Interview with Geneviève Savigny, a member of the UN Working Group on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP)
Geneva, June 25, 2026 by Elena Rusca, CLARIN
As food, climate, and geopolitical crises intensify, peasants—who feed the majority of humanity—remain among the most exposed to poverty, dispossession, and violence.
Since 2018, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) has provided an unprecedented framework to protect their collective rights, seeds, lands, and knowledge. But its implementation remains fragile.
Geneviève Savigny, a member of the Working Group responsible for the UNDROP, analyzes the agrarian, seed, and political challenges currently shaping fields around the world—from West Africa to Latin America.
The UNDROP: a historic text born from peasant struggles
Adopted in 2018 by the United Nations General Assembly, the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas is one of the most ambitious instruments in the international system. The result of nearly twenty years of mobilization driven by La Vía Campesina, it seeks to protect those who produce most of the world’s food, yet who still face the greatest exposure to poverty, dispossession, violence, and political marginalization.
The UNDROP recognizes rights rarely spelled out in other international texts:
the right to land,
the right to seeds,
the right to water,
protection against evictions,
participation in decision-making,
collective and customary rights,
recognition of peasant knowledge.
To ensure its implementation, the Human Rights Council created in 2023 a Working Group made up of five independent experts. Geneviève Savigny, a peasant and former member of the Peasant Confederation and La Vía Campesina, is part of it.
An international working group to defend peasant rights
— How was your working group formed?
G. Savigny: “The working group was formed by the Human Rights Council after a resolution was adopted in autumn 2023. We were selected during the winter and we ended up as five people. Personally, I am a peasant, a former member of the Peasant Confederation and of La Vía Campesina. Carlos is also there, an anthropologist and professor in Colombia; David, a law professor in Armenia; Shalmalee, a former executive director of the NGO Focus on Global South; and Uche, a Nigerian law professor who works in the United States.”
— How do you work concretely?
G. Savigny: “Our group has two annual in-person sessions of five days each, normally one in Geneva and another in New York. This year we preferred to replace the second session with country visits. We’ve just completed a visit to Ghana, and another is planned for November in Paraguay. Each time, we are two members from the group plus our paid team.”
— What do you do during these visits?
G. Savigny: “We meet with representatives of the different ministries linked to agriculture and food, and then with representatives of peasants, fishers, pastoralists, and rural women. In Ghana, the meetings had to go through the government or local authorities so that we could meet with the village chiefs. The goal is to understand how peasant rights are being applied—what the strong points are and what can be improved. Then we prepare a report to be presented in autumn.”
Participation: an essential right, but difficult to exercise
— You published a report on the right to participation. What were your conclusions?
G. Savigny: “Participation is really indispensable for the situation of peasants—women and men—to be taken into account and resolved in the right way. But there’s still a lot to do, even for material reasons: translation, distance, and difficulties getting to places of power.
As for women, there is a particular difficulty in freeing themselves from household tasks and day-to-day work in order to participate in decisions that concern them. It’s an additional level of difficulty in a rural world where work is very absorbing and often isolated.”
Seeds: a crucial challenge in the face of multinational corporations
— This year you’re working on the right to seeds. Why is it so important?
G. Savigny: “Article 19 of the UNDROP sets out how peasants should have the right to maintain peasant seed systems: to save, reproduce, exchange, and sell seeds. The State must also support the existence of this system. But that’s not always the case, because there is a very dynamic—and even aggressive—commercial system, depending on how you look at it.”
— Do GMOs influence this problem?
G. Savigny: “Yes, of course. With technological advances, we now have much easier and faster ways to do GMOs. To facilitate their spread and commercialization, seed companies no longer want them to be called GMOs, but NGTs—New Genomic Techniques. They want them to be recognized as something that could appear in nature, so there would be no need to label them.
But there are patents filed on them! And there is fear that patented traits, which are not labeled, could appear naturally in peasants’ plants—plants that peasants have selected for years.”
— What does this mean for peasants?
G. Savigny: “A patent on the CRISPR-Cas system, for example, belongs to a single company. There is increasing concentration of rights that determine whether or not seeds can be multiplied. In response, many seed laws impose strict rules for recognizing and marketing seeds, which conflicts with the peasant right to seeds.
Peasants must claim this right, and States must understand that even for biodiversity and plant resilience, selection should not be halted at the small scale carried out by local peasants. There is an entire system that we need to preserve if we want to maintain biodiversity and important crop diversity.”
Land and territory: collective rights that need to be recognized
— You’re also working on the issue of land. What is the main challenge?
G. Savigny: “We work on article 17 of the declaration—rights to land and territory. Interestingly, the UNDROP emphasizes the importance of collective and customary rights. This matters because in many places the problem is there: where there are no clear land titles, you end up in an informal zone.”
— And in Switzerland, how do you view access to land?
G. Savigny: “I think the right to land can open up new pathways. What’s needed is secure access to land, not necessarily ownership. I hope that in Switzerland we can develop rental arrangements or forms of collective ownership that provide security to those who cultivate the land.
There’s a big problem: an entire generation reaches the end of their working life with small pensions and few resources. Sometimes they don’t want to pass the land on to young people. It’s a general social issue. If we want quality food production, we must also solve the problem of access to land.
Buying is prohibitive. And you have to be careful because in some countries, even in Europe, it’s companies that buy the land.”
Latin America: peasantization under attack, yet essential
— For Chilean readers, what view do you have on peasantization in Latin America?
G. Savigny: “In Latin America, peasantization seems essential to me. Along with Indigenous peoples, peasants form the core of an agriculture that is, at the same time, completely under attack by the development of an intensive industrial agriculture.
This is reinforced by free trade agreements aimed at increasing exports of products and raw materials. What peasants there say is that this is not in the direction of their protection.
It’s an area I don’t know perfectly, but it seems so rich and varied. Culturally, it is peasant and Indigenous. In Latin America, artisanal modes of production remain very important. The quality of food also comes from being able to eat fresh vegetables everywhere.”
— Is it also a struggle against transnational corporations?
G. Savigny: “Of course. Small peasants need to be supported; transnational corporations need to be limited, because they have a natural tendency—one could say even their job—to expand, concentrate, and obtain more profit. But limits must exist, because without them it becomes destructive both environmentally and socially.
This isn’t our direct mandate, but we face the issue indirectly. Our recommendations at the end of each report are addressed to States, UN entities, other institutions, and also private entities—asking them to respect the law and international regulations, and to uphold human rights in all circumstances.”
The UN’s “special procedures”: explaining the mandate
— Can you explain what special procedures are?
G. Savigny: “Working groups are part of special procedures, like special rapporteurs. They focus on a particular aspect of human rights, such as the right to food or the right to water. We are a working group: instead of a single special rapporteur, we are five, which corresponds to the diversity and breadth of the topic.
Our role is to implement the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas—the UNDROP. It’s a text adopted in 2018 by the UN General Assembly, and it brings together twenty-eight articles that summarize the rights needed for peasant activity.
It specifies what a peasant is, States’ obligations, non-discrimination, women’s rights, the right to resources, the right to participation, to information, to education, and more—detailed in a way adapted to rural contexts.”
The Working Group will present its reports on land and seeds next September in Geneva. These documents, which will be submitted to the UN General Assembly, should shed crucial light.