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Faced with global crises, we demand concrete actions from governments to ensure Food Sovereignty for our Peoples and our Peasant Rights

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2 years ago

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Press Release for the International Day of Action for Peoples’ Food Sovereignty against Transnational Corporations – October 16, 2023

On the 16th of October, as we commemorate the International Day of Struggle for People’s Food Sovereignty, we, La Via Campesina, the global movement of peasants and rural communities, once again take to the streets, flood social media platforms, and occupy public squares and spaces. Our aim is to hold those responsible for the severe food crisis humanity is facing accountable. In today’s world, wars continue to rage destructively. A clear example is Israel’s recent genocidal strategy, which for 10 days has completely denied 2.5 million Palestinians access to essential resources such as food, water and electricity, actions that undeniably constitute war crimes. Our struggle for peoples’ sovereignty over their food and our efforts to confront those who deprive them of it remains a top priority for La Via Campesina.

We denounce the World Food Forum organized by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO) this week in Rome and the ongoing transnational corporations takeover of FAO.

We are highly concerned about the World Food Forum, which is especially encouraging the action of global youth, linking them to new technologies and innovation in the food systems promoted by agribusiness. We do not need a reinvention of corporate power to solve world’s hunger, we need instead our governments to have autonomy to decide about their food. We need our peasant rights to be respected and promoted.

It is we, the peasants, who are guaranteeing food for our peoples on a daily basis, and yet we are also among the populations most affected by these crises. Our lands, our water and our seeds continue to be grabbed and owned by agribusiness transnationals. The climate crisis, exacerbated by extractivism, is displacing millions of us and our families, and hunger and malnutrition continue to increase globally. Our peasant rights to a dignified life and social justice continue to be violated. Our lives are at constant risk.

The call of the global peasant movement remains to return to the land, to continue our ancestral legacy of healthy peasant production with agroecological proposals and equitable participation. We aim to integrate new generations, diversities, and alliances in our territories.

This call for action, also want to highlight the process that social movements have initiated towards building a Nyeleni Global Forum for Food Sovereignty in 2025. At this point, we are engaged in a collective effort to broaden and strengthen the struggle for food sovereignty, by forming alliances with climate justice movements, labor unions, feminist groups, and environmental organizations to foster shared proposals for systemic change. Our upcoming 8th International Conference to be held in Colombia from December 1st to 8th will also be a decisive space for convergence and mobilization.

This October, we will continue to negotiate for a binding treaty to effectively challenge transnational corporate power and impunity. Together with civil society, we are in a campaign to end the human-rights violations that transnational corporations continue to do with impunity on our lands and territories. From 23 to 27 of 2023, a peasant delegation will participate in the 9th Session of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIGWG), charged with elaborating a UN Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights (OEIGWG). Legal progress at the international level would allow us to take transnational agribusiness corporations to court whenever they violate our rights, just as they do with our States when they fail to comply with their imposed norms.

A new achievement: UNDROP now has a Special Procedure at the United Nations

Our current struggle for Food Sovereignty is making great progress in the international legal framework. Since the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas – UNDROP, we have not stopped mobilizing for its implementation at global, national, regional and local levels. When COVID restrictions were lifted worldwide allowing a return to normal life, LVC and our allies seized the moment to increase pressure for the creation of a Special Procedure (specifically a UN Working Group) on UNDROP at the UN Human Rights Council before the end of 2023.

And we have succeeded. The UN Working Group on UNDROP, adopted in a UN Human Rights Council resolution this October 11, will be responsible for monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the UNDROP, and for providing support and technical assistance to countries to help them better implement the Declaration. This UN Working Group will be very useful to strengthen the promotion and protection of the rights of food producers around the globe. There is no doubt that humanity can use this mechanism to tackle the global crises we face, especially in rural areas. This is a huge victory in our fight for Food Sovereignty.

