On Monday, May 27, 2025, at the Itamaraty Palace in Brasília, the Brazilian government, represented by the Vice President and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, presented La Via Campesina with the Order of Rio Branco—one of the nation’s highest honors in diplomacy.
This recognition not only distinguishes a trajectory: it is a cry of affirmation for those who struggle, sow, resist, and dream. It is the institutional echo of the peasant struggle as an unstoppable force that transforms the world.
The Order of Rio Branco is awarded to institutions and individuals who contribute to the values of peace, solidarity, and justice. By awarding this medal to La Via Campesina, the Brazilian State recognizes that the peasant struggle is at the heart of a project that defends the commons, the dignity of peoples, and the real possibility of building a more just world.
Since its founding in 1993, La Via Campesina has been the voice of those who cultivate the land, care for the seeds, protect the waters and forests, and feed the people. Gathering more than 200 million people in 81 countries, this international movement has placed Food Sovereignty, Popular Agrarian Reform, agroecology, and the defense of rural peoples at the center of the global debate.
During these 32 years, La Via Campesina has achieved historic achievements: the defense of peasant rights, the promotion of agroecology, the promotion of peasant and popular feminism, the struggle against patriarchy and violence, and the frontal resistance against neoliberalism and transnational corporations. The global movement has been a protagonist in the approval of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and has accompanied the space of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD). LVC has mobilized consciences and communities on all continents with mass mobilizations, by setting up formation schools, carrying out land occupations, and organizing global campaigns. As a global voice of the people of the territories, LVC has sown the seeds of hope.
In a context of climate crisis, growing hunger, and violence against rural peoples facing a brutal offensive of transnational capital on their territories, the recognition in Itamaraty is an act of historical justice. But it is also a call to the governments of the world: to support and recognize peasant movements as a political and ethical obligation to guarantee the right of peoples to exist, to produce, to decide.
To defend La Via Campesina is to defend life. It is to assume the collective commitment to dismantle the agribusiness model and build a new horizon of dignity for rural communities. It is to bet on a Popular Agrarian Reform that guarantees land, territory, water, free seeds, and Food Sovereignty for all.
This award belongs to all the organizations that make up La Via Campesina, in Brazil* and around the world. To the peasants who every day, with wisdom and courage, build concrete alternatives to the agribusiness and extractivist model of death and destruction. To those who organize themselves, to those who do not give up, to those who make the struggle an act of love for humanity and for Mother Earth.
We dedicate this award to the people who fight for life, for land, territory, water, and seeds, who dream of a world of justice, dignity, and freedom. We will go forward, with more strength, with more organization, and with more unity, for a more just, more peasant, and more humane world!
The land is for those who work it, not for the profit of a few!
Globalize the struggle, Globalize hope!
**In Brazil, the organizations that are members of La Vía Campesina are: Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas (MMC), Movimento de Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), Pastoral da Juventude Rural (PJR), Coordenação Nacional das Comunidades Quilombolas (CONAQ), Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais (MPP), Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), and Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA).