From Carajás to Gaza: Peasant Struggles Are Global — To Defend Land, Water, and Territories for Life!
17 April 2025, Bagnolet | Statement on #17April – International Day of Peasants’ Struggles
Every year, La Via Campesina marks the 17th of April as the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, to honour the memory of the 21 landless peasants brutally murdered by the police while they participated in a peaceful protest in the southern region of Para state, Brazil, in 1996. Despite the gravity of this crime justice remain elusive with perpetrators still unpunished.
This year, 17 April unfolds against the backdrop of a genocidal war in Gaza, where food has been weaponized to exterminate the Palestinian population through starvation. Systematic mass killing carries on with total impunity. Had the so-called liberal world order, through its international institutions and Western democracies, truly wanted to stop the genocide, it would have done so months ago. Gaza has laid bare the truth: these powers are willing to sacrifice thousands of Palestinian children—and the very principles of human rights and international law—in service of their imperial ambitions.
What ties Palestine, Eldorado dos Carajás, Sudan, the DRC, Haiti, and many other territories is not only repression and violence—but the silence and complicity of global institutions and so-called democratic governments. Instead of ending the suppression and operation waged against the peoples, many of them are only enabling these wars and conflicts. They actively create and sustain them —paving the way for militarization, the destruction of peasant livelihoods, the grabbing and devastation of land, water and forests through extractivism, and the adoption of laws pushed by submissive governments that auction off our territories and commons.
The criminalization and violence against those who defend land, water, and territories is a persistent reality across all regions of the world. Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and rural and urban activists face threats, persecution, and even assassination for resisting land grabs, extractivism, and agribusiness. These attacks threaten not only lives, but also the survival of alternative models of production — like peasant agroecology — that defend communities and ecological balance against the greed of multinationals and the plunder of Mother Earth.
In March, La Via Campesina called on social movements and civil society organizations everywhere to hit the streets and push back against this violent, extractivist system that is fueling hunger, poverty, forced migration, wars, and ecological collapse..
The response has been resounding.
In April, from Brazil to Kenya, from Australia to Puerto Rico, solidarity actions and struggles for land, water, and territories were reported. While these actions were organized autonomously in different locations by movements and civil society members, what tied them together were the chorus for a common set of demands.
Food Sovereignty in the times of geo-political crisis:
Amid growing militarization, trade wars, and rising prices of food, fertilizers, and fuel, the demand for food sovereignty is gaining momentum worldwide. This month, in actions across Asia, Africa, and Central America grassroots movements urged their governments to learn from recent supply shocks and geopolitical conflicts and prioritize national food sovereignty. There is also a growing call to shift from an export-driven monoculture model to domestic production through peasant agroecology. This involves investing in short agro-food chains, supporting local solidarity markets, and establishing robust market regulations to improve price transparency, ensure fair prices for peasants, and create public food stocks. Furthermore, this transformation must go hand in hand with the strengthening of the value chain for peasant products, boosting food sovereignty and control over our territories.
Agrarian reform and the Right to Land:
Across the world, peasant movements have been key defenders of land, agroecology, and food sovereignty. In South America, examples like Bolivia’s Plurinational Constitution, the struggle for overdue agrarian reform in Colombia, and the land occupations led by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) show that real solutions are born from the organized bases of the countryside. These struggles echo in peasant movements worldwide, where Agrarian Reform and the Right to Land remain urgent demands to protect and uphold food sovereignty.
This April, many organizations across Latin America, Europe, and East Asia have called for reforms not only for landless peasants, but for all working-class people — using land and territory as tools to rebuild and defend community.
Revitalizing peasant communities — long fragmented by imposed models of rural ‘modernization’ that prioritize monoculture, land grabs, and dependence on agro-industrial giants — goes hand in hand with securing land rights and diversifying production. Together, these efforts :
- creates pathways for youth to stay in or return to rural areas, and for all those, whether from rural or urban backgrounds, who wish to work the land and strengthen local food systems,
- allows migrant family members to return to their lands or begin farming in their new countries, and
- leads to the empowerment of women in productive activities and decision-making.
The upcoming ICARRD+20 conference in Colombia in 2026 offers a historic opportunity to advance comprehensive agrarian reform. Public policies are needed to secure our right to land and support our struggle for life, water, and territories.
Real rooted solutions to solve the climate crisis:
In April, many actions focused on the climate crisis and its growing impact on food production and rural economies. As the world prepares for COP30 in Belém, Brazil — at the heart of the Amazon — social movements and civil society organizations are sounding the alarm on the need for structural responses. Not far from there, in the Andes, peasant communities are facing fires, droughts, land grabs, and forced displacement, all while resisting through practices that protect community commons based on ancestral knowledge. These struggles are not isolated: they are part of a collective response to a global system in crisis — climate, food, economic, and political.
That’s why real solutions must rethink the current industrial model of food production, storage, processing, transport, and consumption; dismantle corporate control over food systems; and move toward local, peasant-led, agroecological and people-centered alternatives. This conversation will also be central to the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum in September, which aims to build a shared agenda for transformation from the territories in the face of systemic collapse.
La Via Campesina firmly believes that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) provides a clear path to building resilient local economies and food sovereignty. We are collaborating with the UN Working Group to translate this Declaration into concrete national and local policies that will benefit our peoples.
As we advance these proposals, we remain dedicated to honoring the memory and struggle of countless peasants and Indigenous Peoples who have been killed or persecuted for defending their land, water, and territories.
Not a moment of silence, but a lifetime of struggle – that is our commitment.
Land, Water and Territories for Life, not Profits!
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