From 9 to 12 June in Sri Lanka, 60 representatives from 12 countries and from more than 20
global and regional social movements and civil society organisations, across Asia and the Pacific
came together to reflect on the progress made for food sovereignty and agroecology since the
historic Declaration of Nyéléni (Mali, 2007), and the Nyéléni Declaration on Agroecology (2015)
and to work towards a third Nyéléni global forum to be held in 2025. The Nyéléni process we are
undertaking is at a time of unprecedented corporate capture of governance all the way to the
United Nations, which has ceded its role to corporations and allowed the World Economic Forum
to run first, the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, and now the annual World Food Forum,
supplanting legitimate spaces for multilateral decision making. We reject multistakeholderism
and demand a return of governance spaces with self-determined democratic participation of civil
society by our grassroots movements. We represent diverse organizations of national, regional
and international movements of small-scale food producers, including peasants, Indigenous
Peoples, fisherfolk, landless, family farmers, rural workers, plantation workers, pastoralists,
forest dwellers, women, youth, gender diverse, urban poor, homeless, domestic workers, street
vendors, unorganized labour etc. Together, the people we represent globally produce 70% of the
food consumed by humanity. We were joined in Sri Lanka by invited allies from other key global
movements for health, debt justice, climate justice, social and solidarity economy, labour, and
gender diversities, who are engaging together in the Nyéléni process.

We stand in solidarity with the oppressed and with victims of historic and ongoing injustice, today
especially with the Palestinian people. We strongly condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza, added
to the 17 years of siege that had already made 65% of Gazans food insecure. Food is a basic
human right and should never be weaponised. We extend our solidarity to all people suffering
under violence from authoritarian and illegitimate states, including the peoples of Syria,
Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Niger, Myanmar, and Afghanistan.
Until all people are free of tyranny, none of us are free.

The gathering in Negombo, Sri Lanka began, as food sovereignty always must, by standing with
comrades on the ground and hearing grassroots stories of the struggle of the farmers, fisherfolk,
pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples, including focused interventions from the women and youth.
From the national to the household level, we learned of the adverse impact of the IMF. Most
recently, a series of neoliberal policy reforms have been imposed on the people of Sri Lanka with
devastating effects on local communities, small farmers, small-scale fisher communities, landless
workers and larger toiling masses across the country. We reject systems of debt at all levels, from
the crushing World Bank loans in many Asia and Pacific countries to the equally unjust interest
rates on so-called micro-finance extended to rural people and smallholders, which have led to
the suicide of more than 200 Sri Lankan women unable to service repayments. Like the suicides
of lakhs of Indian smallholders over the past decades, farmers unable to repay debts after
conversion to cash crops made them reliant on increasingly expensive inputs, these deaths are
completely avoidable. No debt should be repaid with a life ever, anywhere. Micro-finance is a
deadly false solution. Furthermore, sovereign debt with exorbitant interest conditions have
driven unjustly high rates of inflation which have left many Sri Lankans with no choice but to
diminish their daily nourishment from three to two meals.

In the face of these struggles, we have heard countless stories of resistance, as struggle is our
only weapon. We have heard stories of solidarity amongst the fisher women of Matara, who
collectively have defeated post-tsunami disaster capitalist tourism developments that sought to
bar access to their traditional fisheries. These women have brought down literal walls through
their determined collective action. Nearby, smallholders have been inundated by near-constant
floods since a mega-infrastructure project to install a salinity barrier against rising sea levels left
rainwater with nowhere to go. Unable to work the paddies, the farmers have been diversifying
their crops to produce for local markets, while working together to force the government to
amend the scheme to once again let the Nilwala River flow to her rightful home in the sea. Such
mega-infrastructure projects, especially big dams, are driving Indigenous Peoples, fishers, and
rural communities from their traditional lands in places as diverse as Pakistan, India, the
Philippines and Malaysia as entire valleys are flooded in the name of so-called progress. In India,
the mighty farmers’ movement forced a dictatorial government to bow down in front of farmers.
In all the countries represented, the strength of solidarity, collective action, and unity was visible
as peoples’ movements came together to fight for a better world.

