English Ahead of the Food In Our Hands march – this Saturday April 26th 2025 in London – LWA’s Catherine McAndrew explores how the struggle for food sovereignty and agroecology underpin not only the struggles of migrant farm workers in the UK, but our broader fight for the transformation of our food system into one based on rights, dignity, and sustainability.
La Via Campesina and the Global Fight for Food Sovereignty
Why are concepts like agroecology and food sovereignty important to us?
Where do these concepts come from?
Fundamentally, they come from the defence of peasant food systems and class struggle by peasants in the Majority World. But, they are both concepts that are relevant here in the UK and across Europe. Farmers here need fair prices to produce the food that we all need, and we all need to know that food will be available and affordable when we need it. The need for protectionism and market regulation to safeguard healthy, affordable food for all is what we still fight for today.
Ahead of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade (GATT), an agreement that paved the way for the World Trade Organisation and would come to rewrite the rules of international trade, peasant leaders warned that this agreement spelled a fundamental shift away from controlled national economies towards an almost exclusively market-driven global economy.
With this shift, the global social movements that formed La Via Campesina knew that these changes would increasingly encourage national governments to shift production increasingly towards the needs of the dominant corporate players in the world market in the West and to roll back on the hard-fought wins of peasant movements from land rights to guaranteed prices, and protective tariffs. The consequences for peasants and small and family farms globally have been severe – the removal of protections for Mexican agriculture under the North American Free Trade Agreement saw 2 million small farmers driven from their land, with many becoming migrant workers in the United States.
At the same time, the loosening of restrictions on international investment caused successive waves of flows of financial capital into agriculture. This financed the growth of international agribusinesses, monoculture cash crops, and a land grab of territories previously held predominantly by peasant communities. Unlike peasant agriculture, which is rooted in local communities and the rhythms of their specific ecosystems, working with nature to restore the soil, corporate agriculture is centralised and concerned predominantly with extracting as much monetary value as possible – both out of the land and those who work it, at the expense of both. Research undertaken by the Landworkers’ Alliance and the New Economics Foundation found that of the value of fruit produced on a case study farm, 54.% went to supermarkets and just a miserly 7.6% was retained by the farm’s workforce. This process has also created an over-polluting agricultural system which, for example, in the UK, contributes 30% of the country’s greenhouse gases.
To oppose these policies, peasant movements established La Via Campesina in 1993 as a vehicle for a global fightback against neoliberal trade policies, and established food sovereignty as a cornerstone of their political programme, the idea that “we have the right to produce our own food on our own territory”, mobilising against the expropriation of peasants at the behest of multinational corporations and international trade agreements. The movement also called for embracing traditional peasant food production methods based on small farms and the integration of crops, trees, and livestock, as an alternative to corporate monoculture, under the slogan of “agroecology” – or agri (agriculture) + ecology (relationship with the environment). The road to an alternative food system does not just come from ideas, but from struggle by the people in the food system to defend their interests.
Migrant Workers Struggles and the Transition to Food Sovereignty
In order to survive the corporate domination of agriculture, family farms in the UK have increasingly had to take on larger landholdings, adopt industrial farming methods, and intensify production in order to bridge the gap between corporate pressure and remaining in business. Meanwhile, in the Majority World, peasant farmers unable to make this transition have increasingly had to make the choice to abandon their landholdings and move to urban areas, and then further afield to the centres of the world economy. Many become waged farm workers themselves. The result is that, in rich countries such as the UK, the majority of the food producers are migrant farm workers working on an ever smaller number of agroindustrial farms.
It is migrant farmworkers who experience the agroindustrial system’s worst injustices. The farmworker’s health is degraded in order to extract profit from the land; they are expected to work in inhuman conditions, beyond normal limits, for extremely low pay; and they are also bonded to their employers via the immigration controls system. The UK’s Seasonal Worker Scheme, like temporary migration schemes globally, ties workers to their employers through a combination of visa sponsorships and debts incurred during transit.This occurs against a backdrop of continually inflammatory statements from political leadership in the UK and complicity in racist war crimes, which encourage hostility towards migrants and other Black and Brown landworkers.
It is also migrant wage workers who are often former peasants or the children of current peasants in their home countries. They are often one and the same communities. They provide a necessary subsidy to the survival of peasant food systems in the South in the form of remittances. Migrant worker struggles are Europe’s direct link to La Via Campesina’s global vision.
When migrant workers fight against these injustices, they come directly into conflict with the corporations who control the global food system (with the supermarkets at the top) and help create the conditions for every farm worker, migrant or otherwise, to thrive. Their struggles, if successful, would build worker-led structures within the agroindustrial farms in the form of trade unions, which seek to manage farms in the interest of their workers – interests which go against the agroindustrial exploitation of people and land.
March for Food In Our Hands, April 26th
A growing movement of farm workers is coming together to challenge the injustices in the UK food system. In January, Latin American farm workers initiated the Justice is Not Seasonal campaign, and courageously took a stand against the injustices of the current farming and immigration systems by demonstrating outside the Home Office.
The demonstration highlighted the long wait these workers have endured since their strike in 2023 against their employer Haygrove farm for a verdict in their case, which includes accusations of trafficking, wage theft, and racial discrimination. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the Worker Support Centre is documenting violations of workers’ rights on farms a calling for action on endemic non-payment of wages.
Central to that are measures that end the ongoing exploitation of farm workers on UK farms, through a redistribution of wealth from the top of the supply chain from corporate profits at the top of the supply chain to the farm workers who pick, pack and process our food. Immediate reforms need to be introduced to the Seasonal Worker Scheme that allow workers to freely change their employer and offer a path to full residency in the UK. The agriculture budget, already facing reductions, needs to be increased to counter the pressures corporate domination places on farms which push farms into intensification.
There needs to be a recognition that farm workers are neither labour inputs into the agricultural system nor passive victims of injustice, but a key agent central to transformation of the UK’s food system along the lines of food sovereignty and agroecology.
This Saturday April 26th the Justice Is Not Seasonal campaign will march alongside farmers, food system workers and everyone who has a stake in the UK’s food system under the banner ‘Food In Our Hands’.
Join the ‘Food In Our Hands‘ march to raise our voices in unison and demand a Right to Food for all
When?
Saturday April 26th @ 1pm
Where?
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London
Then marching on Defra via the Home Office
Get down early and join the Migrant Rights Network ‘Words Matter‘ Workshop
When?
Saturday April 26th, 11.45am – 1.15pm (before the main march)
Where?
Vauxhall City Farm
165 Tyers St, London SE11 5HS
Header image: United Voices of the World
