The UN General Assembly of 17 December 2018 finally ratified the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UN-DROP), an important milestone to the struggle of peasants and other groups in many parts of the world whose livelihood rely heavily on natural resources in the countryside.

Through the UN-DROP, some of their rights, as asserted in various international human rights instruments, are reaffirmed as to be respected, protected, and fulfilled. All this time, those rights are often disrespected, easily breached, and unfulfilled by states out the various big economic interests and capital accumulation in the countryside. Corporations dominate the ownership of land and other natural resources as well as controlling the production and trade of agricultural products in the rural areas. The state facilitates corporations to control livelihoods, exploiting and even dismissing peasants and other groups.

The Indonesian nation may rightly take pride in the ratification of the UN-DROP, for the first ideas of “peasant rights” were formulated by activists and peasants in Indonesia since the late 1990s. This idea came out of advocations to improve the living conditions of peasants in Indonesia whose lands are shrinking, whose access to agricultural means of production are worsening, and who are facing environmental damage as well as various conflicts.

As the year 2000 draws near the early formula for “peasant rights” were drafted in Yogyakarta, which was then discussed and sown in other parts of Indonesia. It then became one of the declarations of the 2001 National Conference on Agrarian Reform and Peasant Rights in Cibubur. The document of the declaration would then be a part of the campaign international peasant groups through the Indonesian Farmers Union (Serikat Petani Indonesia, SPI), a member of the international peasant union La Via Campesina (LVC).

After lengthy socialisation and negotiation processes, in 2008, LVC adopted the Declaration of Peasant Rights that were made by the Indonesian peasant groups and their supporters. The LVC and various transnational civil society organisations would immediately begin an international advocation campaign to support the discussion of the draft in the assemblies of the UN.

The idea of peasant rights was pushed for alongside discussions regarding the protection and fulfilment of the right to food in the UN Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which then demanded further study to its Advisory Committee. In 2012, they reported their study and stated that the UN-HRC should make a declaration regarding the rights of peasants and other groups working in the countryside.

The long two-decade journey of campaigns, advocations, and international lobbies by proponents of agrarian reform, defenders of peasant rights, farm labourers, fishermen, and herdsmen finally came to fruition. The UN-HRC Assembly of September 2018 drafted the UN-DROP. Out of 47 members of the UN-HRC, 33 countries voted in favour, 11 abstained, and the remaining 3—Australia, Hungary, and the United Kingdom—voted against the DROP. The declaration then moved on to the UN General Assembly, December 2018, which ratified it as a part of the international human rights instrument through the UN General Assembly Resolution No. A/RES/73/165.

Even though the UN declaration is not a legally binding instrument, it is a transnational political statement of a crucial matter for the continuation of a civilised humanity. It stands as a testament to a shared political will from the international community to the advancement of civilisation by respecting human rights and returning the state to the role of its protector and fulfiller. Thus, the UN Declaration must rightly be a legal reference in the policymaking of its member states, especially those who voted in favour.

The UN-DROP affirms the need for securing the rights of farmers in preserving and developing indigenous seeds, as well as to exchange and sell them. The point is not only in respecting indigenous knowledge and their cultural rights, but also a fulfilment of their right for environmental conservation and the improvement of biodiversity.

Indeed, most of the UN-DROP merely reaffirms a number of rights that have already been mentioned in various international human rights instruments as well as other international conventions. Nevertheless, there are some new kinds of human rights such as: right to land and territory, right to seeds and protection of indigenous knowledge regarding seeds, right to biodiversity and environmental protection, right to agricultural means of production, right to food sovereignty, rights of peasants and other groups in the rural areas to a decent income, and their right to develop community-based commercialisation systems.

During the ratification of the declaration in the UN General Assembly, 121 countries voted in favour, 54 were in abstention, and 8 countries voted against. Most of the votes against came from countries that were already adopting the same stance since the draft of the declaration was ratified in the UN-HRC. Their reasons fell within the argument that the rights mentioned in the DROP are already stated in other international human rights instruments. Aside from that, they were reluctant to affirm the presence of “collective rights” alongside individual rights within the domain of human rights.

However, a deeper analysis from a political-economic perspective is essential to see why countries considered as the “champions” of human rights—such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, for instance—consistently stood against DROP from the beginning. One may suspect that behind their reluctance, masked with various terminologies within human rights discourse, lies an interest in production control and the worldwide commercial domination of agricultural produce.

The DROP necessitates the protection of small-scale and subsistence agriculture, which are the main livelihood of the majority in rural areas, from being crushed by contrivances of the large-scale economy. Implicitly, the DROP also emphasises the rights of peasants and other groups in rural areas to withstand the gales of large-scale capital and exploitation in the countryside, in addition to highlighting their right to develop an alternative to the very system that exploits them all this time.

The new human rights instruments in the DROP are needed to increase the coherence and the realisation of certain fundamental rights—as stated in earlier instruments—especially amid the marginalisation of peasants and other groups. It is hardly arguable that although the world has established covenants on economic, social, political, cultural, and civil rights, much of the world population living under extreme poverty and hunger lives in the rural areas. Not even the rights of farm labourers are protected due to being beyond the reaches of labour conventions, which are generally only effective when applied to workers in the formal sector.

