Managua, Nicaragua| 27 August 2018
“Workers and peasants of the land and water for Climate Justice”
La Via Campesina, in representation of millions of peasant families, farm workers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, allies from social movements and academics, have met in Managua, Nicaragua, Central America from 24-27 August 2018, to deepen a strategy for environmental and climate justice.
We salute the hospitality of the peasant organizations of Nicaragua and the reception given by the government led by the Sandinista Front of National Liberation which ensured a meaningful international meeting of the Climate Justice Collective of La Via Campesina. We were glad to see the environment of peace and stability in the country, a result of the People’s dignified defense of the participatory democracy in the face of a coup supported by Western powers.
We are conscious that it is the capitalist system that causes predatory actions against the environment, causing severe damage to our planet. The extractive industrial model destroys our lands and rivers, forests and seas, pillages our territories and criminalizes our struggles – all for the benefit of the few. Capitalism is the main cause of the climate crisis provoked by greenhouse gases that heat the planet.
The effects of climate chaos are becoming more and more serious: violent storms, droughts, floods, migrations, and peasant crop loss. The causes are clear, but since the real solutions challenge the very basis of the “petroleum society” and the interests of the companies that benefit the most from climate crisis (energy companies, chemical companies and agribusiness), the opposition to structural change is considerable.
Our Mother Earth, her heritage and common goods cannot sustain the spurious over-consumption and over-production of this modern and globalized industrialized society. The agro-industrial food system, that is part of the capitalist system promotes over-consumption and food waste, as well as toxic foods that cause illness and kill across the world.
Despite the diverse existing international institutional frameworks, agreements and protocols such as the Framework Convention of the United Nations on Climate Change of 1992, CDB 1992, Kyoto Protocol of 1995, TIRFAA/FAB 2001 and the Paris Agreement of 2015, nothing has been accomplished to stop the warming of the planet. Every day, we are more vulnerable.
Migration, both internal and external, is one of the most visible consequences of the devastation caused by the climate crisis and the development model. In reference to international migration, the United Nations reports that 300 million people are migrants, pushed out of their land and into countries that reject them. At least one-fourth leave their lands due to the natural disasters that have destroyed their peasant economies and their communities.
It is imperative to create harmony among the living beings of the planet and to cool Mother Earth. Food sovereignty links climate change and the collective rights of humanity, it guarantees the protection of the peasantry, indigenous people and migrant workers and their role in food production.
In the face of the capitalist planetary crisis, we commit to:
- Defend Mother Earth with peasant agroecology in all of our territories
- Lift up our proposal of Food Sovereignty as a true solution to the climate crisis
- Continue to feed our peoples with our peasant and indigenous knowledge
- Defend our territories, including fields, forests, rivers, seas, coasts, pastures, knowledge, our communication and popular governments with which the possibility of constructing public policy in favor of our peoples exists
- Denounce false solutions: climate-smart agriculture, carbon markets, REDD and REDD+, geoengineering, privatization of nature and other ways of speculating with the life of Earth
- Link the climate crisis with the extreme concentration of wealth and the power of transnational corporations
- Build sustainable local food systems through peasant markets and community distribution centers that eliminate the chain of intermediaries and improves the quality of life of producers
- Dignify well-being and prosperity for life on the planet under the limits of nature and recognizing the rights of Mother Earth
- Systematize the formation of consciousness, ideological orientation, technical training and healthy practices of production, distribution and consumption that guarantee a policy for cadres to safeguard the generational renewal, giving emphasis to popular communication
- Develop actions to protect migrants who resist disappearing in challenging the capitalist system; an act of resistance that should be incorporated into the struggle against the causes of the environmental and climate quagmire, which should become a permanent front in our efforts
- The planet cannot be saved if we do not commit ourselves to leaving capitalism behind. Our struggle is for the life and the survival of mother earth, which is the sum of all of our lives.
Given in the city of Managua on August 27th, 2018.
Globalize struggle, globalize hope!
[#Prensa] En Managua, trabajadores del campo y organizaciones campesinas sellaron compromiso por la vida y salvación de la madre tierra. #Nota aquí ▶️ https://bit.ly/2MFweBO
Publiée par Confederación Nacional Agraria-CNA sur Mardi 28 août 2018
