Land Rights, Trade Justice, and Generational Renewal Among the Key Issues Peasant Youth Table at the Oxford Real Farming Conference 2025
Every January, the Oxford Real Farming Conference connects people from the UK and around the world to discuss and explore the transformations that social movements and civil society groups are advocating for in global and local food and farming systems. It is a unique space that brings together farmers, growers, activists, policymakers, and researchers who share a vision of transforming the food system.
This year, the Land Workers’ Alliance (our member in the UK) and a small group of peasant youth from La Via Campesina participated in various onsite and online panels. These sessions addressed topics such as agrarian reform, food production in contexts of displacement, agroecology, and trade justice.
Anuka de Silva, a member of the Sri Lanka Movement for Land and Agriculture Reform (MONLAR) and an International Coordination Committee (ICC) member of La Via Campesina, contributed to four different sessions. She shared her insights and experiences on agrarian reforms in Asia and highlighted La Via Campesina’s efforts to support communities that have lost their lands or are resisting dispossession. Last year, land rights activists in Sri Lanka, had warned of a large-scale land grab in Kilinochchi district for mineral exploration purposes. They had also denounced Sri Lanka’s government’s reported attempts to exclude 418 acres from the Vidataltivu Nature Reserve in Mannar District, Northern Province of the country, allegedly for the expansion of an industrial aquaculture project. MONLAR and other civil society organizations in the country have been resisting.
Recently the Land Workers’ Alliance had also released a study that called for enabling access to land and housing through the introduction of government-funded land-matching and share-farming services, the provision of low-interest loans for land trusts, and reforming planning laws to accommodate small farming enterprises, including new dwellings for landworkers. Drawing from these experiences, the delegates intervened in different sessions at the forum. The participants also defended peasant agroecology, exposed the risks of its co-optation by large agribusinesses, and reaffirmed agroecology as a grassroots and liberatory approach to transforming food and land-use systems.
Edu H. Nualart, a member of the Dutch organization Toekomstboeren and an active participant in the Youth Articulations and Climate Working Group of the European Coordination Via Campesina, emphasized the New Trade Framework proposed by La Via Campesina and critiqued the imperialist and neoliberal strategies underlying Free Trade Agreements. 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 promote cross-border cooperation rather than competition.
Edu also presented La Via Campesina’s strategies for advancing land reforms and improving access to the agricultural sector for young people. For a long time, the ECVC has been insisting on generational renewal as key to agricultural transition. This includes the implementation of a dedicated plan and highlights the importance of building a welcoming rural environment with services and financial resources to combat the gap between urban and rural communities. The transition of agri-food systems can only be achieved with farmers by recognizing the diversity of agrarian systems in Europe and ensuring a decent and stable income, particularly for small- and medium-scale farmers and farm workers.
Paola Laini, a peasant youth from the Italian Rural Association (ARI) and an ICC member of La Via Campesina, was unable to attend the conference in person but shared a message through Edu. In her statement, she elaborated on the principles of Food Sovereignty:
“Food Sovereignty is the right of peoples, countries, or unions of states to define their agricultural and food policies without creating negative impacts (dumping) on third countries. It is the freedom to decide—individually or collectively, as families, communities, territories, or nations—the food we want to produce and consume. It is about the hands and hearts that grow food, the mouths that eat it, the seeds that germinate, and the waters and soils that nourish them.”
“We must defend this freedom, this right, and protect Food Sovereignty from any form of co-optation or appropriation. Food Sovereignty resonates with justice and international solidarity. It amplifies the voices of the people—voices that demand: an end to all wars, the rejection of all Free Trade Agreements, the dismantling of imperialism, taking agriculture out of WTO negotiations, popular agrarian reform to secure access to land and territories, a new trade framework rooted in Food Sovereignty and solidarity, and the protection of peasants’ rights and agroecology.” (Download her complete speech)
Photos by Hugh Warwick