The statistics of both national and global poverty illustrates that rural areas are still huge pockets of poverty. Global data suggests that until 10 years ago around 75% of poor citizens are in the countryside. If a more comprehensive outlook incorporating aspects other than income like health, education, and standard of living is adopted, then until 4 years ago, out of around 1.4 billion lives of the world poor, 85% of them are in the rural areas (Alkire et al. 2014).

In Indonesia, 61% of citizens under poverty are in rural areas (BPS 2018). While the number of citizens under the category of “extreme poverty”, using the World Bank poverty line of US$ 1.90 per day, are decreasing in the last one and a half decade, amounting to 15.1 million lives (5.7% of the total population).

With the new methodology of calculating poverty rates adjusted with Indonesia’s economic status as a lower middle-income country, the number of people who live in poverty or those with a daily expense of less than US$ 3.20 is around 72.1 million or 27.3% of the population. But it is important to note that the World Bank uses an exchange rate based on global Purchasing Power Parity of around Rp 5.466 per US Dollar. If they were to use exchange value as found in the market, which currently is at around Rp 14.000 per US Dollar, then the number of those in “extreme poverty” is at least around 16% of the total population. In other words, if one is using the same exchange rate, more than half of the Indonesian population, currently numbering around 260 million, can be categorised as living in poverty.

The 2018 Inter-census Agricultural Survey (Survei Pertanian Antar Sensus, SUTAS) stated that there are 27.7 million farmer households, or around 38% of the population, whose lives are reliant on agricultural activities from farms, plantations, forests, fisheries, and cattle farms. If those among them are landless, the alternative employment opportunity in the rural areas is waged informal odd jobs in agriculture or construction.

The percentage of informal workers in the agricultural sector amounts to 88.5% (BPS 2018), while the average rate of net income is only 54% of the average national minimum wage. Aside from very low pay, labourers in the rural areas also have no security in wages, work opportunity, or work safety.

Inequitable land ownership originating from the colonial period and worsening today becomes the main basis of enduring poverty in the rural areas. The widening gap of inequality along with the conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural activities have diminished work opportunities, leaving only odd jobs with loose pay. Looking at the Gini ratio of land ownership by peasant households in Indonesia from 1963 to today shows that the main cause of rural poverty has never been seriously dealt with.

The Gini coefficient of inequitable land ownership numbers around 0.52-0.59 (Bachriadi 2017). This means that the distribution of land ownership in Indonesia has always been imbalanced. What is worse is that the previous calculation does not include landless peasants. If they were to be included, the ratio would reach around a horrifying 0.64-0.72.

Aside from inequitable land tenure structure, from the New Order period until now, the farmers of Indonesia on average only own small lands, rarely if ever reaching more than a hectare. The latest Agricultural Census (Sensus Pertanian, SP) and SUTAS, run by Statistics Indonesia (Badan Pusat Statistik, BPS) in 2013 and 2018 revealed that most Indonesian farmers own less than 0.5 hectares of land; 55% during the former, and 57% during the latter. The percentage of such farmers has kept increasing since the 1960s. In 1963 and 1993, they amount to 44% and 49 % of total farmer households (Bachriadi 2017).

De-peasantisation, or the decline in the number of farmers and community farming, in Indonesia as the logical consequence of industrialisation evidently did not carry those who work in rural areas—most being farmers—to better living standards. On the contrary, people in the countryside are all the more marginalised with rampant evictions and land grabs, enclosure of waters for small fishermen, and other various agrarian conflicts. Criminalisation to them and their defenders are relentless, even though it is often said that the authoritarian regime has fallen and now is the era of a return to democracy and respect to fundamental rights.

The emergence of the UN-DROP will certainly not end the mistreatment of farmers and other marginal groups in the rural areas. A text of a declaration by the UN is merely what it is: a text, for it is not a legally binding instrument. The Declaration is meaningful if and only if the governing regime—especially of a country that voted in favour—takes real measures regarding the text.

Interestingly, when farmers and civil society groups from Indonesia and their allies from other parts of the world fought for the DROP, the Indonesian government and its permanent delegation in the UN weren’t really responsive to its people’s request, despite being a member of the UN-HRC several times from 2007 to 2017. Instead, it was UN-HRC delegations from countries in Central and South America as well as Africa who were supportive of the idea of peasant rights from the beginning.

In 2015, for instance, when the UN-HRC formed an Intergovernmental Working Group to draft the UN-DROP, the four “core group of sponsors” were Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and South Africa. Indonesia, alongside Brazil and Switzerland, only became “friends of the core group”. It would be interesting to see how power relations develop between social movement groups and the ruling regimes of Indonesia as well as the countries above regarding the priority of the fundamental rights issue that is being fought for in the UN.

May the Indonesian government after the 2019 Elections and beyond—regardless of who will be chosen as the head of state—consistently uphold Indonesia’s position as a signatory of the UN-DROP. That is, to give full protection to farmers and other groups working in rural areas, which mainly includes an implementation of a true agrarian reform—as the indispensable basis for food sovereignty, instead of a “bogus” agrarian reform as shown throughout the previous decade.

Kyoto, Early February of 2019

Translation by Alvin A. Waworuntu

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