Urgent actions to safeguarding Food Sovereignty and Human Rights:

  1. Immediate restoration of essential resources: We demand that Israel immediately restore access to essential resources, including food, water, and electricity, to the 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. The denial of these basic necessities constitutes a violation of international law and human rights. This request is also extended to all peoples whose Food Sovereignty is being violated by the actions of other States as a result of wars and conflicts like Haiti, Cuba, Niger, among others.
  2. Binding Treaty Against Corporate Impunity: We call for the swift finalization and adoption of a legally-binding treaty that holds transnational corporations accountable for human rights violations. Transnational agribusiness corporations must be held legally responsible whenever they infringe upon our rights.
  3. Full Implementation and Monitoring of UNDROP: We urge the international community to actively support and monitor the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). The newly established UN Working Group on UNDROP should be empowered to ensure that the rights of food producers globally are promoted, protected, and upheld.

Source: viacampesina.org

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Global Peasants Movement demand for peasants protection. Enough of FTAs, enough impunity for Corporations! La Via Campesina calls on States to exit the WTO and to create a new framework based on food sovereignty Food Sovereignty is the only solution and way forward. Finally UN General Assembly adopts Peasant Rights declaration UN Food Systems Summit: The Battle Over Global Food and Agriculture Governance

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NGO WORK

Communities stand up against corporate land grabs and State violence

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3 days ago

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May 6, 2025

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Across the global South, communities that oppose corporate control of their territories face not only corporate violence but also tear gas, batons and state repression. Challenging the expedient misinterpretation of “all land belongs to the State” that governments use to protect corporate interests, communities stand strong in the struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands “because it is a sacred place; it is a place that gives meaning to our existence.”

This editorial is about the courage and determination of communities who are mobilizing to denounce and resist corporate control over community lands. Often, they face not only corporate violence and control over their lands but also tear gas, batons and state repression unleashed by governments resorting to ‘a greedy misinterpretation of “all land belongs to the State”’ to protect corporate interests. (1)

This is what has been happening in the Litoral region of Cameroon, where the community of Apouh à Ngog is opposing the replanting of industrial oil palm plantations on their ancestral lands by Socapalm, a Cameroonian subsidiary of the notorious multinational Socfin. For nearly 50 years, the company operations have been making life miserable for the community of Apouh à Ngog, whose original village site was eradicated by the corporate oil palm plantations decades ago.

As Socapalm replaces sections of old oil palm plantations, it not only ignores community requests for retrocession of vital spaces immediately around the village; the new company plantings are creeping even closer to the village edge. “If they do not stop these operations, the women who live close to Socapalm in Edéa will have to endure another 50 years of suffering, abuse, rape, theft, hunger, frustration and violation of our rights, our privacy and our dignity”. This is what the Association of Women Neighbouring SOCAPALM Edéa (AFRISE) explains in a petition calling for an end to this occupation of the village’s vital life spaces by RSPO-certified Socapalm. (2)

In January 2025, the women of AFRISE planted banana saplings on some 35 hectares of disputed land being prepared for replanting by Socapalm. The company sprayed the young banana plants with chemicals shortly after and on 24 March, returned under the protection of dozens of armed military personnel to continue the replanting. Overcoming fear and facing tear gas and batons, the community stood in the way of the company’s bulldozers, blocking the corporate replanting for days. As the company forged on with its planting, over 60 organisations called for an immediate stop to the continued corporate encroachment on the community’s ancestral lands. They also urged the government of Cameroon to guarantee vital living space for the community of Apouh à Ngog – instead of sending in armed military forces to protect the corporate interest of Socfin, a company that like few others epitomizes the colonial pattern of exploitation of the region.

