Voices from the field 1
Shaping the future of Nyéléni through convergence from the ground up!
Tammi Jonas, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA)
Shaping the future of Nyéléni demands a concrete and radical approach grounded in the lived struggles of peasants, fishers, pastoralists, food and fish workers and local communities. At the Nyéléni Global Forum in Kandy, we affirmed that food sovereignty is a political project of liberation, whose strength lies in convergence from below, where we build unity through shared strategies of resistance and transformation.
Accepting the challenge to bring more movements together, AFSA came to Sri Lanka as a delegation of peasants, Indigenous Peoples and labour organisers rooted in everyday struggle against the corporate capture of food and land in so-called Australia. While we organise in a context where settler-colonial capitalism continues to dispossess Indigenous Peoples, and industrial agriculture dominates policy and palates, we also carry concrete victories from the ground that show what food sovereignty looks like in practice.
Through collective organising, we have fought for over 15 years for state and national recognition of the critical role small-scale farmers play in feeding local communities while cooling the planet. We have changed planning laws to support agroecology and processing infrastructure on our farms, resisted oppressive food safety regulation, and embedded the principles of UNDROP in our national advocacy. These wins were not granted by governments—they were won through grassroots mobilisation and democratic organising. This is the approach we brought into Sri Lanka: convergence through organising, not consultation; power built from below, and in solidarity with but not delegated to our NGO allies.
At the forum, we worked in solidarity alongside comrades to defend feminist leadership and youth and gender and sexually diverse peoples’ participation in decision making. We manifested our intersectional approach, advocating shoulder to shoulder with pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, and workers to ensure their struggles are visible across our collective actions and campaigns. We insist that Nyéléni must remain accountable to social movements, with clear political coordination and collective decision-making led by peasants, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, fishers, and food and fish workers.
We came home charged with Nyéléni’s vow to rise against the chains of extractive debt, ready to tear down the lie that our future must be mortgaged to the powerful. Together, we will build a world free from financial imperialism—because the revolution will not be borrowed.
Voices from the field 2
Nyéléni in Kandy: Strengthening Sri Lanka’s social movements
Anuka De Silva, Movement for Land and Agrarian Reform (MONLAR), La Via Campesina
In 2022, due to a severe debt crisis, widespread corruption, the hegemony of power, and high food inflation, the country faced major political, social, and economic crises. People took to the streets demanding political reform, democracy, justice, and national sovereignty. Sri Lankan citizens played a pivotal role in changing the political landscape of the country. This is why the Nyéléni Forum has become increasingly important to us as a social movement.
As part of the IMF’s conditions for the financial bailout, Sri Lanka has been urged to implement a series of austerity measures, which include selling off some government-owned assets. One of the institutions affected by this is the National Institute of Cooperative Development (NICD), which is among the properties under consideration for privatization. With the support of Nyéléni, we stopped the privatization of the NICD.
Why is the Nyéléni Forum important for social movements in Sri Lanka?
Hosting the Nyéléni Forum helped strengthen the collective power of different local struggles and emphasized the importance of solidarity in addressing common challenges. The convergence at Nyéléni brought together grassroots movements to demand collective action aimed at dismantling systems of oppression.
Given the country’s agricultural struggles and food insecurity, food sovereignty is a vital tool to push back against corporate-driven agricultural systems that prioritize profit over people’s well-being. Building a collective vision for food sovereignty and creating a political action agenda through the Kandy Declaration continues to strengthen our movement’s impact. The convergence of struggles and solidarity remains the force that can lead to true transformation — one much greater than a single political change.
It’s clear that the Sri Lankan steering committee for the forum has laid a solid foundation for long-term movement building by keeping the community central to these efforts, aligning local struggles with the broader global agenda, and engaging with the government for policy reforms and real systemic transformation.
Voices form the field 3
Women building systemic transformation
Sarah Luiza and Bianca Pessoa, World March of Women Brazil
Since the 1st Nyéléni Forum, we have affirmed that there can be no food sovereignty without feminism. Building on our achievements, at the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, feminism was recognized as a fundamental part of the common political agenda, based on its popular, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-heteropatriarchal perspective. It is not possible to bring about systemic change without transforming the relationships of inequality and violence experienced by women everywhere in the world. This was our breakthrough: the creation of a common struggle for all who want to see radical change in society and in the world we live in. In this sense, the Women’s Assembly was a fundamental space for convergence.
