🖊️ REGISTER HERE: bit.ly/GPCForwardOurFuture
đź“… September 23
đź•“ 2PM CEST | 3PM Amman | 3PM Kampala | 5:30PM New Delhi | 8PM Manila
Organized by the Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice with the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, PAN Asia Pacific, Asian Peasant Coalition, and the International Indigenous People’s Movement on Self-determination and Liberation.
The profit-driven model perpetuated by big imperialist powers is unsustainable, exploitative, and oppressive. It hinders genuine sustainable development and threatens the planet. In a desperate attempt to mask this fundamental contradiction, the UN is organizing the Summit of the Future (SOTF) on September 23-24, 2024.
Supposedly, it aims to get the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track and respond to new opportunities and challenges. However, the current draft of the Pact for the Future – a negotiated political declaration of the SOTF – reveals contradictions. While it emphasizes sustainable development, it also promotes neoliberal trade, export-oriented growth, and investment liberalization. Notably, it lacks specifics on structural issues like control over land and resources and the unsustainability of corporate food systems. Additionally, it focuses on climate finance but remains silent on phasing out fossil fuels.
Using the SDGs as a pretext, the SOTF seeks to preserve an unjust, unequal, and unsustainable global order. It 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 occur amid rising tensions between imperialist powers, with the US striving to maintain dominance against challenges, especially from China. This rivalry fuels wars and aggravates hunger, displacement, and environmental destruction.
People’s Summit
For rural and oppressed peoples, a bright future or truly sustainable development is unattainable under a global system dominated by profit-driven monopoly corporations and imperialist powers competing for domination. Today, the rural people have been forwarding their future through grassroots struggles, campaigns, and policy advocacies. The Global Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice (GPC), launched in 2023, aimed to provide a platform for these ongoing national and local efforts to support each other and build international solidarity for the demands of the rural people.
The GPC will organize the Forward Our Future: Summit for the Peoples’ Development Agenda to highlight these struggles and demands and counter and expose the SOTF. The People’s Summit will culminate the local, national, regional, sectoral, and thematic consultations, forums, and other actions that the GPC has organized since last year. It will also further build on the outcomes of the Global People’s Summit for Just, Equitable, Healthy, and Sustainable Food Systems (GPS) held in September 2021.
From these previous efforts, rural peoples’ concrete policy demands and aspirations – the Rural Peoples’ Development Agenda – shall be collated and presented at the People’s Summit. The development agenda shall be divided into Food, Land, and Climate Justice.
- Break the chains of imperialist plunder and profiteering. It will cover the issues of global governance, imperialist and TNC control over food systems, fossil-fuel hungry agri-food systems, etc.
- Shift the future towards the rural peoples’ rights and welfare. It will cover the issues of genuine land reform, food sovereignty and agroecology, financing for radical food systems transformation, etc.
The People’s Summit shall produce a declaration called Forward Our Future: Rural Peoples’ Pact for Food, Land, and Climate Justice, which synthesizes the different rural communities and movements’ demands and aspirations gathered and discussed from the GPS to the GPC. The Forward Our Future pact will serve as a call to action to continue and strengthen the rural peoples’ struggles to realize these demands and aspirations, including on people’s food sovereignty and agroecology, genuine land reform and rural development, and climate justice.
The Rural People’s Development Agenda and Forward Our Future Pact shall serve as basis for future campaigns, cooperation, and solidarity among the groups that participated in the GPC.
We call everyone to organize gatherings in their communities, offices, or other places and join the summit via Zoom. The event will also be livestreamed via the GPC Facebook page and cross-posted in the pages of the organizers.
It will take place on September 23, 2024, from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM Manila to coincide with the second day/closing of the SOTF. ###