Statement | From April 17 to the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, Let’s Rise for People’s Food Sovereignty!
The 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum—scheduled to take place in Sri Lanka in September 2025—will bring together one of the most diverse representations of the world’s working classes. Expanding beyond its traditional base of small-scale food producers, the forum is building joint proposals and actions to confront the interconnected crises facing humanity today. Reproduced below is the statement from this collective, issued on the International Day of Peasant Struggles.
April 17 marks the International Day of Peasant Struggles, honoring the lives and resistance of 21 rural workers and landless peasants massacred by the police of the state of Pará, in the municipality of Eldorado do Carajás, Brazil.
This tragic event occurred in the midst of a struggle waged against landowners who had usurped peasant lands. To this day, the perpetrators of that crime have not been brought to justice.
As a gesture of rebellion and solidarity, this date is commemorated each year and continues to form part of our collective history and commitment to the struggle of peasants in defense of land, water, territories, human rights, and the improvement of living conditions in rural and peri-urban areas.
It is important to emphasize that our struggle is part of the broader defense of human rights and life itself, as affirmed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). In the face of capital’s relentless advance into territories once deemed “marginal,” peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and other rural inhabitants stand as the primary line of resistance against the hydro-agro-extractivism imposed by transnational megacorporations.
Our territories—whose climate and biodiversity are continually being destroyed—are under constant assault, as capitalist interests impose increasingly dangerous technologies without debate, consultation, or public participation. Our ways of life remain under continuous threat. Political and social instability is widespread, fueled by systematic assassinations, massacres, forced disappearances, high rates of femicide, arbitrary detention, intimidation, harassment, persecution of land and territory defenders, forced migration, blockades, and wars against our peoples.
While a multipolar world may be emerging, demands for the Right to Land, Comprehensive and Popular Agrarian Reform, Food Sovereignty, and the end to the criminalization and persecution of social leaders remain urgent and central to the historical struggles that have brought victories to the peasant movement.
April 17 is a day to reaffirm our commitment to these demands and to the banners of struggle we carry forward. It is a day to proclaim that, in our diverse societies, the struggle for Food Sovereignty is ongoing and unwavering. We advance this struggle through the practice of agroecology, which offers meaningful responses to the climate crisis. Agroecology strengthens local food systems, peace, popular peasant feminism, and the dignity and self-determination of peoples. We also call on governments to institutionalize agroecology through public policies that guarantee a life of dignity for the peasantry.
Therefore, we must continue to exert pressure to build an alternative systemic model that ensures social justice and fosters coordinated action—locally, regionally, continentally, and globally.
In today’s context, we face corporate greed, environmental collapse, wars, genocides, pandemics, and more. In this complex world, it is crucial to strengthen the peasant movement to counterbalance corporate power and uphold the rights of the planet’s social majorities. This is a shared responsibility—one that calls us all to act, from the global to the local level, without exception.
As social movements, we face many challenges. It is essential to unite, seek solidarity, uphold respect and mutual understanding, and remain critical and self-reflective in the processes we build. Communities and peoples must reaffirm the right to self-determination and build strong, interconnected networks of resistance at local, national, continental, and global levels.
Today, poverty in rural areas is forcing peasants to migrate to other countries, including the United States, where the current administration is mounting campaigns to force migrants to return to their countries of origin. In light of this, we call on the peoples and governments of the world—as well as on UN organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and research institutions—to support public policies that ensure access to land and credit, particularly for those of us who produce food.
In addition to being a day of remembrance and resistance, April 17 calls us to place agriculture at the center of urgent global priorities. It is a path toward overcoming extreme poverty and crisis, improving our living conditions, and creating lasting stability. Though the world is facing complex challenges, there are also great possibilities ahead—thanks in large part to the critical role of peasant agriculture in shaping a better future.
For all these reasons, popular movements from across the world are calling us to the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum—to transform food systems through the movement for Food Sovereignty, to expand our struggles from peasant and Indigenous movements to society at large, because humanity needs us. The Earth needs us.