Such unity has never been more critical. As more public resentment has accumulated, right wing
populism and authoritarian governments have emerged in the region, bringing with them an
escalating repression of rights to expression, assembly and protest, and unlawful crackdowns on
journalists, activists, human rights defenders and social movement leaders, and the escalating
trend of criminalization of dissent. Shrinking civic spaces and a proliferation of Free Trade
Agreements is contributing to more oligarchies and corporate capture, nowhere more so than in
cases of land and water grabbing, devastating rural communities and turning once-sovereign rice
producing countries from Southeast and East Asia into net rice importers. Meanwhile, villages
across the region with biodiverse forms of food production converting to commodity
monoculture end up exposed to global capital and corporate accumulation processes. While
neoliberal and corrupt governments claim that highly productive lands from Indonesia to Hawaii
are unable to sustain their peoples, the real root of most countries’ increasing dependence on
imports is, of course, the aggressive export agenda of others in the region such as Australia, India
and China; a morally bankrupt heritage of colonial aid and so-called development that serves
mostly corporate, not peoples’, interests; and corporate tourism. Rural areas and captured
natural resources and commons have been exoticised and displayed for a corporatised tourism
industry at the cost of their depletion, and the alienation of such commons (forest, river, lake,
sea and mountains) from the collective access of communities.

People living in rural and forest areas and in close relationships with the land and oceans are
amongst the first impacted by the climate crisis. From the mass deaths of pastoralists’ animals in
Mongolia due to one of the harshest winters on record, to catastrophic flooding in Pakistan,
devastating earthquake in Nepal, and extreme heat and droughts in India and SouthEast Asia,
peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk and Indigenous Peoples are some of the most exposed to the
climate crisis, even as they have done least to create it. On the contrary, food sovereignty and
agroecology are a real solution to the climate crisis – and not Climate Smart Agriculture – helping
to heal our relationships with nature, nurture and repair ecosystems, and build resilient and
sustainable livelihoods. However, these solutions are rarely recognised for what they are – the
financialisation of nature – and our movements instead face added dispossession and violence as
a result of green grabbing and blue grabbing for renewable energy, mineral extraction, or
misguided environmental and conservation projects.

Carbon – a building block of life – continues to be captured by corporations in the latest round of
land grabbing. Carbon markets, perhaps the most egregious false solution (packaged as Nature-
based solutions and net-zero emissions) promoted to address the ravages of capitalism – with
more capitalism – are on the rise, joined now by biodiversity markets in Australia, as are energy
projects to feed the ever-ravenous beast of industrial agriculture. While net loss in forests
globally reduced from 6.2 million hectares per annum between 2000 and 2010 to 4.7 million
between 2010 and 2020, deforestation rates are much higher – the FAO estimates that 10 million
hectares of forest are cut down each year. The more than 5 million hectare difference in ‘net’
loss underscores the false solution of REDD+, as some of the world’s remaining primary forests
are sacrificed for temporary plantations, which contribute to biodiversity destruction in the name
of short-lived carbon sequestration. Such a scale of deforestation is also a result of alienating
forest from communities and the capitalist idea that considers forest as ‘resource’ rather than
commons. This also affects food sovereignty as it restricts communities’ foraging. This kind of
colonial conservation that denies communities access to their ancestral territories is only likely
to deepen and intensify with the implementation of the 30X30 Agenda (a land sparing approach
that entrenches the colonial concept of the separability of humans and nature), adopted in the
Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP15. It is the people, local communities,
who can protect forests.

Always morphing to find another market, capital is now capturing data as farmers sign up for
carbon farming apps, handing over seed and soil data in hopes of a small return, unaware that
they have compromised their privacy and become contract carbon farmers in the new frontier of
digital agriculture. Like many generations of technology before them, these tools are designed to
benefit industrial and financial capital, not the farmers to whom they are marketed. Without
ownership and control of their own data, technologies and tools, farmers face plunder and
exploitation from big tech companies. Technological sovereignty means the development of tools
owned and controlled by peasants, pastoralists, fishers and indigenous people, and must start by
valorising the technologies of agroecology, including seeds, as well as indigenous and traditional
knowledge, which are often dismissed in favour of high-tech solutions such as GMOs and gene
edited products.

Carbon markets have also joined the ranks of other forms of ocean grabbing, while another false
solution, the Blue Economy, is constituted by capitalist ideologies reimagined underwater,
leaving fisherfolk bereft of access to traditional fisheries or the fish that used to richly inhabit
them. Aquaculture and mariculture are false solutions, promoted by many governments and the
FAO in Asia and the Pacific through green/blue revolution and ‘feed the world’ and blue
transformation narratives. In fact what they are proposing is factory farming in the sea, with the
same devastating impacts on marine ecosystems as their land counterparts. As with all factory
farming, it is a system of over-production built on the exploitation of ecosystems and of human
and more-than-human lives, with frequent human rights abuses in production and processing
facilities. As elsewhere, export orientations in aquaculture and mariculture are designed to feed
those who can afford it from middle class and wealthy societies around the world rather than
local fishing communities in Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, or Sri Lanka, fueling
the profits of elites instead of sustaining the livelihoods of local fisherfolk. Alongside aquaculture
and mariculture, marine spatial planning, the corporatisation of fishing, and the sidelining of
customary rights, lead to or legitimate the dispossession and displacement of small-scale fishers.
Coastlines are devastated by such colonial development, displacing local communities and
destroying natural ecosystems and sand dunes that protect land from tsunami, for the sake of
extensive port and tourist business developments.

