The Latin America and the Caribbean People’s Alliance for Food Sovereignty met in Santiago, Chile, from February 25 to 27, 202 to celebrate our Third Continental Assembly. During the event the participants analyzed the current social, cultural, economic, environmental, and political context in the region with the impacts on our peoples and territories.

More than 60 delegates from 16 countries in the region who are part of 20 continental and regional member organizations of the Alliance and allies met at the event. We come from various family farming sector of food producers, peasant agriculture, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, harvesters, youth, women, and indigenous people.

We are alarmed by the growth and deepening of multiple crises, which are marked by systemic violence throughout the continent, exposing, among other things, the complicity of the authorities and the growing emergency of drug trafficking. We are concerned about the subjugation of food systems through the corporate capture of the political decision-making spaces, the social narratives, and of the territories themselves. All this systemically affects the participation of peoples and life in their territories. The advance of these extractive economic models strengthens the predatory actions against natural resources, such as biodiversity and biocultural systems intertwined with Mother Earth, thus promoting forced migrations, especially of young people and women.

We believe that our voices are not being heard after decades of struggle, advocacy, and policy recommendations to the governments in the region. At the level of international agreements, the setbacks in the implementation of Human Rights are added to the deepening of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.

We express special concern about the policies and practices of the World Trade Organization. Those are contrary to the interests of the farmers growing healthy food who are the protagonists of the most important economic activity for humanity, food that guarantees human life.

Therefore, we reaffirm the principles that govern our political vision, among which we highlight: solidarity, equality with social, political, economic, and environmental justice; respect for human dignity and horizontal power relations; decision and action with autonomy; mutual support; revaluation of ancestral knowledge; Good Living and care as the center of the reproduction of life.

We ratify that peasant agroecology is the solution to guarantee the Food Sovereignty of our peoples. Furthermore, as paradigms it promotes a diverse agri-food system that comes from our territories, retakes spirituality, cosmovision, intergenerational work, offers full participation of women and youth, and embraces popular, peasant and community feminisms.

We demand that the States of the region to guarantee:

a) Territories:

• The right to governance and management of lands, water, territories, including marine and coastal territories, rivers, lagoons, lakes, and seas and, to implement measures to protect the commons for the Food Sovereignty of the peoples, guaranteeing the Free, Prior and Informed Consent as a collective human right.
• The elimination of all forms of criminalization of defenders, activists, leaders, and leaders of the peoples, guaranteeing the right to social and popular mobilization.
• The implementation of measures to face land, territory and sea grabbing, industrial mining and large projects that cause displacement and forced migrations, among others.
• The enforcement of effective actions, policies, and programs in situations when food, social, economic, ecological, and climatic crises arise in communities and territories.
• Ensure the right to people’s free movement and guarantee good living conditions and decent adequate working conditions for migrants.

b) Women and Youth as priority

• The concrete measures that foster gender equality and non-heteronormative diversities, with an intersectional perspective, and feminist economy and care for the sustainability of life to confront machismo and patriarchy.
• The implementation of policies that guarantee the right to decent work and employment in food production, with a focus on socio-labor inclusion that allows women and youth to be rooted in their own territories.
• The recognition of youth and women in taking leadership roles and full participation.
  

c) Agrifood systems

• The financing of family, peasant, indigenous, pastoral, fishing, and artisanal agriculture, in the process of transitioning to Agroecology. This will need guaranteeing a system or governance process, prioritizing the traditional knowledge of the agrifood systems that includes a participatory development and the implementation of economic, technical, and economic support policies, with a gender, generational and socio-environmental approach.
• The implementation of programs that address the social, cultural, economic and environmental needs of the peoples, strengthening solidarity markets, short marketing circuits, and rural-urban relations that intertwine dialogues between farmers and consumers.
• The elimination of pesticides and agrochemicals in agriculture, fishing, and industrial livestock, guaranteeing the people’s right to health, water, biomes and their territories.
• The right of communities over the use, production, storage, conservation, and exchange of native and creole seeds, which, in turn, should be considered as a common good of the peoples at the service of humanity and therefore should not be subject to the application of any form of intellectual property rights.
  International norms and agreements
• The implementation of international agreements: the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, the ILO Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Voluntary Guidelines on Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests, the United Nations Decade for Family Farming, the Voluntary Guidelines on Gender and the Empowerment of Women and Girls.

Territorial conflicts at the continental and global level, we wish to express our solidarity with two causes:

• The ethnocide against the Mapuche People in Chile, through the expropriation of their ancestral territories, and the criminalization, imprisonment of their leaders, and condemning them to a marginal and exclusionary life. iAmulepe weichan pu peñi pu lamgen we waiñ! (The struggle continues, brothers and sisters, we will win!).
• We also stand in solidarity with the Palestinian People and reject all acts of oppression, domination, segregation, and genocide imposed by the State of Israel that has occupied their territory, imposing an apartheid system and brutal attacks, especially against Palestinian women and children.

We call on social movements, networks, and popular organizations to strengthen the struggles for life and Food Sovereignty from Agroecology and people’s self-determination of our region.

We join forces towards the great Nyéléni 2025 Meeting!

Food Sovereignty Now! People’s Food Sovereignty!

Santiago de Chile, February 27th, 2024

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