Towards Nyeleni 2025: Declaration from Asia Pacific
From 9 to 12 June in Sri Lanka, 60 representatives from 12 countries and from more than 20 global and regional social movements and civil society organisations, across Asia and the Pacific came together to reflect on the progress made for food sovereignty and agroecology since the historic Declaration of Nyeleni (Mali, 2007), and the Nyeleni Declaration on Agroecology (2015) and to work towards a third Nyeleni global forum to be held in 2025.
The Nyeleni process we are undertaking is at a time of unprecedented corporate capture of governance all the way to the United Nations, which has ceded its role to corporations and allowed the World Economic Forum to run first, the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, and now the annual World Food Forum, supplanting legitimate spaces for multilateral decision making.
We reject multistakeholderism and demand a return of governance spaces with self-determined democratic participation of civil society by our grassroots movements. We represent diverse organizations of national, regional and international movements of small-scale food producers, including peasants, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk, landless, family farmers, rural workers, plantation workers, pastoralists, forest dwellers, women, youth, gender diverse, urban poor, homeless, domestic workers, street vendors, unorganized labour etc.
Together, the people we represent globally produce 70% of the food consumed by humanity. We were joined in Sri Lanka by invited allies from other key global movements for health, debt justice, climate justice, social and solidarity economy, labour, and gender diversities, who are engaging together in the Nyeleni process.