International Day of Action Against the WTO and Free Trade Agreements: Call to Action!
BAGNOLET: The 10th of September is recognized by La Via Campesina and its allies worldwide as the International Day of Action Against the World Trade Organization and Free Trade Agreements. It was on this day in 2003, outside the WTO Ministerial Meeting venue in Cancun, Mexico, that Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean peasant, sacrificed his life to protest against the devastating impact of opening national borders to free trade. At the time of his martyrdom, Lee wore a sign around his neck that read “WTO Kills Farmers.”
Twenty-one years later, as we commemorate his sacrifice, the world is confronted by a polycrisis of hunger, climate catastrophes, genocidal wars, extreme inequality, rising national debt, inflation, and migration. Yet, all we see is a desperate attempt to maintain the status quo, to continue with business as usual, and systematic efforts to deflect attention from the root causes of these crises by stoking racism, parochialism, patriarchy, and xenophobia.
Since its founding days, La Via Campesina has warned that free-market globalization—promoting disinvestment, privatization, and the dismantling of national regulatory networks—would lead to heightened concentration of power among political and corporate elites, in particular through transnational corporations, with devastating consequences for the world’s rural communities and urban workers. Today, almost every country in the world is witnessing growing anger among its rural and urban working class, who have been systematically marginalized and invisibilized by an economic system that expanded with the blessings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.
It is high time for the world to follow a different economic trajectory, vastly different from the dominant model guided by neoliberal principles. We are living in a geopolitical moment that is witnessing the emergence of a multipolar order, where the hegemony of the old colonial powers is being challenged. But even within this reordering, there is little effort to rethink the exploitative economic model that has led us to the situation we face today and the power of transnational companies keep increasing.
La Via Campesina is calling upon all our social movement allies everywhere to organize and agitate for a new economic framework for the world. We need an alternative to the Agreement on Agriculture promoted by the World Trade Organization. The free-market logic that has guided international trade and driven capital expansion across borders must be stopped and replaced with a new framework that respects solidarity, internationalism, feminism, equity, social justice, and the protection of local economies and food sovereignty.
Since 2022, La Via Campesina has been engaged in consultations to build an Alternative International Framework for Global Trade in Agriculture that promotes food sovereignty, aligns with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), and fosters cross-border cooperation rather than competition. This year, we will broaden this consultative process to include our allies, friends in academia, governments, and diplomats.
We urge all our members and allies to use the month of September to highlight the ongoing crisis in their communities and demand public policies that bring greater transparency to national and international trade, guarantee the food sovereignty of our peoples, and ensure fair prices for our produce.
We, the peasants and small-scale food producers, still feed 70% of the world’s population even as we struggle to meet our own production costs and feed our own families. We are the cornerstone of ensuring food sovereignty, and any government serious about ending hunger, and malnutrition, and building robust rural economies must guarantee that we have access to and control over all means of production, that our commons are protected, and that we receive fair compensation and wages for our work, alongside social security and healthcare for our communities.
Free Trade Fuels Hunger! WTO Kills! A New Trade Framework, NOW!
Send us details about your mobilizations plans in September to communications@viacampesina.org and we will be plotting them onto a global map. You can also tag us on our social networks and use the hashtag #WTOKills #NewTradeFrameworkNOW
