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The International Conferences serve as the most important collective decision-making, analysis, evaluation and planning space for the 182 national organisations articulated by regions around the world, representing the landless, women, rural workers, migrants, fishermen, pastoralists, indigenous peoples and diversities in 82 countries in Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia, at national, regional and continental levels.
During these international conferences, attended by almost 500 delegates from 10 different regions, different issues affecting the diversity of rural areas are discussed and analysed as a whole. It is here that La Via Campesina defines, updates and refines its strategic lines of action, as well as examining and ratifying new member organisations, discussing internal functioning and launching new campaigns.
In the 30 years that La Vía Campesina has been organising, seven international conferences have taken place. The first was held in Mons, Belgium, in 1993, where for the first time the strength and solidarity of peasant struggles from the global North and South were successfully united, proposing food sovereignty as a concrete defence of peasant agriculture against agribusiness.
During the 1996 conference in Mexico, the movement gave a strong response against free trade agreements and the World Trade Organisation. At the conference in India in 2000, the role and political participation of women was realised when the first International Women's Assembly was celebrated, sowing the seeds of peasant and popular feminism. At the 2004 conference in Brazil, the African continent joined La Via Campesina, organising itself into two regions. Africa brought a diversity of struggles and forms of organisation, strengthening the struggle for environmental justice and against extractivism, colonialism and racism.
At the Mozambique conference in 2008, we launched the International Campaign – 'Stop Violence Against Women' – as a pedagogical tool within our organisations and also to dialogue with societies in our struggle against patriarchy and all forms of violence.
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