Farmers Solidarity Project

In much of the developing world, family farms and cooperatives are critical to fighting poverty and supporting sustainable development. Families can support themselves, send their children to school, and create local jobs for others. However, in recent years, the rapid expansion of corporate agribusiness has demolished small family farms, increasing poverty and migration. Trade agreements like the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization’s (WTO's) Agreement on Agriculture, are expected to deepen these problems.

To protect their way of life from extinction farmers around the world have built strong grassroots organizations. Peasant farmers have built one of the strongest social movements in the world today. This movement has demonstrated the capacity to organize and mobilize at the grassroots level against corporate power in food and agriculture, free trade, groups like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monitary Fund.

Farmers around the world face desperate times, partly due to U.S.trade and agricultural policies. Some are driven to suicide (over 100,000 in India) and others migrate to cities or other countries in search of work. But they are also building national and international movements to fight for fair trade and agricultural policies. And they form, as one observer noted, “the most important source of democratic transformation in national and international politics.”