It is also what has been happening in the municipality of Aracruz, in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo, where about 1000 women from the Rural Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) took action to demand agrarian reform and against the multiple forms of violence perpetrated against women. (3) Under the slogan, “Agribusiness means violence and environmental crimes. The struggle of women is against capital”, they occupied land controlled by Suzano, the world’s largest exporter of wood pulp.  For years, the company has gone about its business with impunity, amassing large areas of fertile land and committing violations against Indigenous Peoples, quilombola and landless peasant communities. In a press release, the MST points out that “Multinationals are not worried about obtaining land in order to solve the problem of hunger in the country” and that it would be possible to settle more than 100,000 families on the 2.7 million hectares of fertile land in Brazil that are held by Suzano. In 2011, Suzano agreed to provide 22 areas occupied by the corporation for settlements of landless peasants, but the company has been failing to comply with its commitment.
Just as AFRISE in Apouh à Ngog, the women occupying the land in Aracruz vow to continue their struggle for land to grow food, as they, too, are confronted with a state siding with the company, not peasants. (4)

It is also what has been happening in Cote d’Ivoire, where 20 members of the indigenous Winnin community were arrested in December 2024. The Winnin have been voicing their opposition to the privatization of their ancestral lands at the Monogaga forest. (5) The Winnin have called these forests their home for more than six centuries. The Ivorian Ministry of Water and Forests, meanwhile, granted a concession to Roots Wild Foundation whose operations have already been causing conflict with the communities. The arrests and the threats to individuals of the Winnin prior to their detention highlight serious concerns about the criminalization of land defenders in the region.

It is also what is happening in Indonesia, in Papua, and across the Mekong region, as we read in two declarations we share in this edition of the bulletin. In Papua, the Solidaritas Merauke Movement came together to share stories of collective suffering and trauma caused by state-corporate crimes, especially in the name of what the government of Indonesia declared National Strategic Projects (PSN). The declaration, collectively prepared by the Solidaritas Merauke Movement, highlights community struggles against the dispossession of their living space by such state-corporate mega-projects that defile what communities hold sacred. In Thailand, communities from the Mekong region and Punan communities from North Kalimantan in Indonesia came together to exchange and learn about community struggles against mega-hydrodam projects.  On the occasion of the International Day of Action Against Dams on 14 March, they reaffirm through a declaration the importance of standing together to show that “we are united and firm in the collective struggle to defend our rivers, forests and futures from false green solutions and corporate greed”.

In an interview with WRM in 2018, a leader of the Akroá-Gamela Peoples in Brazil explains why despite the fear of state repression and violence from greedy corporations, communities stand strong in the struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands: “because it is a sacred place; it is a place that gives meaning to our existence.” (6)

Because land gives meaning to their existence, communities are standing up against corporate violence and governments’ greedy misinterpretation of “all land belongs to the State”. In Apouhs à Ngog, Aracruz and the many other places, communities are organizing to protect and reclaim the lands of their ancestors – The struggle continues!

WRM Secretariat

(1) WRM Bulletin 241. 2018. A Reflection from Africa: Conquer the Fear for Building Stronger Movements.  
(2) Petition. Cameroon: Testimony of women who reclaim their land back.
(3) Against capital and patriarchy, MST women hold day of struggle and occupy Suzano-owned eucalyptus plantations in Brazil.
(4) Brasil de Fato. 2025. Justiça determina despejo de ocupação de mulheres do MST em área da Suzano no ES.  
(5) Mongabay. 2025. Des leaders communautaires emprisonnés après s’être opposés à la privatisation controversée d’une forêt classée en Côte d’Ivoire.
(6) WRM Bulletin 241. 2018. Brazil: I am Kum’tum, I am of the Akroá-Gamela People.  

Source: World Rainforest Movement

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NGO WORK

Under Guise of Climate Action, the World Bank Launches Fresh Offensive on Land Rights

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1 week ago

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May 2, 2025

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  • A new report exposes the exploitation of the climate crisis by the World Bank to advance a global land grab agenda for corporate interests that will fuel dispossession across the Global South.
  • Under the guise of accessing land for climate action, the Bank intends to open lands for agribusiness, mining, and carbon offsetting schemes – while undermining Indigenous and community land rights.
  • The Bank’s agenda to change land tenure directly contradicts recommendations made by climate experts, who uphold agroecology and the protection of lands from conversion and overexploitation as real solutions to the climate crisis.

