La Via Campesina 2023 Annual Report
The year 2023 was a significant milestone for La Via Campesina, as we celebrated the 8th International Conference of our movement. After the ordeal that the COVID-19 pandemic represented for peasant organizations, it was essential for us to come together to strengthen the unity of the peasant movement and to define our common strategy for the coming years.
Throughout 2023, all the International Action Days served as occasions to prepare for the International Conference collectively. After a six-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic, over 500 delegates from member organizations and allies converged in Bogota, Colombia, from December 1 to 8. The success of the International Conference fills us with hope and strength to face the many challenges ahead.
In addition to preparing for the 8th International Conference, the peasant movement focused its actions on solidarity with our member organizations facing situations of repression, natural disasters, wars, or coups d’état. We mobilized in support of peasant communities facing earthquakes in Turkey, Nepal, and Morocco. We also stood with peasant organizations in Peru, France, and Sri Lanka against the criminalization and repression of their mobilizations, and we supported peasants in Haiti and Niger in response to destabilization attempts linked to imperialism. The movement mobilized alongside our Palestinian comrades to denounce the genocide of the people of Gaza and to call on governments to act for the liberation of the Palestinian people. This solidarity is an essential axis of La Via Campesina’s action. Together, we are stronger to resist.
The two years of COVID-19 allowed a few rich countries and transnational corporations to attempt to capture the critical space of global food governance to serve their interests, exemplified by the UN Food System Summit (UN FSS) organized in late 2021. The lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in 2022 enabled us, the peasants, and our allies to push against this agenda. We continue to engage in the Rome processes to demand participation in the elaboration and implementation of public policies that ensure new relationships between those who produce food and those who consume it, both in rural and urban areas. We call for policies that guarantee fair prices, generating a decent income for all who produce in the countryside as well as fair access to healthy food for consumers.
That is why, together with our allies, we are convening the Global Nyéléni Forum in 2025 to continue building popular alliances around food sovereignty and to move towards people-based food governance, not dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs).
In 2023, La Via Campesina, working together with its allies (CETIM and FIAN International), focused on concluding a crucial step toward the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), demanding the establishment of the UN monitoring mechanism. With COVID-19 restrictions behind us, peasant delegates frequently visited Geneva, home to the UN Human Rights Council, to lobby for support from member states and advocate for the mechanism. Our efforts were rewarded in October when the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution to create a working group, almost five years after the adoption of UNDROP by the UN General Assembly in 2018.
In 2023, the movement organized numerous virtual and face-to-face training sessions: virtual training for trainers on UNDROP at the global level in August, an in-person UNDROP training session for African delegates in May held in Harare, Zimbabwe, communication training for regional secretariats in Turkey, and the 1st International Women’s School held in March in Maputo, Mozambique. After 30 years of existence and the growing recognition of peasants as political subjects, we continue to build a stronger and larger movement.
At the 8th International Conference, we celebrated the incorporation of the tenth La Via Campesina region, the Arab and North Africa (ArNA) region, the creation of an International Articulation of Diversities, and the increasing involvement and representation of young people in political decision-making spaces. As the peasant movement, we began to work together with our allies to radically change the international trade order.
We are convinced that it is time for the World Trade Organization to be replaced by a new global framework for trade and agriculture, based on food sovereignty, cooperation, and solidarity. United in diversity, we continue to organize, mobilize, and march forward to ensure a future for humanity.