The rise of ultra-processed foods (UPF) in the region fuels a significant increase in devastating
non-communicable diseases, mental health issues, and hunger. From production to
consumption, UPF exemplifies the destructive forces of colonial capitalism. From oil palm
plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia to the wheat and canola fields of Australia, UPF is
manufactured from resource-intensive monocultures of crops and factory-farmed animals all
grown to produce non-nourishing foods for the profit of elites. UPF destroys everything in its
destructive path – the traditional lands of Indigenous Peoples and peasants first, and people’s
health and lives next. Promotion of fortified food is also a false solution promoted by the very
elites who have destroyed local communities’ ability to grow or access nutritious traditional
foods.

But where there is oppression, there is also a strengthening of community organising and
solidarity, and a flourishing of resistance against the latest waves of extractive, patriarchal,
colonial capitalism. We heard from Hawaiian, Māori, Dalit, Filipino, Sri Lankan, Australian and
many more comrades that land is mother, land is life, land is food, but that today, land is also
politics. We assert what we feel and what Indigenous Peoples and peasants have known since
the beginning of time, that we belong to the earth, it does not belong to us. Our Hawaiian sister
shared images, words, songs and feelings of her ancestral lands and waters, starting from the
bottom of the sea, stretching to the sky and then back to the earth where we humans are bound.
She reminded us that decisions about what we take and what we give back must be based on
what is there, its health, and who and how many parts of the ecosystem rely on a given aspect
of nature. We work for people and planet, not profit, and deeply feel and act on our obligation
to protect Nature.

While we hold these principles of a life made in common with nature dear to our hearts and our
activism, we still have unlearning and relearning to do, as we, too, have long lived in patriarchal,
colonial capitalist societies, no matter where we sit within them socioeconomically or culturally.
Patriarchy is not a person – it is a structure – and men, women and people of other genders must
constantly reflect on the ways it has shaped our experiences and responses to the world around
us, especially expressions of power and control. While we reject the blame of individuals as
unproductive and non-transformational, we take responsibility for our actions even as we assert
our rights and the rights of others. Collective processes give us an opportunity to reflect, learn,
and strengthen our collective solidarity and accountability to each other.

As movements united in our global struggles for food sovereignty, we draw inspiration from the
year-long struggle led by India’s farmers, that has demonstrated what the resilience, unity and
solidarity among working people can achieve even in the face of great adversities. The Farmers
Movement in India has inspired millions around the world who are fighting for justice, democracy
and solidarity. The farmers held their ground in the face of threats, intimidation and relentless
propaganda, and forced the Indian government to repeal the Farm Bills, thus reversing the
reforms for corporatisation of agriculture. This was one of the most spectacular victories of
united peasantry against the combined assault of corporate power and the state in recent
history, showing that determined struggle can defeat the mightiest of forces.

Collectively, we have many emancipatory examples of peoples working for food sovereignty and
agroecology across our region, including agroecology schools and many other forms of horizontal
knowledge sharing, land sharing and landback to Indigenous and dalit peoples, land occupations,
ownership and control over seed saving and sharing, the defence of traditional fishing rights and
territories, solidarity economies such as community-supported agriculture (CSA), and the
inclusion of food sovereignty in the Constitution of Nepal. We expose corruption and abuse of
power through National Green Tribunals in India, Rights of Nature Tribunals in Australia, and Blue
Economy Tribunals conducted by the World Forum of Fisher People.

We collectively assert that all proposals and strategies for transformational change of food and
agriculture systems should apply emancipatory political, technical, economic, organisational,
methodological, pedagogical, and philosophical principles of agroecology to our organising, and
they should always prioritise participation of youth, women and gender diverse people. Real
solutions to the multiple crises caused by patriarchal colonial capitalism must:

– Question & transform structures, instead of reproducing them
– Cultivate autonomy, not dependency
– Prioritise use value, not exchange value
– Organise collectively, not through individualised projects
– Build horizontal processes, not hierarchies
– Build capacity to struggle and transform
– Act based on culture and relationalism, not productivism

The struggle for food sovereignty is about knowledge, territory and sovereignty, asserting rights
as enshrined in the UNDROP and UNDRIP, which require a profound restructuring of who holds,
uses, and shares power and knowledge in agri-food systems, and puts control of the means of
production back in the hands of Indigenous Peoples, dalit, landless, peasants and local
communities, starting with land, our mother.