Who are peasants?

From the draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural areas dated 12 February 2018.

A peasant is any person who engages or who seeks to engage alone, or in association with others or as a community, in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence an/or for the market, and who relies significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, on family or household labour and other non-monetized ways of organising labour, and who has a special dependency on and attachment to the lands.

The declaration applies to any person engaged in artisanal or small-scale agriculture, the raising of livestock, pastoralism, fishing, forestry, hunting or gathering, and handicrafts related to agriculture or a related occupation in a rural area. it also applies to dependent family members of peasants.

The declaration also applies to indigenous peoples working on the land, transhumant, nomadic, and semi-nomadic, and the landless.

The declaration further applies to hired workers, including all migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, and seasonal workers, on plantations, agricultural farms, forest and farms in aquaculture and Afro-industrial enterprises.