Postscript on La Via Campesina's Visit to Taiwan, China: Insights from the 2012 Peasant Guidance
Text by Lin Lexin and Cai Yanlin
At the end of May this year, Haesook of the East Asia and Southeast Asia regional secretariat of La Via Campesina (Note 1), a global grassroots farmers' organization, and Yakub, director of its youth department, visited Taiwan. Over the previous two years, La Via Campesina had invited Taiwanese youth and farmers to Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam and other places to take part in youth meetings and regional annual conferences. Knowing that the situation in Taiwan with land being enclosed and agricultural water being seized is quite serious, La Via Campesina arranged this trip to get to know the farmers struggling in Taiwan. At the beginning of next year, Taiwanese farmers will also be invited to host a regional conference, to promote close exchange and cooperation between Taiwanese farmers and the global peasant movement.
For a record of this one-week visit to Taiwan, please see the serial write-ups in "NewsMarket". We will not repeat the details of the activities here, but instead want to share some of the reflections and thoughts that this exchange prompted. First of all, the first stop of Haesook and Yakub's visit (hereafter referred to as La Via Campesina) was the expropriation zones of Erchongpu and Sanchongpu in Zhudong. That day, Liu Qingchang, chair of the local self-rescue association, led us to visit the Erchongpu spring and personally explained that this is the junction of a graben, where underground springs are abundant and flow all year round.
This surging, trickling spring seems the best metaphor for this trip: where different cultures, backgrounds of knowledge and movement experiences meet, that is precisely the moment when energy is forged and inspiration sparks. During the trip, several quiet remarks by the La Via Campesina representatives sounded like sharp blows to the head, and blow echoed blow, faintly pointing to a possible practice of breaking out of capitalism with agriculture at its foundation, leaving us pondering again and again and unable to resist sharing our humble thoughts.
First blow Organic or not organic? Let's talk about agroecology.
In Taiwan, whenever agriculture is mentioned, everyone thinks of organic, and organic is all the rage now. Whether it is sustainable environment, healthy diet, local tourism, agricultural transformation... organic seems to be the effective solution, and everyone is talking about "organic."
Yet La Via Campesina does not talk about organic. What La Via Campesina talks about is "agroecology," meaning no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides. So why not just use the concept of "organic"? Haesook said that the word "organic" has been absorbed by neoliberalism and heavily commercialized; the definition and practice of "organic" have been monopolized by certification companies and managerialism, so La Via Campesina deliberately avoids using the word "organic."
When talking about agroecology, La Via Campesina constantly stresses that farmers must control their own means of production, including water, soil, seeds, farming methods and various inputs, and through mutual aid and sharing among farmers and communities, break free from dependence on capitalism in the production process.
What we currently discuss as organic, or chemical-free, is mainly a consumer- or environment-centered way of speaking; La Via Campesina, by contrast, takes farmers as the subject and, through the practice of agroecology, places the autonomy of labor and production first, seeking to liberate agricultural production from the cycle of capital accumulation.
Second blow Farmers to Farmers: building a farmer-centered perspective and way of asking questions
Regarding the "farmer as subject" perspective raised by La Via Campesina, many Taiwanese friends could not resist asking: "Then how do you communicate with consumers? Can ordinary people accept it?" Such anxious eagerness to connect with consumption perhaps precisely highlights the long-standing blank spot in Taiwan's thinking, from national policy down to the individual subconscious, regarding farmers as the subject.
Yet even if we shift our caring gaze from the "consumption end" to the "production end," our discussions may not really have taken farmers "into view." In Taiwan's past discussions of farming methods, farmers have often been treated as objects waiting to be educated and enlightened, especially since, after the Green Revolution and the rise of expert knowledge systems, knowledge of cultivation has come to rely on scientific experiments and imported farming methods as the mainstream, suppressing the continuation and preservation of lay knowledge and turning a blind eye to farmers' existing local wisdom.
La Via Campesina is not anti-intellectual in belittling science, but rather hopes to recover farmers' own local wisdom amid the scientific myth that overemphasizes expert knowledge. Therefore, they never ask "What is the best farming method?" but tirelessly and earnestly ask: "What is the local farming method?" Valuing the local does not mean being closed and conservative; rather, it returns the hopeful subject of agricultural development and the authority of knowledge from the expert's "brain" back to the farmer's "hands." The knowledge of farming is always practical knowledge, and practical knowledge is necessarily local knowledge. For this reason, La Via Campesina, as a global platform linking farmers, also actively promotes sharing and exchange among farmers, which they call "Farmers to Farmers" (F to F for short). Through F to F, knowledge is no longer monopolized by scholars, experts and researchers, and farmers are thus not merely "laborers producing crops," but even more so "thinking subjects producing agricultural knowledge."
Fourth blow: generating power where there is water - not only a means of production, but also a source of energy for living
Agricultural water is the life of agriculture and farmers. Throughout the visit, farmers from various places enthusiastically led the friends from La Via Campesina to inspect irrigation canal facilities. On a hilly site in Zhudong, Hsinchu, because the slope is rather steep, the local irrigation association used the ecological engineering method of "stepped weirs" to slow the flow of the irrigation canal; this was a very educational stop. Yakub, from Indonesia, saw the "stepped weirs" and asked: "Do you use this water to generate electricity?" We looked at each other, and explained that only farther upstream, at the Zhudong Main Canal, is there a Taipower power plant.
