At this Rural Peoples’ Summit, we vow to strengthen our solidarity, grow our movements, and intensify our fight for food, land, and climate justice. The Rural Peoples’ Development Agenda that our organizations and communities put together through the Global Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice is not simply a list of our demands and aspirations. It is a testament to our ongoing struggles, fraught with numerous sacrifices but teeming with boundless courage, for our rights to food and produce food, land and resources, and a healthy environment that will benefit us and future generations.
Food
- Uphold people’s food sovereignty as the framework for agricultural and rural development, with small-scale food producers and other rural sectors having the fundamental right to determine policies governing agriculture and food systems.
- End the neoliberal dictates of international finance institutions over food systems and agriculture, which have only served the profiteering of corporate interests and drove countries in debt. Shut down the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Group for its role in worsening the global food crisis in the past 80 years.
- Support and prioritize local food production instead of importation for domestic food security. Set up and support local markets.
- Protect small-scale food producers and provide for their production through their needed social services, facilities, subsidies, research and training.
- Support the setting up of cooperatives and other forms of collective work in food systems and agriculture.
- Control the prices of food and other basic commodities including through state support and subsidies and national policy mechanisms against monopoly pricing and price speculation. Ensure that farmers earn while market prices are affordable for the general public.
- Promote the use native/indigenous and farmer-bred seeds over proprietary seeds, including genetically modified/engineered seeds, from transnational corporations.
- Afford the same right to land and resources to rural women as men. Protect them from all gender-based discrimination and violence.
- Ensure the right to food for all and the protection of food producers in conflict-stricken and occupied areas/lands.
- Provide unconditional food aid to starving and malnourished populations, especially in conflict-stricken and occupied areas/lands.
- Stop the war crime of using starvation as a tool of war.
Land
- Dismantle corporate monopoly control over agricultural lands through genuine agrarian reform and rural development programs. Prioritize ownership, control, productive land use and management of landless farmers and small-scale food producers and their organizations or cooperatives to improve their economic wellbeing and develop domestic agriculture, instead of changing use and handing the land over to foreign investors and corporations. Likewise, fisherfolk should be prioritized in accessing waters.
- Recognize and defend people’s right to land, forests, waters, and other resources and uphold the basic human rights of rural and indigenous peoples. Stop the criminalization of dissent and political repression against land rights defenders including the killings of farmers and Indigenous Peoples. Hold perpetrators, especially state actors, accountable.
- Respect the right to self-determination of Indigenous People and recognize its link with their right to land. Indigenous knowledge, culture, and practices should not go against rural development, and they should not be pushed out from their ancestral lands.
- Stop the landgrabs and development aggression facilitated by international finance institutions like the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Group and Asian Development Bank. Hold these institutions accountable for pushing market-assisted land reforms and facilitatingon large infrastructure projects,of hydropower and agribusiness interests, and other corporate investments that displace rural and indigenous communities.
- Prohibit the plunder and destruction of natural resources and apprehend violators. Rural and indigenous communities should permit and control any extractive activities and infrastructure development.
- Discourage monoculture and the use of agrochemicals (synthetic pesticides and fertilizers) that destroy the soil’s health.
- Increase wages of agricultural workers according to standards of decent living, protect them from occupational and health hazards, and provide them social services and protection, and recognize their right to freedom of association, and other labor rights..
- Stop the bombing and militarization of their communities.
Climate Justice
- Promote people-led agroecology, hand-in-hand within the framework of genuine agrarian reform and rural development, to realize people’s food sovereignty and climate justice. Provide all support needed by small and landless farmers to allow their shift to agroecological farming.
- Protect the welfare of rural sectors, especially small-scale food producers and other vulnerable groups, from climate change impacts through adequate, timely, and accessible state support and services.
- Provide all material and financial aid and support necessary for rural food producers, especially peasants, to recover from losses due to extreme weather events such as droughts and floods.
- Promote people-led initiatives to mitigate climate change impacts.
- Oppose the false climate solutions endorsed by corporations, corporate-backed research institutions, CSOs, and foundations, and international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Group and Asian Development Bank.
- Hold corporate and state actors accountable for their part in the climate crisis and for massively profiting from it at the expense of the people and planet.
- All aforementioned agenda for food and land are part of the climate agenda.
- All of these are in addition to the demands from our petition to COP28, supported by 108 organizations from 26 countries:
- Transform food systems away from fossil fuels towards agroecology and people’s food sovereignty
- End corporate monopoly over land, water, and natural resources
- Polluters must pay for climate destruction
- End fossil-fueled wars vs. rural communities
- Ensure genuine participation of rural peoples in climate policy
Read the Forward Our Future: Rural Peoples’ Pact for Food, Land, and Climate Justice, a declaration adopted based on the abovementioned agendas.