We had women from all movements, regions, sexualities, and ethnicities, affirming the importance of diversity in this process. Women have a lot to teach. From their different realities, they share experiences of resistance, of building alternatives from the territories, showing that feminism is not an empty banner. It is built from everyday practice.
The impacts of the false solutions of green capitalism displace women from their territories and threaten their lives. That is why women defend the struggle for energy sovereignty and climate justice that is good for the people and not for the market. For us, the solution lies in the territories and in life. In the way women relate to nature and to people. It is the care of life and good living with equality that will, in fact, build a new world.
We affirm feminist economics as fundamental, recognizing women’s work and all their contributions to the social reproduction of life, from the perspective of care, equality, and good living. At the same time, we face daily the violence that heteropatriarchal and racist capitalism inflicts on our lives. Based on this, fundamental banners of the feminist struggle such as equality, freedom, justice, peace, international solidarity, demilitarization, the defence of democracy, rights, and peace, as well as food sovereignty and agroecology, are affirmed and concretized in the 3rd Nyéléni and in the path forward.
Voices from the field 4
Nyéléni and beyond: Indigenous leadership and perspectives in the global movement for food sovereignty
Nicole Maria Yanes, Opata, International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and NDN Collective
For Indigenous Peoples, Food Sovereignty is a way of life. It carries the survival of our territories, languages, cultures, ceremonies, stories, clothing, and every part of who we are as Peoples. Across the world, Indigenous Peoples’ territories are on the frontlines of colonization and extraction, framed as “sacrifice zones” for military testing, extractive projects, and so-called development. As a result, Indigenous Peoples now face the harshest impacts of the climate crisis caused by governments and corporations.
At the Nyéléni Gathering, Indigenous delegates played key roles. From sharing our communal leadership practices, approaches to consensus-building, traditional knowledge and ceremonies to our grounded experience in advocacy, negotiation, and movement building.
We successfully represented our Peoples collectively, gathering support from global movements for our ongoing efforts including the full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; for the UN Food & Agriculture Organization to fulfil its commitment to amend the International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management to include Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights, especially our right to free, prior, and informed consent; for the UN to separate and not conflate, in all its documents and decisions, the concepts of Indigenous Peoples with local communities; and for Indigenous Peoples’ LandBack work in regaining territories that were illegally stolen.
Though participants came from distinct ecosystems and histories of colonization, Nyéléni reminded us that defending our food sovereignty requires solidarity, collaboration, and shared strategy. Connecting the work we do in our territories to international arenas is not easy and goes beyond us gathering in Sri Lanka. True solidarity takes commitment and a willingness to understand one another’s histories, struggles, and goals across diverse ecosystems, languages, and political realities. In addition, it is important to note that the political agenda and declaration’s impact is dependent on the use and implementation that the people give it through its use.
In moments like these, Nyéléni reminds us that our collective freedom and future are deeply interdependent. Our liberation is bound together. Strengthening alliances across Peoples, regions, and movements is not only a strategy but a responsibility. It is an act of survival in these times of rising fascism and authoritarianism.
Voices from the field 5
From Nyéléni to Belém: the struggle for climate justice as an element of convergence
Martín Drago, REDES/Friends of the Earth International
Those who are responsible for and drive climate breakdown and environmental degradation are inextricably linked to the social, economic and gender inequality that prevails globally. They are also a fundamental part of the construction and perpetuation of the current energy system, around which multinational companies and states in the global North have deepened colonial relations. Therefore, when we talk about climate justice, we are talking about changing the whole system.
To achieve climate justice, we need to transform economic, social, political and energy systems, gender relations and our relationship with nature through the widespread implementation of grassroots initiatives to build a new model based on global solidarity and social, economic, gender, racial and environmental justice.
In order to achieve this, it is essential to strengthen the power of the people and their organizations and to transform the multilateral system based on an internationalist, solidarity-based approach and the integration of peoples. This commitment will be possible through different paths that share common principles, characteristics and strategies, and that lead to the construction of popular power in the way that each people define it in their own territory.[1]
Building climate justice is one such path and is therefore a central element of grassroots efforts to change the system.
Voices from the field 6
Nyéléni – On why RIPESS joined
Ruby van der Wekken, RIPESS
RIPESS intercontinental, the solidarity economy network, responded positively to the Nyéléni invitation to join its process two years ago. Since that moment we have been involved in the Steering Committee for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum. RIPESS as such participated in the preparatory process of convergence towards a common political action agenda and travelled with a delegation of 21 representatives from all over the world to the forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
RIPESS had already been advocating for 10 years through members present within the Nyéléni process, that working towards food sovereignty can not be achieved without economic systemic change, which importantly implies a changing of the economy as a whole. Whilst movements having joined the Nyéléni process were already familiar with concepts as feminist economy and care economy, the Solidarity economy, both as a methodology and a vision that places community agency and social and ecological values at the core of the building of another economy, was less well known at a global level.
