Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) is a mass-based alliance of small and landless farmers including women farmers. PKMT has been a strong proponent of food sovereignty and believes that this framework is the most powerful collective response by small producers in rebutting the impacts of free trade and is a cohesive alternative to Globalization. PKMT has taken the lead in collecting and re-generating local and traditional seeds. Members of PKMT from 16 districts across three provinces in Pakistan are now maintaining seed banks and ensuring that wheat, rice, corn, and vegetable seeds are grown not only for their own use but also for exchange among farmers in the communities and the wider PKMT community.
Through APWLD’s Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR), PKMT explored the extensive commercialization of the milk industry in Pakistan, particularly in the Punjab province, and its impact on women as livestock farmers. As part of the advocacy against the corporate control of the milk sector in Punjab, PKMT launched the video documentary titled “Manifestation of a class struggle: Women farmers in the dairy and livestock sector of Punjab, Pakistan” during the International Working Women’s Day on March 8, 2022. The documentary provides an in-depth understanding of the struggles that small and landless farmers and livestock growers are experiencing while contextualizing their plight in the larger framework of neoliberal and pro-corporate global trade rules enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The documentary further emphasizes that there cannot be genuine democracy and women’s liberation until there is equitable distribution of land that will ensure land to the tiller, especially women farmers.
