Southeast and East Asia and Australia, One Crisis, Different Alibis
La Via Campesina Southeast and East Asia Regional Conference
Written by Tammi Jonas and Atticus Jonas.
Travelling across Southeast Asia—and returning home to Australia—it becomes impossible to sustain the fiction that our food systems are shaped primarily by national political differences. Whether under military dictatorship or parliamentary democracy, La Via Campesina peasants’ organisations across the region describe strikingly similar conditions: an accelerating climate crisis, deepening geopolitical pressures, and decades of neoliberal restructuring of agriculture that has hollowed out peasant livelihoods while concentrating land, power and profit.
What differs is not so much the substance of domination, but its legal and political costume.
Across the region, smallholders face the same threats: land grabbing, trade liberalisation, seed enclosure, criminalisation, militarisation, and policy frameworks that elevate ‘food security’ through markets and imports over food sovereignty grounded in peasant control. The violence is sometimes overt and deadly, sometimes bureaucratic. Sometimes it comes with guns. Sometimes it comes with contracts, free trade agreements, and a National Food Council handed to corporations.
Across the region, smallholders face the same threats: land grabbing, trade liberalisation, seed enclosure, criminalisation, militarisation, and policy frameworks that elevate ‘food security’ through markets and imports over food sovereignty grounded in peasant control.
Repression with and without Uniforms
In some countries, repression is naked.
Myanmar is living through the most extreme conditions: a military dictatorship, blocked humanitarian aid even after earthquakes, forced conscription, food shortages, destroyed social organisations, and near-total collapse of civic space. Farming continues through informal and clandestine practices—planting seeds along roadsides for anyone to harvest—acts of quiet defiance simply to keep communities alive.
In the Philippines and Thailand, peasants described violent repression of protests, criminalisation of land defenders, and the systematic rollback of agrarian reform under oligarchic or military-influenced regimes. Indonesia sits in a dangerous hybrid space: formal democracy under the Prabowo administration, but deeply militarised governance where police and military routinely collude with capital in land grabbing and the suppression of peasant resistance.
Australia likes to imagine itself outside this continuum. But listening to Filipino delegates describe corruption—politicians tied to agribusiness, revolving doors between government and corporations, laws written by and for elites—it was impossible not to recognise the pattern. The difference is simple and damning: what is widely recognised as corruption in the Philippines is entirely legal in Australia. Here, corporate capture wears a suit, passes probity checks, and is celebrated as ‘stakeholder engagement’.
Liberal Democracy is No Safeguard
Japan, Korea and Australia are routinely framed as stable liberal democracies. Yet small-scale farmers from all three countries described governments advancing free trade agreements, military expansion and corporate agriculture while agricultural budgets shrink and farming livelihoods collapse.
Electoral democracy does not guarantee food sovereignty. When policy is shaped by corporate power, trade agreements and geopolitical alliances—particularly with the United States—peasants are excluded regardless of how often elections are held. The lesson repeated across the conference was stark: whether authoritarian or liberal, states are increasingly governing for capital, not for those who grow food.
The lesson repeated across the conference was stark: whether authoritarian or liberal, states are increasingly governing for capital, not for those who grow food.
Empire in the Fields
External geopolitical pressure is now a defining feature of agrarian life across the region.
US influence is exerted through tariffs, trade agreements, military alliances and direct import demands—particularly rice in Japan and Korea. BRICS and Belt & Road projects, touted as alternatives, largely reproduce extractivist and neoliberal logics in Indonesia and Cambodia. ASEAN integration raises alarms everywhere, most recently in Timor Leste, where UPOV, seed privatisation and exposure to hostile trade regimes threaten peasant agriculture before it has even stabilised.
No global power bloc is offering an agrarian future worth having. Peasants are being squeezed between competing imperial projects, none of which are accountable to those who actually feed their communities.
Agrarian Reform: Frequently Promised, Rarely Delivered
Across the region, agrarian reform exists mostly on paper (or not at all in Australia).
Redistribution is replaced with land certification schemes that legitimise dispossession. Customary land is reclassified, enclosed, and handed to corporations with state endorsement. Land reform is hollowed out through loopholes, land conversion, debt, and the systematic withdrawal of state support.
