From November 29 to December 1, 2023, at the Niceto Perez Integral Center of the National Association of Small Farmers – ANAP, located in Güira de Melena, Artemisa Province in Cuba, 80 leaders from the 20 Latin American countries that articulate the CLOC were present to celebrate the III Continental Assembly of our peasant movement, and to advance towards the VIII Conference of La Via Campesina International in Managua, Nicaragua.

We met again after resisting the Covid-19 pandemic and mobilizing actions from our territories in defense of Food Sovereignty and the demands for the application of the Declaration of Peasant Rights to promote sustainable agri-food systems with peasants that cool the planet and produce healthy food for the people.

During this meeting, we reaffirmed the urgent need to fight for the definitive eradication of all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism in our Latin America. In a global context in which the emergence of China and the East is foreshadowing a break with U.S. political, economic and military hegemony and opening up possibilities for new scenarios of multipolarity, we are aware of the historical moment in which our struggles and resistance are taking place.

We are alert at a juncture of deepening systemic crises consequences of the development of neoliberal capitalism, where the response of corporate power are hate speeches and media manipulation that encourages and promotes the emergence of fascist groups that identify with racist, xenophobic ideals and violent and anti-democratic methods.

We ratify the fight against agrotoxics in the midst of crises, wars and pandemics that highlight the corporate agri-food system as a threat to humanity as a whole, increasing the prices of inputs, food and consequently the levels of hunger and malnutrition.

We face the challenges of new technologies that present intensive changes in the ways of working and marketing food and we highlight the role of peasants in the production of healthy food for the peoples of the world. The common goods, land and territories, water, our minerals continue to be the main appetite of transnational corporations, so the main challenge of the peoples is to resist extractivism, to defend peasant and native peoples’ territories.

We value the historical moment of Latin America before a new wave of progressive governments; aware that the conquest of political power has been possible through alliances with private sectors and that poses a high complexity and capacity for analysis and proposals to contribute to Latin American integration and peace in the region in the face of this challenge.

We challenge ourselves to lead, hand in hand with our struggles, instances of representation and political definition to promote public policies that strengthen the production of healthy food and advance in the implementation of peasant rights in each country. We are aware that this will only be possible with our organizations mobilized and united, strengthening alliances of the countryside and the city, with trade unions and social and popular movements. Youth participation and political education are essential in this path of struggle and hope.

We highlight the strategic importance of our IALAs, which are being strengthened in all regions, training youth with agroecological militancy. For 30 years La Via Campesina has developed the proposal of Agroecology and Food Sovereignty. As the Declaration of Peasant Rights ratifies, Agrarian Reform is a condition to solve the problem of global hunger, a path that began in Latin America with the Continental Campaign of the 500 years of Peasant, Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance.

We assume our Organic Charter as a tool that guides the strategies to strengthen our organizations and our action plans in order to contribute to the construction of a just and equitable society, convinced that the integration of the great fatherland is the best way to build socialism in Latin America.

We reaffirm our unwavering commitment of solidarity with our sister Republic of Cuba, with its people, that essential beacon in the creation of the new human being that is and will be necessary in the task of liberating the peoples from capitalism and its inherent, unjust and violent inequality. A blockade that the brave Cuban people have faced for more than 60 years, and which in recent times has been exacerbated with the implementation of more than 243 measures of economic, political and military repression by the criminal government of the United States, and despite this, the Cuban people continue to give an example of resistance, struggle, solidarity and revolution. 

We reaffirm our solidarity with the brotherly people of Haiti, which is plunged into a deep political, social and economic crisis, deepened by the institutional racism that dominates and violates the Haitian population to situations of marginalization and precariousness. We recognize in Haiti the courage of a people that made the first true social revolution in the American continent to free itself from European colonialism, abolishing slavery and offering its solidarity in the struggle to continue its struggle for independence.

We walk towards Managua, to the VIII Conference of La Via Campesina International, with the commitment to continue building the unity of the peasant movement, the Internationalist Solidarity, the struggle for Agrarian Reform, Food Sovereignty and Peasant Rights around the world.

Towards the 8th conference !

Globalise The Struggle, Globalise Hope