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La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants, Annette Aurélie Desmarais, Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2006, 238 pages.
The graphie image of a Korean farmer stabbing himself to death atop a barricade at the 2003 World Trade Organization protest in Cancún, Mexico brought international attention to the plight of the planet's small farmers. Lee Kyung Hae was a member of the world's most important transnational peasant organization, La Vía Campesina (Spanish for "Peasant Path").
In the wake of plummeting commodity prices in the 1980s, resulting from agricultural trade liberalization, peasants and small farmers reached across borders to find allies in their fight to defend their right to grow food. La Vía Campesina, a coalition of some 100 farmer groups from over 50 countries, emerged in 1993 as...