Indonesia and the Philippines exemplify how long-running agrarian reform frameworks are neutralised by elite resistance, legal manipulation and trade liberalisation. Thailand’s coups and constitutional changes have repeatedly cancelled redistribution and reopened land to corporate acquisition. Cambodia and Timor Leste sit at a crossroads, where partial reforms coexist uneasily with contract farming and deepening aid dependency. Japan and Korea face a different but related crisis: historic agrarian land acts that assert that only those who till the land may own it remain formally intact, but trade liberalisation and price collapse are driving farmers off the land at alarming speed.
Agrarian reform without food sovereignty is not reform at all.
Food Security as a Weapon
Again and again, governments invoke ‘food security’ to justify imports, corporate procurement, militarised programs and emergency powers. Food sovereignty, by contrast, insists that peasants are producers, decision-makers and rights-holders—not just suppliers to global markets.
Nowhere was this clearer than in school lunch programs.
Mokatil – Timor Leste’s peasant organisation – runs a school lunch program that stands out as a regional benchmark: a legally binding requirement that 75% of food comes from peasants; prices set by producers; cooperatives managing production, processing and distribution; no payment delays; strong local governance.
Indonesia represents the opposite trajectory: militarised implementation, corporate capture, delayed payments, and imports justified in the name of ‘food security’, which has resulted in the literal poisoning of thousands of schoolchildren. Japan and Cambodia fall somewhere in between, constrained by budgets, tendering systems and contract farming models.
Public procurement can either entrench corporate power or build food sovereignty. Governance is everything.
Climate Crisis: Blame the Peasants, Protect the Corporations
Meeting in Bengkulu Province, some 500 kilometres south of the devastation wrought by Cyclone Senyar, the climate crisis was not abstract. Nearly 1,500 people were killed across the region just one week before we met. There was nothing natural about the devastation— decades of deforestation, mining, plantations, and peat drainage left watersheds unable to absorb intense rainfall, turning extreme weather into a mass-casualty disaster. Every organisation present reported worsening floods, landslides, droughts, fires across the region.
Yet responsibility is systematically displaced. Peasants are blamed, while plantations, mining, dams, monocrops and deforestation continue unchecked. Zero-burning policies criminalise Indigenous and peasant practices while industrial agriculture is exempt. Carbon markets and ‘net zero’ schemes are emerging as new frontiers for land grabbing—already deeply entrenched in Australia. Myanmar faces climate catastrophe compounded by war and aid blockades. Japan and Korea confront extreme weather alongside policy-driven production collapse.
Across the region, peasants were unequivocal: agroecology and customary practices are climate solutions, not problems. Agroecology cools the planet.
Organisation, Resistance, and the Long View
Despite these shared stories of repression, the organising power in the region is extraordinary.
Strong cooperatives manage production, processing, pricing and distribution. Agroecology schools and political education are expanding everywhere, including in Australia. Women, youth and diversities are not peripheral—they are leading. Victories matter: Korea’s mass coalition defeated martial law and overturned a right-wing government. Thailand secured an ethnic rights law to protect traditional ways of life. Australia won regulatory reform for on-farm micro-abattoirs. Japan’s rice protests shattered decades of silence around policy failure.
In the face of the polycrisis created by globalised capitalism, these struggles are internationalist, linking anti-imperialism, Palestine solidarity, climate justice, feminist and youth leadership, and UNDROP as a shared moral and legal framework.
Victories matter: Korea’s mass coalition defeated martial law and overturned a right-wing government.
What Unites Us
Across vastly different national contexts, movements converge around the same truths:
- Neoliberal agriculture is collapsing peasant livelihoods everywhere.
- The climate crisis is being governed through repression, not justice.
- Food sovereignty—not food security—is the political horizon we need.
- Agrarian reform without structural change will always fail.
- Peasants must govern food systems, not merely supply them.
- Only organised people can counter state, corporate and imperial power.
- Those who control production control life itself. Only the people can save the people.
- The Southeast and East Asian—and Australian—region is not uniform. But it is unmistakably united in struggle.
About AFSA
The Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) is a farmer- and First Peoples-led civil society organisation of people working together towards socially-just and ecologically-sound food and agriculture systems that foster the democratic participation of First Peoples, smallholders, and local communities in decision making processes.
