Worker Organizations
La Via Campesina, the International Peasants Movement
Landless Workers Movement of Brazil
Small Farmer’s Movement of Brazil
Films on Farm Worker Organizing
Onwards to New Delhi – a farmer’s protest
Satnam Singh, a farmer from Punjab in northern India, is worried about his livelihood. New legislation is set to liberalize the sale of agricultural produce. Hundreds of thousands of farmers head for the capital in protest.
Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley
It is June 28th, 2009. The people of Honduras are preparing to vote in their country’s first-ever referendum. However, instead of waking up to ballot boxes they rise to find their streets full of soldiers. The first coup d’état in Central America in three decades.
An unprecedented nationwide resistance movement is born, known simply as La Resistencia. Without question, the most daring arm of the movement is that of the farmers of the Aguan Valley. With the president that promised to help them get their land back overthrown, they decide to take control of their own destiny. In a matter of minutes they seize control over 10,000 acres of palm oil plantations belonging to the country’s most powerful landowner. Located on some of the most fertile land in all of Central America, the farmers announce that they have no plans of ever giving the plantations back.
MST – Landless Movement of Rural Workers of Brazil
30 years ago, in the face of starvation and poverty, the MST was set up to push forward the case of land reform where “occupation is the only solution”
#WeUnite – The 12-minute film ‘We Unite’ is a window into the lives of two organic farmers and the reasons they join the yearly ‘We are Fed-Up’ demonstration in Germany .Along with hundreds of other farmers, they drive their tractors into the heart of Berlin where they unite with thousands of citizens calling for a better food and farming system for all.
Stories, Lessons & Analysis
The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers
The Indian Farmer Protests: A Rare Concession
India’s farmers’ protest: “This is history in the making”
How the MST maintains its radical vision while winning practical reforms
Films on Sustainable Farming
Brazilian Landless Movement & Agroecology
This film examines a cooperative of the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) in the South of Brazil, which struggled for access to land and then transitioned to ecological agriculture, or agroecology. This MST cooperative is demonstrating the possibility of an alternative model of flourishing rural life, which provides thriving livelihoods for farmers, produces high quality and low cost food for the region, and rehabilitates the earth.
Natural Farming With Masanobu Fukuoka: Minimal Effort And Abundant Yields
Masanobu Fukuoka is a farmer/philosopher who lives on the Island of Shikoku, in southern Japan. His farming technique requires no machines, no chemicals and very little weeding. He does not plow the soil or use prepared compost and yet the condition of the soil in his orchards and fields improve each year. His method creates no pollution and does not require fossil fuels. His method requires less labor than any other, yet the yields in his orchard and fields compare favorably with the most productive Japanese farms which use all the technical know-how of modern science.
Books about Food Production and Food Worker Organizing
Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (2022)
Winner of the 2021 Sara A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). A first-of-its-kind study of the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race, and place.
On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement.
Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers’ strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.
Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2016)
Women banana workers have organized themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces, and their lives. Highly accessible and narrative in style, Bananeras recounts the history and growth of this vital movement and shows how Latin American woman workers are shaping and broadly reimagining the possibilities of international labor solidarity.
Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California (2013)
In 1971, Bruce Neuburger—young, out of work, and radicalized by the 60s counterculture in Berkeley—took a job as a farmworker on a whim. He could have hardly anticipated that he would spend the next decade laboring up and down the agricultural valleys of California, alongside the anonymous and largely immigrant workforce that feeds the nation. This account of his journey begins at a remarkable moment, after the birth of the United Farm Workers union and the ensuing uptick in worker militancy. As a participant in organizing efforts, strikes, and boycotts, Neuburger saw first-hand the struggles of farmworkers for better wages and working conditions, and the lengths the growers would go to suppress worker unity.
Part memoir, part informed commentary on farm labor, the U.S. labor movement, and the political economy of agriculture, Lettuce Wars is a lively account written from the perspective of the fields. Neuburger portrays the people he encountered—immigrant workers, fellow radicals, company bosses, cops and goons—vividly and indelibly, lending a human aspect to the conflict between capital and labor as it played out in the fields of California.
Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW (2011)
Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era’s longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labor, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy.
Dionicio Nodín Valdés examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farmworkers, and organized labor. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and César Chávez, and that the labor movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation’s institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers’ continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment.
Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers’ advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.
Trampling Out the Vintage (2012)
The slogan “Yes we can”—in the form “¡Sí Se Puede!”—doesn’t originate with Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. It goes back more than four decades to the heyday of the United Farm Workers, an organization that at its height won many labor victories, secured collective bargaining rights for California farm workers and became a major voice for the Latino community, which was previously excluded from national politics. The UFW was once a transformative political force of a kind now largely lost in contemporary America.
Food Movements Unite! (2011)
The present corporate food regime dominating the planet’s food systems is environmentally destructive, financially volatile and socially unjust. Though the regime’s contributions to the planet’s four-fold food-fuel-finance and climate crises are well documented, the “solutions” advanced by our national and global institutions reinforce the same destructive technological path, the same global market fundamentalism, and the same unregulated consolidation of corporate power in the food system that brought us the crisis in the first place.
The Union of Their Dreams (2009)
Drawing on a rich trove of original documents, tapes, and interviews, Miriam Pawel chronicles the rise of the UFW during the heady days of civil rights struggles, the antiwar movement, and student activism in the 1960s and ’70s. From the fields, the churches, and the classrooms, hundreds were drawn to la causa by the charismatic Chavez, a brilliant risk-taker who mobilized popular support for a noble cause. But as Miriam Pawel shows, the UFW was ripped apart by the same man who built it, as Chavez proved unable to make the transition from movement icon to union leader. Pawel traces the lives of several key members of the crusade, using their stories to weave together a powerful portrait of a movement and the people who made it.
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