Ahead of the World Bank’s 2025 Land Conference starting on May 5th in Washington D.C., a new Oakland Institute report exposes how the financial institution is using the pretext of climate crisis to push a global land “reform” agenda that favors corporate interests at the expense of people and the planet.

Climatewash: The World Bank’s Fresh Offensive on Land Rights reveals how the Bank is appropriating climate commitments made at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to justify its multibillion-dollar initiative to “formalize” land tenure across the Global South. While the Bank claims that it is necessary “to access land for climate action,” Climatewash uncovers that its true aim is to open lands to agribusiness, mining of “transition minerals,” and false solutions like carbon credits – fueling dispossession and environmental destruction. Alongside plans to spend US$10 billion on land programs, the World Bank has also pledged to double its agribusiness investments to US$9 billion annually by 2030.

“Hijacking the climate crisis, the Bank is attempting to breathe new life and political buy-in to an agenda it has pushed in the Global South for several decades – often met with resistance from local communities against the commodification of their land for exploitation and extraction,” said Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute and lead author of the report. “Instead of strengthening and securing land rights, this plan will enable land grabs and exacerbate inequity and climate destruction,” he continued.

Climatewash details how the Bank’s land programs and policy prescriptions to governments dismantle collective land tenure systems and promote individual titling and land markets as the norm, paving the way for private investment and corporate takeover. These reforms, often financed through loans taken by governments, force countries into debt while pushing a “structural transformation” that displaces smallholder farmers, undermines food sovereignty, and prioritizes industrial agriculture and extractive industries.

Drawing on a thorough analysis of World Bank programs from around the world, including case studies from Indonesia, Malawi, Madagascar, the Philippines, and Argentina, Climatewash documents how the Bank’s interventions are already displacing communities and entrenching land inequality. The report debunks the Bank’s climate action rhetoric. It details how the Bank’s efforts to consolidate land for industrial agriculture, mining, and carbon offsetting directly contradict the recommendations of the IPCC, which emphasizes the protection of lands from conversion and overexploitation and promotes practices such as agroecology as crucial climate solutions.

“There is a blatant contradiction between the Bank’s narrative of accessing land for climate action and its support for industrial agriculture, which is a major driver of climate change and biodiversity loss,” said Andy Currier, Policy Analyst and co-author of the report. “The Bank’s fresh offensive on land rights highlights an untenable position of the institution. It claims to support climate action while it stands by its core objective – catering to corporate and financial powers seeking more economic growth and profits,” he concluded.

Source: oaklandinstitute.org

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NGO WORK

World Bank Fails to Remedy Harms it Caused in Tanzania, Despite a Scathing Investigation by its Inspection Panel

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1 month ago

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April 3, 2025

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Oakland, CA – A scathing investigation by the Inspection Panel of the World Bank confirms the responsibility of the Bank in enabling the expansion of Ruaha National Park and related severe human rights abuses in Tanzania. The Panel confirms “critical failures” of the institution in the planning and supervision of the Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW) project that resulted in “serious harm” to communities and violated Bank’s safeguards and operating procedures.1

“The independent Inspection Panel has confirmed the Bank’s grave wrongdoing which devastated the lives of communities. Pastoralists and farmers who refused to be silenced amidst widespread government repression, are now vindicated, and Bank’s efforts to sweep human rights abuses under the rug laid bare,” said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute.

The REGROW project enabled the government to expand the Ruaha National Park and move ahead with eviction plans – formalized in October 2023 through Government Notice 754. The Bank directly funded TANAPA rangers who committed atrocities with no oversight. In a drastic turn from its initial defense of the project, the financial institution has been forced to recognize “weaknesses in the project design, preparation, implementation, and Bank supervision.” As a result, at least 84,000 people from 28 villages face eviction while pastoralists and farmers have suffered gruesome human rights abuses by Bank-funded rangers and over US$70 million in economic damages.