Importantly also, RIPESS joined the Nyéléni process out of an acknowledgment of the great potential the changing of the food system has for systemic change in our communities and through this society, and wants to contribute to this process of change with the values, principles and objectives of Solidarity economy building as a bottom-up transformative process.
Voices from the field 7
Converging struggles in the Global Fight Against Industrial Aquaculture
Feini Yin, North American Marine Alliance (NAMA)
Nyéléni’s “Global Fight Against Industrial Aquaculture” campaign aims to address the pressing challenges created by industrial seafood farming, and to block the further development and expansion of such operations around the world.
Just like agriculture, aquaculture — the cultivation of seafood in the ocean, in freshwater, or on land — can be practiced in many ways. This ranges from traditional and agroecological forms, such as Native Hawaiian fish ponds, to corporate-driven and industrial-scale aquaculture. With the latter, transnational agribusinesses, banks, Big Green NGOs, and governing bodies promote the export of the factory farming model to our oceans, using catchphrases like “blue economies” and “blue revolution.”
In reality, industrial aquaculture displaces small-scale fishers from their livelihoods and territories, pollutes our waters, and furthers the commodification of our foods. The production of fish feed drives greater production of industrial soy and corn. It also plunders small pelagic fish from off the West African coast, extracting protein from the Global South, where millions rely on small pelagic fish for food and livelihood, to produce protein for consumers in the Global North.
This is an umbrella struggle that bridges food sovereignty issues between land and sea, between the Global South and Global North, and across environmental justice, global health, labour, and women’s movements. As a movement of movements, Nyéléni commits to building coordinated campaigns to secure food, health, and economic sovereignty and to resist corporate control over these by stopping and preventing industrial aquaculture and fishing, blue economy, and the privatization of ocean commons.
Voices from the field 8
The importance of public health in guaranteeing food sovereignty
People Health Movement (PHM)
Starting from the definition of food sovereignty (FS), it is obvious that good health within households (including animal health) is key to sustaining FS. The reverse is also true: FS ensures that households have access to sufficient, nutritious food throughout the year to keep their members in good health.
In the realm of Nyéléni, public health (PH) ought to cover preventive measures: a) water and sanitation (and vector control where applicable – such as mosquitos); b) access to a working Primary Health Care infrastructure (including primary curative health and immunizations); c) access to primary animal health; and d) health promotion measures.
Health and nutrition education will be necessary for achieving the above: we are referring to education that goes beyond technical or clinical aspects – one that explains the structural causes of preventable ill-health, malnutrition, and deaths, and highlights the actions needed to address them.
In the spirit of FS, people must actively participate in decision-making and in monitoring the implementation of these PH components. This is not yet the case and remains a challenge for the Nyéléni constituency. PHM will be able to provide needed inputs and backstopping to our wider Nyéléni community drawing on the activities it has been carrying out for two decades. (PHM has a Nutrition and FS thematic group that met a couple times but has not worked regularly. In parallel, the Latin American region of PHM set up a regional FS group that has been active and successful -they were represented in Kandy).
For all these reasons, PHM enthusiastically joined the Nyéléni 3 Process from the very beginning in the spirit of the right to food and the right to health –and in the shared spirit of jointly tackling the social determination of both. The joint struggle for health, agroecology, and food sovereignty is still in its infancy, and we must emphasize the need to recruit more movements and organizations within Nyéléni to join us in this struggle.
Voices from the field 9
2026: International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists
Fernando García-Dory, World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples and Pastoralists (WAMIP)
We, as global pastoralist movement, place a lot of hope in Nyéléni as a space to stand shoulder to shoulder with other food producer movements to examine the current political frame that impacts our livelihoods and lands and to formulate joint proposals for alternatives to the current crisis. We urge other movements to look at our claims, from understanding core aspects of pastoralists’ rights, to expanding agroecology to pastoralism. Nyéléni is a valuable convergence space with other movements that has enabled important achievements, such as the UNDROP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas). Next year, 2026, is the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. We want to ensure that pastoralists are placed at the centre. FAO and other bodies should understand we represent a model of production with cultural, social, and political value that empowers communities, contributes to the endurance of indigenous nomadic peoples, and advances food sovereignty.