Yakub said that even a small irrigation canal like this can generate power! In Indonesia there are examples of rural communities installing waterwheels in irrigation canals to generate electricity, and after generating power the water can still continue to irrigate farmland, without any waste at all. This conversation was quite enlightening for us as well. Besides "farmers as subject," in fact the "countryside," as a living space, has abundant natural resources and can also be very "autonomous and independent."
Taiwan's main modes of power generation, whether thermal or hydroelectric, are all large-scale, centralized generation by Taipower or private enterprises, and in the process of distributing electricity this causes a great deal of energy waste and inefficiency. Yakub's words made me recall that last year in rural China, I saw farm households using pig manure from pig farming, fermented into biogas to generate electricity, which could be used for electric lighting and for cooking rice in an electric pot. Is such a model not one possible way out that takes into account both "green energy" and escaping capital's domination?
Combining agriculture's natural production resources to serve as alternative energy for rural communities - in the so-called "late-developing countries" and "backward villages," there are many treasures worth observing and learning from.
Fifth blow Science parks are "parks"?
Taiwan's science parks are set up excessively and everywhere, enclosing land and grabbing water, so during our one-week visit we of course also visited and introduced many rural sites where science parks grab production resources. We explained in English how "science park" is this and that, and our La Via Campesina friends suddenly asked: "Why do you all call that a 'park'?" Huh? Because a park is a "park" - that's how the government's web pages put it?!
Right, that's exactly the problem; the replication of language, the infiltration of ideology, happens just like this.
"I think calling it a 'park' is very strange; park means a public garden, as if it were a very beautiful place, but in essence it is actually an industrial zone, so calling it a 'complex' would be more appropriate." Haesook of La Via Campesina reminded us this way. Complex has the sense of an aggregation, and used to refer to a concentrated cluster of factories, it is indeed more precise than park, so we followed the advice. It sounds simple and easy, but if our La Via Campesina friends had not reminded us, we would never have noticed it ourselves!
The plain of consciousness accumulated layer upon layer through the practice of everyday language is easy and pleasant to walk upon, with few obstacles, and is indeed very hard to notice on one's own. In the translation preparation work before La Via Campesina's visit, we found that La Via Campesina documents often, after mentioning "farmers," attach "men and women, children and youth, and workers," and not only do they tirelessly repeat this long string in more than one document, but they also alternate between "she" and "he" in personal pronouns.
Although such linguistic practice is very troublesome for translators, it is like a repeated reminder, reminding us that farmers have never been a single, homogeneous group, and even less can they be reduced to a single political position, let alone an incarnation of a revolutionary subject. On the contrary, farmers of different genders, ethnic groups, ages, sexual orientations and classes have differing experiences, structural predicaments and situated knowledge. This attention to difference echoes La Via Campesina's insistence on gender equality, with one man and one woman in each region and leadership position, and also reminds us that besides striving for a farmer-centered perspective and way of asking questions, we must also strive to imagine plural farmer subjects.
Sixth blow Globalize the Struggle. Globalize Hope
Having written this far, the last question we want to raise is: what is the connection and relationship between such a plural-subject peasant movement and "non-farmer citizen activists" like us? In the process of exchanging with La Via Campesina, we repeatedly came to understand that La Via Campesina very much emphasizes the boundary between farmers and non-farmers, to ensure that La Via Campesina will not take the old path of Northern NGOs "speaking for the weak." Yet in fact, if seen from the context discussed earlier of "zero-cost agriculture" and "the countryside as living space and energy," the influence and significance of the twenty-first-century peasant movement definitely do not stop at professional farmers, because the values of community, ecology, the local, pluralism, sustainable development and so on are precisely the values that small-scale farming production can create.
Simply put, we cannot fully return to a rural society "with farming as the occupation" (it is impossible and also unnecessary for everyone to be a farmer), but we can create a life model "with farming as the foundation" (you can grow vegetables even in an apartment), thereby overturning and healing the various psychological, environmental and cultural wounds caused by capitalist development. We believe it is in this sense that agriculture offers a possibility for everyone to "return to the future," because it provides a life model for all farmers and non-farmers, achieving relative life autonomy through ecological and social practices such as renewable energy, autonomous food production, small-scale exchange and community support.
It is also in this sense that La Via Campesina is not only "the farmers' road," but also "farmers pointing the way," a path of survival pointed out by small-scale producers all over the world for humanity in the next era of peace and prosperity, leading to an attainable future with farming as the foundation and coexistence with all beings.
Note 1: Regarding how to translate "La Via Campesina," we once discussed it with Awei, who has long cared about the three rural issues, and everyone agreed that translation should above all be colloquial and plain, so that farmers can easily understand it. Therefore, when we introduce it to farmers in the countryside, both the Taiwanese and Hakka oral interpretations simply say "the farmers' road." But when translating documents in writing, we still temporarily continue to use the previous translation "La Via Campesina." Green Sprouts also once did an introduction; please see
Further reading : "2012 La Via Campesina Visit to Taiwan Record" serial write-ups