition as rights-bearing individuals. For Perla, these experiences, as solid as they are, “demonstrate the validity of an instrument of human rights – such as the Declaration – on an international level”.

Experiencing these changes deepens the struggle and increases the will to organize. For women, hope also moves them forward to build peasant and grassroots feminism and to establish more spaces of leadership, fighting against misogyny and work overload. Martha explains this very well: “the experience of being in peasant organizations led by women opened up beautiful possibilities for us to be heard, recognized, admired, supported, to be truly valued. Other languages, other values, other principles are in the core of these movements, in which we don’t want to shine as individuals, since we women together make leadership happen. Recognition of peasant rights gives us the possibility of claiming, as from a new place, the end of femicide, violence, patriarchal hierarchy”.

“The possibility of having rights, experiencing them, claiming them, and building them has also been an awakening to the consciousness of what we are as women in a patriarchal society. Women’s experiences in rural areas, within the context of peasantry, are terribly painful. Sexism reveals itself in many ways, in many forms of violations and violence. Peasant and grassroots feminism is a watchword we will have to realize and keep building. Day by day, we make efforts to read more, write more, listen to and understand each other. The Declaration brings infinite wealth, calling youth, women, diversities, and people from different ages and cultures to admire the possibility of change.” Martha Elena Huertas Moya

La Via Campesina is celebrating 30 years of struggles, hopes, and organizing with tag #LVC30Years. In November 2023, it will celebrate its 8th International Conference and its 6th Assembly of Rural Women. These will be spaces for discussion, assessment, and collective construction of the peasant movement in Nicaragua, on which there will be a comprehensive process of collaborative and militant communication coverage.

Text and translation edited by Helena Zelic
Translated from Portuguese by Rosana Felício dos

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“Cooking up political agendas” was first published on Fian international website on September 7, 2020. You can find it here.

With “Cooking up political agenda” Fian international proposes a full set of tools to organize struggles for the right to food from a feminist perspective. This full set includes : a guide, postcards, a poster, a notebook, name tags and a powerpoint. You can find it all HERE.

The UNDROP as a utensil for organizing

In this feminist guide the UNDROP is presented as a tool for the right to food and nutrition, especially for women in rural areas. The UNDROP recognizes a right to food and food sovereignty at its article 15. This article was critical for La Via Campesina and its allies during the negotiations of the UNDROP at the UN, it is a victory to have it in the UNDROP.

The UNDROP can be a powerful utensil for feminist struggles. Its article 4 is dedicated to peasant women, women working in agriculture and rural women in general. It gives States obligations toward these women, the first one being to not discriminate them and to end all discrimination against them. To learn more about this article you can read Cetim’s training sheet n°6 Non-discrimination against rural women and Fian’s briefings: Rural women’s rights.

Extract from the postcards

The ‘common cooking pot’ has historical and political significance. At different moments in time, women in Latin America living under authoritarian regimes would create spaces to discuss politics and articulate actions of resistance. This strategy was also used to respond to severe economic and food crises. Although the practice is not common throughout the world, the political meaning and material use of the ‘common cooking pot’ can be translated across borders. From selecting the best seeds when harvesting, to giving the finishing touch to dishes full of flavor, women have passed on knowledge about food from one generation to the next. This intergenerational sharing of knowledge around food encompasses a rich set of spiritual and material relationships.

Rather than reinforcing gender roles that confine women to duties of social and reproductive labor (bearing the sole responsibility of ‘cooking’, ‘caring’ and ‘feeding’), this Guide evokes the emancipatory potential of collective organizing and knowledge construction between women. The ‘common cooking pot’ enhances collective building and transmission of different ways of knowing between women. It recalls women’s political subjectivities and their struggles against oppression. Throughout the guide, we choose to speak of ‘cooks’ instead of ‘participants’, and ‘recipes’ instead of ‘experiences’. In this way, the metaphor of the cooking pot is able to break through the fictional borders that divide different aspects of women’s lives (referred to as the private and public spheres). We hope this Guide will provide a grounded space for women in rural areas to ‘cook up’ political transformative agendas on the human right to adequate food and nutrition.

La entrada Cooking up political agendas se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

La Via Campesina, presents the publication “The Path of Peasant and Popular Feminism in La Via Campesina” with the aim of strengthening the training processes of the Movement and to build Peasant and Popular Feminism as a political tool against oppression and violence. This document compiles the historical knowledge accumulated by Peasant and Popular Feminism in identifying the political challenges that exist in the historical moment that we live in, and thus contribute to the analysis and collective reflections to build a plural movement that respects diversities.

The publication is split into four parts: the first one looks back at the conquests of women inside LVC, up to Peasant and Popular Feminism as something to be built collectively. The second chapter highlights the role of women in the Peasants’ Rights Declaration adopted at the UN and highlights the rights achieved with this tool. The third chapter focuses on La Via Campesina’s Global Campaign “End Violence against Women”, the way the campaign is organized and its experience in different territories. Finally, in the last chapter in order to further expand reflections and discussions, we provide a virtual toolbox that will facilitate training and communication processes.

Download the PDF

Read the illustrated version here

La entrada The path of Peasant and Popular Feminism in La Via Campesina se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.

On 25th November, La Via Campesina’s global campaign to eliminate gender-based violence finds resonance in a newly launched graphic book that traces The Path of Peasant & Popular Feminism in the movement. On this day, when members of the global movement amplify our International Solidarity Actions to End Violence Against Women and Girls, this book echoes our critique and condemnation of a capitalist and patriarchal system that perpetuates these violations. At this moment, in a united voice, La Via Campesina demands justice and dignity for those affected by the violence and condemn the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. It is time to say “enough!” to gender-based violence experienced by women, girls and non-binary genders.

The book is a vital political-pedagogical tool for training at the grassroots, regions and continents. Organized by the Women’s Articulation of La Via Campesina and beautifully illustrated by the FemGarabat Feminist Collective of the Basque Country, this book synthesis the historical struggle of peasant and indigenous women around the world.

The artists who worked on the book also expressed their support and respect for these struggles when they said, “As a feminist graphic collective, we use illustrations as a tool for transmitting ideas that we believe in and value. Through our work we had the opportunity to learn about women’s struggles from all over the world and, in that sense, working with La Vía Campesina has been a very enriching experience. It has been a pleasure to visually illustrate these diverse struggles, those in which Femgarabat firmly believes”

Twenty-eight pages of stunning illustrations reveal the role of women in the global fight for Food Sovereignty and their centrality in promoting Peasant and Popular Feminism in their territories and organizations. It also offers several testimonies of peasant leaders from across continents in implementing the Global Campaign to End Violence Against Women promoted by LVC since 2008.

Download the PDF

La entrada The Path of Peasant and Popular Feminism in La Via Campesina – illustrated se publicó primero en Defending Peasants' Rights.