Voices from the field 10
Global advocacy action for migrants and refugees
Paloma Chen, Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe (TMP-E)
The food sovereignty movement present at the Nyéléni Forum 2025 has not been limited to the initial core of small-scale food producers, such as farmers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, and rural workers; it has also expanded to include feminist and climate justice movements, migrants, conscious consumers, academic researchers, artists.
The struggle of migrant and refugee peoples is inseparable from the struggle for food sovereignty and livelihood. Migration is deeply linked to the corporate global food industry built on exploitation, dehumanization, and utilitarian narratives that reduce migrant workers to cheap labour. The migration struggle is a common struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, food sovereignty, and a just transition that aims to weave resistance and alternatives to the corporate system that profits from our displacement, repression, exploitation, and death. But sites of food production can also be sites of resistance, dignity, and future-building. Our participation at the Nyéléni Forum is part of a broader effort to strengthen convergence across struggles (from regularization campaigns in Europe to cross-border mobilizations like the Caravanas) to demand housing, health, labour rights, land and food sovereignty and justice for everyone.
Through debates, presentations, workshops, and working groups, the effort at the forum has sought to build a unified political vision against the dominant, patriarchal, imperialist, colonialist, racist, caste-based, and supremacist capitalist system with the production of two political documents: the Kandy Declaration and the Common Political Action Agenda. The Kandy Declaration, read out on September 13 at the forum’s closing ceremony, includes among its next steps actions such as a global day of mobilization against imperialism, genocide, war, and the use of hunger as a weapon. This aligns with the Global Advocacy Action presented by the Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe at the forum on systemic narrative change on migrants and refugees.
Voices from the field 11
When academia meets the movement: Knowledge exchange on the path of convergence
Bruno Prado, Bhoopendra Kuma, Yukari Sekine, Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South
At the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, in the first ever Dialogue between Researchers/Scholars and Movements at the forum, with over 70 participants, a shared commitment emerged to bring scholars and movements into deeper dialogue, recognizing that the struggles for food sovereignty and systemic transformation are inseparable from the democratization of knowledge.
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS)[2] was invited to contribute to this process, supporting the creation of spaces where researchers, community leaders, and movement organizers could meet as equals: all knowledge-makers and knowledge-holders. These exchanges emphasized that genuine transformation requires horizontal relationships among diverse knowledge systems, where learning flows in all directions.
Across the conversations, participants called for decolonizing knowledge production and challenging extractivist, corporate, and top-down research practices. Scholar activists shared experiences of co-producing knowledge with communities and reaffirmed that research must serve people’s needs rather than the interests of capital.
The discussions also pointed to the importance of building broad, intersectional knowledge coalitions that connect social movements, universities, and public institutions. Participants agreed on the need to support younger and early-career scholar-activists, foster collective research agendas, and communicate knowledge in more accessible ways through community forums, podcasts, and creative visual formats.
Moving forward, the collaboration between academia and movements should continue as a collective and participatory journey. The Nyéléni process reminds us that knowledge is not a privilege, but a shared tool for systemic transformation: grounded in trust, equality, and solidarity, and built through the ongoing convergence of diverse struggles and ways of knowing.
Voices from the field 12
Bridging movements: Unions meet Nyéléni
Chris Spindler, AMWU, IndustriALL Global Union
Even when the Union movement represents only a minority of workers, it is often the organized labour movement that sets the agenda for industrial and working conditions. This is what capitalist powers seek to break — they want to see an end to organized labour.
Today, the Union movement faces many challenges. In no particular order, and by no means exhaustive: technology and automation; political influence; confronting and organizing against anti-union laws; organizing beyond the workplace – and even internationally. How it responds to these issues will dramatically affect its relevance, growth, and ability to win better conditions for members and the broader community.
The Nyéléni process also presents challenges to the Union movement: to work with broader social and community movements, not just traditional political parties; to strengthen involvement in the community as a progressive force alongside industrial campaigning; and to challenge the political system rather than accept its conservative framework.
The Nyéléni movement opposes the idea that food is primarily a commodity or an export earner, and that countries should compete for ever-higher productivity. Community organizations and Unions, each in their own way, are challenging these assumptions about food and the way the current political system governs it.
Nyéléni 2025 brought together a remarkable collection of committed activists doing extraordinary work in their communities. This is a movement for social change that Unions should engage with and – where possible – join in relevant campaigns.
