International Day of Peasant Struggle

[susanreads]

I only found out about this today, from a World Development Movement desk calendar. I can't find it on their website, it's not on Wikipedia at all, and nothing seems to be happening in Britain, but it's big in continental Europe, South America, and other parts of the world where traditional agriculture survives.

From Via Campesina's press release:

More than one hundred different events are taking place [...] in every corner of the world, in capitals cities, towns and small villages, in defence of peasant agriculture and food sovereignty. This date commemorates the 1996 assassination in Eldorado dos Carajás, Brazil, of 19 innocent peasants who were struggling for land and defending peasant and small farmer food production.

This year we reaffirm the need to get rid of the corporate food system, and our belief that peasant agriculture can feed the world. The current food crisis shows that the dominant corporate food system has failed and that the promises of the 1996 World Food Summit, echoed by the Millennium Development Goal of reducing hunger by 2015, will not be fulfilled. On the contrary, the number of hungry has increased from 800 million in 1996 to more then 1,000 million at the moment.

The Via Campesina site has a lot of confusing dingbats, though at least they don't move; here's a more usable version of the map, and the list of events, sorted by continent. (Why is Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Europe? The rest of Canada is at the bottom of the list. Also I guess the European countries are in alphabetical order in a European language, possibly Spanish.)