Via Campesina
At the International Via Campesina conference in Bolivia 2000, a gender platform was proposed, which included the following goals
• Work to achieve gender parity at all policy-making events within our organizations at the local, national, regional and international levels.
• Achieve the goal of having 50 percent women delegates in all committees and conferences of the Via Campesina
• Build leadership among women through concrete training and participation in programs.
• Support the organization of gender workshops for both women and men.
• Ensure that women take positions of decision-making within local, regional, national and international peasant and farm organizations.
• Continue to actively build links of solidarity between peasant and farm women within the Via Campesina movement through better communication, meetings, exchanges and collective analysis.
• Gender issues should be integrated into all of the following themes of the Via Campesina : agrarian reform, biodiversity and genetic resources, human rights, food sovereignty and trade and farmer based sustainable agriculture. Develop a strategy of publicity and mass media campaigns on these issues.
• All Via Campesina initiatives should be implemented and assessed to ensure that they respect equal rights of women.
• All members in all participating Via Campesina organisations must accept the importance of developing a gender, class and ethnicity perspective and integrate this into their frameworks. The burning problem of inequality between the genders can be solved in the countryside.
• Via Campesina organisations must build and support literacy training programs, consciousness raising and political training in rural areas. The Via Campesina demands free education for all women and men.
• The Women’s Assembly pointed out that women want equality; they do not want to overcome men. Equality means that women need social, psychological, physical and economical support.
• For this reason Via Campesina needs better coordination so that there is greater interaction with organizations around the world. To ensure better coordination, coordinators from each country should work together to find solutions to the issues they face at the national level; they should also work closely together to strengthen the work at the international level.