Box 1

A new international trade framework that works for all

At the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum held in September 2025 in Sri Lanka, La Via Campesina laid out the essential principles for a Global Framework on Agricultural Trade Based on Food Sovereignty.

Guided by the foundational definition of food sovereignty established at the 2007 Nyéléni Global Forum and grounded in international human rights law, this framework articulates an ethical paradigm for trade that prioritizes human dignity, environmental justice, and democratic governance of food systems at all levels—local, regional, and global.

It asserts that all trade mechanisms must be designed to respect the inalienable rights of peoples and nations to determine their own agricultural and food policies, recognizing food as a fundamental human right rather than a commodity.

It firmly emphasizes that trade mechanisms shall neither be weaponized nor subordinate basic rights to commercial interests. Instead, trade shall be reconstituted as an instrument of mutual benefit, replacing exploitative practices with equitable exchange and shared prosperity among nations.

Integral to this vision is the commitment to protecting the planet by preserving biological diversity and respecting planetary limits, recognizing the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples as custodians of ecosystems, and advancing regional food systems alongside agroecological methods rather than corporate-controlled supply chains.

It insists that such a global trade framework must be inclusive, transparent, equitable, and empowering; it shall prioritize and protect small-scale food producers (farmers, farmworkers, fishers, pastoralists) and food system workers, Indigenous Peoples, and historically marginalized groups, with particular attention to women and gender minorities.

It calls for a system of trade governance that ensures decent incomes and safe working conditions across food systems, democratic participation in trade decision-making, public accountability in market operations, and strong market regulation.

A global framework for agricultural trade should lead to a systemic transformation of trade relations to realize food sovereignty, climate justice, and social equity for both present and future generations. It affirms that the implementation of these principles shall be measured by their concrete advancement of human rights, environmental protection, and economic and social equity for all people.

Box 2

Global finance and trade bodies enabling the aggression on oceans, rivers, and fisher peoples

Imperialistic nations’ relentless accumulation of wealth is not only exploiting and expropriating the historical, traditional and Indigenous customary homelands of fisher peoples and coastal communities, but is simultaneously annihilating their  sovereign rights over lands, waters and fisheries, ethnically cleansing and violently uprooting their ways of life, their socio-ecological identities and their cultural belonging from coasts, oceans, rivers, inland waters, mangroves, islands, seas and all their traditional territories.

Ocean and land grabbing, including fisheries, has accelerated through extractive industries (mining, oil, gas); destructive industrial fishing; mega infrastructure projects (waterways, industrial wind farms, pipelines, smart cities, reclamation, port construction); financialized conservation schemes like 30×30 and OECMs (Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures); marketization and privatization of nature; and corporate industrial aquaculture (fish factories or blue foods).

Narratives such as “blue growth”, “blue economy”, and “blue transformation” promise sustainability but accelerate grabbing and amount to greenwashing. These initiatives are embedded into national economies through blue finance programs, binding nations to fiscal conditionalities that subordinate sovereignty to transnational capital, reducing even democratically elected states to “rentier states” leasing oceans for corporate profit. This drives the climate crisis and the criminalization of fisher peoples, who resist commodification of oceans, fisheries, and coasts and advocate at all levels against false solutions and territorial grabbing under fraudulent “green” or “blue” claims.

The WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and free-trade agreements have been used to dismantle national policies that protected people’s sovereignty over natural resources and local markets.

Movements such as the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP) denounce those who persistently push this agenda, including large international environmental organizations, the World Bank, regional development banks, and corporations; and call for genuine community-led, rights-based development shaped by fisher peoples.

They also remain committed to engaging in legitimate multilateral policy platforms on food, fisheries, agriculture, climate, biodiversity, and human rights to advocate for their political autonomy and customary governance. WFFP and others recognize the FAO, the Committee on Fisheries (COFI), the Committee on Fisheries Subsidies (CFS), and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) as the appropriate UN bodies for global governance in which social organizations actively participate.

Box 3

The peoples of the seeds confront the tyranny of global trade

From January 19 to 21, 2026, the Latin American Seed Collective hosted the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) in Cartago, Costa Rica, to “highlight the urgency of defending the relationship between peoples and their fundamental crops and seeds”—an ontological relationship dating back to time immemorial, that is crucial for leading humanity and the planet into the future.

The PPT heard about the threats faced by various communities around the world in their efforts to preserve and reproduce their seeds independently of the market, intellectual property restrictions, and biological and digital technologies.

The structure of politics —the PPT explains— has led to food and nutrition being progressively transformed into a sector of the economy, where everything related to sustenance is separated from people’s actual lives and becomes a part of the global market. Oligopolies seek to turn people into a homogeneous mass of consumers, and natural diversity into profitable commodities.

Now that trade is also being used as a weapon of war, an initiative like this is vital.

“The peoples of the seeds,” says the TPP, is a cross-cutting term that transcends borders and refers to those facing diverse yet overlapping and complementary challenges in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If we do not view it this way, peoples that still care for their seeds and crops find themselves fragmented in the face of the brute force with which global trade is being restructured. In the face of the dismantling of international law, peoples with their seeds can bring sustenance everywhere, challenging not only global capitalism and supply chains, but also the commodification of the foundations of life.

Statement by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.

Box 4

MC 14 Collapses—that’s good!

The WTO’s 14th Ministerial conference (MC 14) held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, has collapsed, without even a Ministerial Declaration. Negotiations on the e-commerce and TRIPS Non-Violation Complaints moratoria, fisheries subsidies, agriculture, WTO reform and a Least Developed Countries (LDC) package have been deferred to the General Council in Geneva.

The collapse is a welcome victory in a larger battle. Although many developing countries refused to let the US and its cohorts advance their agendas through the deception of multilateralism, this is not a straightforward rebellion of the Global South. Many South countries remain wedded to the logic of free trade, advancing proposals that undermine food sovereignty and benefit agribusiness at the expense of working people and small-scale food providers.

For 30 years, wealthy countries have used the rhetoric of rules-based trade and reciprocity, promises of increased development aid, and outright bullying to break alliances among South countries and extract greater concessions from them. WTO rules have always been skewed in favour of former colonizing powers. They lock in outcomes that favour their economies, their elites and their businesses, and consolidate transnational corporate power in food systems, public health and all sectors vital for life with dignity.

But even if competition were perfect and power games eliminated, the WTO framework is unacceptable. We reject the premise that all things on earth and our labour should be treated as merchandise, and a vision of human relations based on perpetual competition.

It is futile to expect any meaningful reform of the WTO that will advance the well-being, rights, aspirations and needs of the working peoples of the world. It is also damaging and dangerous for participatory democracy and accountability, since in too many countries, trade-investment negotiations and agreements are not subject to domestic scrutiny.

While we intensify our core demands of ending the WTO, we also need to use effectively and forcefully the entire body of international human rights law and our governments’ human rights commitments to challenge the power of the WTO over our domestic policies. The rights of working people and small-scale food providers cannot be traded away for corporate profit. We want food sovereignty, not free trade!

For more info read the Yaoundé Declaration: The WTO And Free Trade Cause Hunger, Poverty And Inequality.