I began with key questions the Union movement needs to answer for its own sake and for the sake of the wider community, and I believe the Nyéléni process should also reflect on similar issues:
- How will the Nyéléni process engage with the Union movement, given that we share common ideas but work in different ways and spaces?
- Are there campaigns where Nyéléni can identify common ground with the Union movement?
- How does the Nyéléni process move from community and social groups to a movement for social change? Although the forum spoke of fundamental change, this question remained unaddressed.
- Are there plans – in the near future – to discuss these and any other questions regarding Union involvement?
Nyéléni was an amazing, thought-provoking event – challenging both for my own campaigning work and, I imagine, for many others as well.
Voices from the field 13
Linguistic Justice as a practice in the Nyéléni process
Stepping out of the shadows: upholding linguistic rights is also part of the struggle
Collective for the Self-organisation of Interpreting Technologies (COATI)
The Nyéléni process has incorporated Linguistic Justice as an essential practice, recognizing that upholding linguistic rights is also part of the struggle. More than 750 people from around the world participated in the meeting held in Kandy, and for the first time, simultaneous interpretation was provided in 18 languages.
COATI participated in the entire process, providing technology, coordination, and political commitment. Seventy-three volunteer interpreters and four technicians from the Asia-Pacific region were recruited, also contributing to regional technological autonomy.
The Interpreting Working Group (WG) formed a diverse and inclusive team of interpreters, translators and technicians representing different dialects from the global South and North, different ages, genders and activist and professional backgrounds. This diversity, rather than a conscious decision, was a natural consequence of the network that had been built, where the plurality of voices generated a profound human exchange and strengthened collective work for food sovereignty.
COATI also took on an unprecedented technical and logistical challenge, demonstrating that self-management and free technologies can achieve, and even surpass, what market service providers fail to do: support complex processes with care, creativity and cooperation.
Linguistic Justice is an exercise in speaking and listening, which builds equality. Those who make it possible are not mere service providers, but committed individuals who are actively involved in the struggles.
For the first time, the Final Declaration of the Nyéléni Global Forum recognized interpreters and translators as part of the struggles. We want to extend this to all technical teams and volunteers as a fundamental part of collective struggles, since they made it possible for the word to circulate in pursuit of full and fair participation. Our deepest gratitude goes out to all of them, who put their hearts and souls into making Linguistic Justice a living reality at Nyéléni.
More info in the Fanzine produced by COATI (in English, Spanish and French).
Voices from the field 14
Popular Communications at the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum
Rohan Antony, A Growing Culture
For the 3rd Nyéléni Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka, popular communications was not an afterthought but a vital tactic in shaping the collective voice and political imagination of the process. It was a way of ensuring that the voices of grassroots leaders echo far beyond the halls where they were spoken, into the everyday struggles that unfold across streets, fields, factories, and communities around the world.
The Nyéléni Communications Space brought together a team of fifteen communicators from movements and allied organisations, alongside a dedicated group of Sri Lankan volunteers. With microphones, cameras, brushes, and pens, they worked collectively and tirelessly to enliven the forum with energy, imagination, and joy, and make the moment accessible to everyone within and far beyond Kandy.
The Nyéléni Radio filled the halls with conversations, reflections, and songs of resistance from across movements. The audiovisual team captured powerful and intimate moments that will shape the visual memory of this gathering for years to come. A text team distilled the day’s debates, decisions, and celebrations into a daily multilingual bulletin, ensuring that every participant, and those following from afar, could stay informed. Through social media and press, updates and voices from the ground reached thousands around the world. The artists transformed walls, walkways, and shared spaces into living canvases holding the emotional truth of the forum, featuring resistance art from around the world, creative corners where delegates could draw, paint, and unwind, and a participatory mural that immortalised our collective moment in Kandy.
This collective effort also revealed a deeper truth: communication is not separate from struggle, but part of it. It is where narratives are contested, solidarities forged, and power reclaimed. The Kandy Declaration and Common Political Action Agenda affirm this by recognising grassroots feminist popular communication as a strategic front for systemic transformation, and by reminding us that sovereignty is not only about control over what we grow, but also about reclaiming power over our stories — stories of who we are, why we resist, and the world we dream of.
[1] Friends of the Earth International (2023) Pathways to system change: Transforming a world in crisis into a sustainable and just future.
[2] Aguiar, D., et al. (2023). Transforming critical agrarian studies: Solidarity, scholar-activism and emancipatory agendas in and from the Global South. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(2), 758–786.
