From the Articulation of Women of the CLOC-LVC in Central America, we salute women’s struggle regionally, particularly those in rural areas, join the International Women’s Day commemoration calling for world peace, and demand an end to the genocide against the Palestinian people, which has claimed thousands of lives.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the impacts of various crises on rural women are multiple, complex, and disproportionate. Recognizing this reality is the first step toward implementing comprehensive and transformative actions to generate concrete changes locally, increasing women’s resistance and empowerment.

Globally, rural women represent one third of the population and 43% of the agricultural labor force. Engaged in diverse rural activities, they play a central role in agrifood systems and contribute to climate change solutions. However, UN Women highlights that rural women suffer disproportionately from poverty’s multiple aspects. Despite being producers and managers like their male counterparts, they lack equal access to land tenure, productive resources, training, financial and digital services, technologies, markets, decent work, and face an unpaid work overload. They also lack equal access to public goods and services, such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure like water, sanitation, or internet access, resulting in a 18.4% lower average income compared to salaried men in agriculture.

On International Women’s Day, we denounce all forms of violence and the evils of the capitalist and patriarchal system that exploit and oppress women. We protest femicides as the most brutal expression of violence against women, children, and diversities. Tens of thousands of girls and women, including trans women, are murdered worldwide annually due to their gender, with many more at risk due to gender-based violence, highlighting the failure of States to protect survivors and ensure their safety.

As a peasant movement, we will continue strengthening equality, rural-urban alliances, and building new gender relations while caring for mother earth. Our Peasant and Popular Feminism values peasant agriculture for Food Sovereignty, challenging exploitation, land grabbing, and colonizing extractivism. Land and territories are spaces for life, where we aim to build healthy, chemical-free relationships free of violence.

We commit to remaining organized and united as the primary resistance against extractivism, capitalism, and patriarchy, conserving biodiversity, seeds, common goods, and ancestral knowledge. We continue building the movement, revolutionizing hearts and minds, fighting for popular sovereignty, food sovereignty, community sovereignty, and women’s sovereignty.

We call on Central American States to make a serious and sustained commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, especially Article 4, eliminating discrimination against peasant women and promoting their empowerment to ensure they fully enjoy human rights and participate in rural development.

We condemn the criminalization of the peasant struggle and demand respect for women’s human rights, ending patriarchal and institutional violence against peasant families defending their territory from transnational corporations seeking to dispossess them of natural resources.

With conviction, we build Food Sovereignty and fight against crises and violence.

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