In documents made available today, the Bank’s management concedes that by “enhancing TANAPA’s capacity to enforce the law,” the project “increased the possibility of violent confrontations” between rangers and villagers. The Inspection Panel found the Bank to have failed to adequately supervise TANAPA and to be unaware of the agency’s operating framework which permits the rangers to use “excessive force,” in violation of international standards. As documented by the Institute, over the course of the project, at least 11 individuals were killed by police or rangers, five forcibly disappeared, and dozens suffered physical and psychological harm, including beatings and sexual violence. The Bank provided TANAPA rangers with 21 different types of equipment to strengthen their patrolling capacity in the project area – including bush knives that the Panel found “could potentially have been used to burn or strip naked” Maasai women in a May 2023 incident.

The Panel’s report documents the timeline of Bank’s failure to act after April 2023, when it was informed by the Oakland Institute about the abuses and violations of its safeguards. Instead, the Bank disbursed over US$33 million to the project over the next year. REGROW task team leader, Enos Esikuri, even publicly stated that the Bank was “very impressed with what is going on,” when meeting with government agencies implementing the project. In April 2024, disbursements were finally suspended as a result of Tanzania’s noncompliance with Bank safeguards, followed by cancelation of the project in November 2024.

“The World Bank failed to act after it was informed of the harms it was financing. It continued disbursements for a full year, allowing cattle seizures and farm closures to drain family savings, kept children out of school, and let TANAPA rangers murder more innocent villagers with impunity. No institution is above law and can be allowed to get away with crimes like this,” said Mittal.

The Bank’s Executive Directors, however, approved the Management Action Plan (MAP) that does not address the Panel’s findings. In blatant disregard of the facts and official documentation, the World Bank has conveniently refused to acknowledge its responsibility in allowing the park expansion, which it falsely claims took place prior to the project.  It is this expansion of Ruaha National Park that triggered murders, evictions, and decimated livelihoods. The MAP delusionally places trust in the government that there will be no resettlement while it is already well underway. The impacted communities conveyed their rejection of the MAP to the Bank’s Board and called for it to remedy the harms caused by park’s expansion by reverting boundaries to the 1998 borders, suspending livelihood restrictions, resuming basic services, and providing justice and reparations for victims.

“Instead of remedying harms identified by the Panel, the MAP patches together two projects that have nothing to do with REGROW and are in no way designed to provide redress. The Action Plan put forward by the World Bank is beyond shameful. Suggesting that tens of thousands of people forced out of their land can survive with “alternative livelihoods” such as clean cooking and microfinance is a slap on the face of the victims. It demonstrates World Bank’s continued lack of remorse for harms financed by tax dollars and makes a mockery of its own accountability mechanism. Financing of this institution – responsible for misery of the poor instead of ending poverty – must be challenged,” commented Mittal.

Despite fear of retribution from Tanzania’s repressive regime, the impacted communities were relentless in demanding justice till they forced the cancellation of the project. “For years we have waited for the World Bank to fix the disaster it created. Today the Board of the Bank has undoubtedly failed in its own mission, but we will not give up, no matter what it takes,” said a community representative.

“The World Bank’s financing commitments for operations in Tanzania amount to US$10 billion. It does have the leverage and authority to fix this catastrophe. The United States, as the largest shareholder and funder of the World Bank Group, must also take responsibility,” concluded Mittal.

Source: oaklandinstitute.org

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Campaign Victory: World Bank Suspends Funding for REGROW, a Conservation Project Responsible for Evictions & Human Rights Abuses in Tanzania World Bank Project Cancelled in a Landmark Victory for Tanzanian Villagers The World Bank Must Be Held Accountable for Harm Inflicted on Tanzanian Communities by Tourism Project World Bank Changes: The office of the Accountability Mechanism Secretary is to be disbanded as the Inspection Panel, and the Dispute Resolution Service will operate independently. Witness Radio – Uganda and partners welcome a public acknowledgment of the complaint lodged before the World Bank’s Inspection Panel.
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