Agricultural Workers

Tea workers in West Bengal have rejected the tripartite wage agreement signed on February 20 that sets wages below the poverty line for the next three years.

Police have suppressed a mass protest against Indian government plans to legalize corporate land grabs. The protest was planned for January 11, the opening day of the Vibrant Gujarat Summit, where representatives of governments and over 500 transnational corporations are gathering to discuss "investment" in Gujarat. Small farmers and agricultural workers are worried that the Summit is a platform to encourage land grabbing.

On International Migrants Day, December 18, the IUF and Amnesty International Korean organizations capped their two-month joint campaign with a declaration and joint press conference calling on the government to protect the right of migrant agricultural workers in the country to live and work in safe conditions.

India's new right wing government has lost no time in proving its 'business-friendly' credentials by attacking the world's biggest employment program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a vital support for the country's rural poor. Unions have begun organizing the fight back.

Workers and small farmers must build collective bargaining power in the face of growing corporate control of agriculture or risk falling into debt and dependency. Organizing to build that power was the theme of the recent 'Beware of Contract Farming' training workshops for members of the IUF-affiliated Agriculture and Farmers Federation of Myanmar (AFFM-IUF).

Unions of rural development workers in Niger, representing public employees in agricultural research and engineering, agronomists and water resource specialists have announced a 5-day strike for November 3-7 as they continue to fight for essential benefits and pay equity with other public sector workers denied them since 2008.  

The IUF together with the NGOs Misereor and FIAN is launching Harvesting Hunger - Plantation Workers and the Right to Food to mark World Food Day on October 16. The booklet highlights the massive violation of plantation workers' right to food resulting from their low wages and the routine exclusion of this scandalous situation from food security debates.

The IUF has called for urgent protective measures by the Colombian government following public threats by paramilitaries against trade union leaders it denounces as "guerillas in disguise". Threatening leaflets signed by a notorious paramilitary group have been distributed in the department of Magdelena, where 9 union leaders have been murdered so far this year.

At least 23 murders of rural union leaders and defenders of the landless have been recorded in Brazil since the beginning of the year - all of them linked to conflicts over land rights, landgrabbing and illegal logging.