In 2012, La Via Campesina visited Taiwan, China, and invited farmers from various places to take part in grassroots exchanges.

Editor's note:

The global farmers' movement La Via Campesina will visit Taiwan this weekend, holding exchange forums in rural communities across the island. The hosting organizations, Taiwan Rural Front and the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Taiwan, invite everyone to join a session near you, and especially welcome friends with hands-on farming experience to come and exchange ideas with farmers and young people from across Asia. NewsMarket has partnered with the organizers to produce a special series on La Via Campesina's visit to Taiwan, introducing the movement's efforts around the world and the highlights of its exchange visit to Taiwan.

Below is the invitation letter from Taiwan Rural Front and the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Taiwan. Everyone is welcome to join.

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Dear friends:

From 5/26 (Sat) to 5/30 (Wed), the global grassroots farmers' movement La Via Campesina will visit Taiwan to meet Taiwanese farmers and learn about rural Taiwan. The friends visiting this time are mainly young cadres of La Via Campesina in the East Asia-Southeast Asia region, including friends from the Indonesian Farmers Union (SPI) and the Korean Women Peasants Association (KWPA).

La Via Campesina was founded in Belgium in 1993. Over the past nearly twenty years, it has linked farmers from 70 countries, 150 farmers' organizations and more than 200 million people. To resist the tide of neoliberalism and unfair trade, La Via Campesina has put forward the concepts of "defending food sovereignty" and "sustainable smallholder farming," because smallholders who are friendly to the land and cooperate with one another keep production resources from being monopolized and held hostage by transnational capital, and let people everywhere decide for themselves what to grow, what to eat, and what kind of life to live, building sustainable development that belongs to grassroots people.

In recent years, Taiwan's mainstream economic development model has become almost unsustainable, and has even intensified, further stripping away agricultural production resources and the natural environment, seriously squeezing out farmers' right to survive and right to work. Friends of La Via Campesina in the East Asia-Southeast Asia region are also very concerned about the current situation of Taiwanese farmers and the farmers' movement, so this visit has been arranged, and it will also lay the foundation of solidarity for future regional farmer organizing.

2012/5/26-30Visit to Taiwan by the global grassroots farmers' movement(La Via Campesina) Itinerary

• 5/26 (Sat) 19:00-21:00 Hsinchu, Erchongpu (beside the rice paddy in front of No. 86 Minsheng Road, Zhudong Township)
• 5/27 (Sun) 19:00-21:00 Changhua, Xizhou (intersection of Guang Road and Zunnan Road, inside the tent by the Cizibei Canal)
• 5/28 (Mon) 19:00-21:00 Kaohsiung, Meinong (3rd floor, Lequn Building, Qimei High School)
• 5/29 (Tue) 19:00-21:00 Yilan (Songyuan Cabin, No. 26-1 Jinshi Road, Yilan City; enter the alley at the "Jinshi Betel Nut" sign and it is the first door on the right. Do not drive into the dead-end alley; please park on Jinshi Road)
• 5/30 (Wed) 19:00-21:00 Tucheng (Tucheng Ammunition Depot "Teacher Liu's Nature Classroom," No. 111 Heping Road, Tucheng District)

For the latest information, please keep an eye on the Taiwan Rural Front website and Facebook updates.

Sincerely, Taiwan Rural Front and the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Taiwan

(At the end of 2011, the Alliance for the Defense of Rural Taiwan was invited to take part in the La Via Campesina East Asia-Southeast Asia regional conference held in Vietnam)