The Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice (GPC) took off in 2023 to mobilize rural communities and advocates for their rights and interests across all global regions and around the inter-related issues of food, land, and climate justice. It strived to provide a platform to forge greater solidarity among rural peoples and their movements for their ongoing struggles and campaigns to assert their rights and demand accountability from governments and corporations. It aimed to expose and oppose the imperialist agenda and schemes that tighten corporate monopoly control over agri-food systems while burdening the rural poor with worse hunger, poverty, landlessness, displacement, and destruction. These primary objectives shall carry on in 2024, focusing on consolidating the groups and countries in Asia that mobilized for GPC 2023 while expanding to Africa and Latin America and more groups and countries in Asia.
It has become increasingly clear that the current development paradigm that big corporate powers want to perpetuate is not tenable. A profit-driven mode of production under global monopoly capitalism or imperialism is inherently exploitative, oppressive, and ruinous. It is the biggest reason the world fails to achieve sustainable development, pushing the planet to the brink of ultimate devastation. In a futile effort to continuously mask the fundamental contradictions between plunderous profit-making and sustainability, the UN has concocted the Summit of the Future (SOTF) that will take place in September 2024. It has the stated objective of getting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track and responding to new opportunities and challenges.
A major outcome of the SOTF is a negotiated political declaration called Pact for the Future, which supposedly outlines the “how” of achieving the summit’s goals. A look at the current draft of the Pact, specifically its agenda on sustainable development, reveals a host of contradictions. On the one hand, it trumpets sustainable development and the right to development. On the other hand, it proclaims neoliberal and neocolonial trade with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core, export-oriented growth, investment liberalization, debt dependence through official development assistance (ODA), etc., as the keys to addressing the global crisis. It talks about the fundamental transformation of food systems only in the context of increasing investments while ignoring the structural issues of control over land and productive resources and the unsustainability of global market-based corporate food systems. It commits to combat climate change mainly through more finance but is silent on loss and damage funding and, more importantly, on the need for fundamental shifts such as phasing out fossil fuels.
With its broad agenda beyond sustainable development, the SOTF does not only seek to preserve an unjust, unequal, and unsustainable global order. It also aims to further consolidate and deepen corporate monopoly control over global governance through multistakeholderism (essentially a public-private partnership between the UN and transnational corporations or TNCs) and create more profit-making through science, technology, and innovation or STI (the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution), which the TNCs also falsely present as the cure-all to the multiple crises.
The SOTF will take place amid escalating tensions between the world’s leading imperialist powers, with the US forcefully and desperately maintaining its global dominance in the face of increasing challenges to its supremacy, in particular from China. Wars and militarism driven by inter-imperialist rivalry for resources and territories have been driving worsening hunger and displacement of the people and aggravating the destruction of the planet.
For the rural people and all the oppressed and exploited, there is no bright future or genuine sustainable development under the global political and economic system dominated by monopoly corporations driven by an endless quest to accelerate profit rates and capital accumulation.
The GPC 2024 will culminate in September to counter the SOTF with Forward Our Future: Summit for the Rural People’s Development Agenda. The GPC will join other movements and civil society organizations in a gathering that would highlight the real development agenda of the rural people and other oppressed and exploited social sectors. It will continue to build on the national and global campaigns of the rural peoples’ movements and their allies for people’s food sovereignty and agroecology, genuine land reform and rural development, and climate justice. The People’s Summit will advance the progressive and thoroughgoing policy reforms needed to address the multiple global crises that the SOTF and other similar global platforms are unwilling and unable to move forward in their efforts to conceal the roots and nature of the crises. The outcomes and messages of the People’s Summit shall carry on towards the World Hunger Day commemoration in October.
For the People’s Summit, the GPC is putting together the Rural People’s Development Agenda based on the outcomes of national or local community consultations that started in 2023 and will continue this year. It will also refer to the outcomes of global thematic consultations and workshops, including those organized under the Day of the Landless 2024. It will highlight and forge solidarity for specific national and local campaigns on the issues of food, land, and climate in the build-up towards and beyond the SOTF and People’s Summit. It maximizes sectoral movements of peasants, agricultural workers, rural women, indigenous peoples, and youth for campaigning and mobilization.
Highlight events
| Dates | Events |
| September 4 | Victorious Fields: A Study Session on People’s Movements vs. GMOs (Registration link: bit.ly/GPCvsGMOs) |
| September 5 | Peasants Rise against Land & Resource Grabs! Solidarity webinar series – South East Asia (Registration link: https://bit.ly/PeasantRiseSEA) |
| September 12 | Peasants Rise against Land & Resource Grabs! Solidarity webinar series – South Asia (Registration link: https://bit.ly/PeasantRiseSA) |
| September 16 | Fishing in Troubled Waters: Voices of the Fisherfolk(Registration link: bit.ly/GPCFisherfolkVoices) |
| September 23 | Forward Our Future: Summit for the Rural People’s Development Agenda(Registration link: bit.ly/GPCForwardOurFuture) |