In the spotlight 1
Solidarity and unity to confront the global crises: Towards the third global forum for food sovereignty
The Third Global Forum for Food Sovereignty is being organized by the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC) in India in 2025.
The IPC is now building a ‘Nyéléni Process’ urging mobilization within and beyond the Food Sovereignty movement to create a response and form alliances with climate justice movements, labor unions, feminist groups, and environmental organizations to foster shared proposals for systemic change. The food sovereignty movement faces systemic threats and needs to collaborate with other groups fighting various forms of oppression for social, racial, gender, economic, intergenerational, and environmental justice.
Through the Nyéléni process, we are implementing a ‘Dialogue of Knowledge’ to build unity and reinforce territorial organizational processes, that resist neoliberalism and establish equitable and sustainable food and economic systems. This multi-year process involves democratic consultations in regions worldwide, and results and proposals from this process will be presented at the Global Forum in India in 2025, where representatives will discuss strategies for creating just and ecological food systems and renew a global alliance against multidimensional crises caused by forces like free-market capitalism and destructive trade.
India: The site of a remarkable struggle for Food Sovereignty
In 2020-21, India experienced a historic period of unrest led by farmers’ for food sovereignty. Right in the middle of a pandemic, the Indian government brought in three controversial laws that pushed for a massive privatization of the Indian agricultural system without any legal safeguards for price protection in place. Although the Minimum Support Policy offered some protection, it was not yet a legal guarantee, and farmers alleged that the new legislations threatened to remove even such protections.
In this context, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella organization of various farmer unions, led a 15-month-long protest against the three controversial legislations. The protest transformed into a public movement, witnessing millions of farmers protesting in Delhi and elsewhere, despite repressive measures and hard COVID-19 protocols from the government. The movement gained amazing solidarity and support from various sectors, leading to a national-level public strike. Eventually, in 2021, bowing to public pressure, the Indian Parliament repealed the three contentious agriculture laws. This successful farmers’ struggle is an inspiration for similar movements for food sovereignty worldwide. It is a demonstration of what cross-sectoral alliances can achieve in united struggles.
The upcoming Nyéléni Forum in India aims to draw inspiration from the remarkable struggle of Indian farmers to invigorate and reinforce the food sovereignty movement. It seeks to promote solidarity, generate momentum, amplify the voices of grassroots organizations, and provide a shared direction for social movements in the years ahead.
It is crucial to acknowledge that the forum itself is not the ultimate objective of this process. Instead, the primary goal is to put into practice the decisions and guidelines formulated during the process. Let’s globalize our hope and struggle for food sovereignty!
In the spotlight 2
Nyéléni calls on us to strengthen social and popular coordination
We live in a time where it is increasingly clear that the crises of social and economic inequality, environmental, food, health, housing, and national and global democracy are deeply connected. Meanwhile, corporations and transnational big business are promoting and implementing drastic and rapid changes in order to accumulate greater power from these crises. These changes come at the cost of setbacks in the rights won by the peoples and are often an attempt to co-opt our proposals and narratives, to disguise their false solutions, to continue advancing in the privatization, commodification and financialization of public services, land, nature and data, and to increase the exploitation of working people.
To these ends, a growing fascist wave is highly useful. An extreme right-wing and deeply conservative project in the social, economic, political and cultural spheres, with a long-term vision and the endorsement (by support or omission) of the dominant media, works to dominate society with an extremely conservative common direction that is elitist and aporophobic, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, sexist, queerphobic, anti-pacifist and anti-democratic. It is a project that ignores and attacks any form of organization that defends popular interests.
But this interconnection of crises is also pushing social and popular movements to look beyond their specific agendas and revive paths of popular convergence to halt the conservative advance and transform our realities. Paths of convergence that, on the basis of agreements, and working through nuances and divergences, allow us to build systemic responses.
We must be many more walking together towards unity, without forgetting the urgent threat we face. This requires the political will of the organizations, as well as the resources and dedication of comrades to coordinate strategies, proposals and common demands from the diverse thematic agendas of the social and popular movements.
As stated in the newsletter no 48[1], Nyéléni is a space and a process to coordinate “analyses and positions, make struggles visible and resist their criminalization, strengthen solidarity links, build programmatic agreements and agree on actions to transform food systems and our societies”.
The Nyéléni process calls on us to join forces to strengthen the popular mobilization of resistance, and also to defend the rights and sovereignty of the peoples and the common goods, and to build social, racial, gender, economic, intergenerational and environmental justice.
[1] Newsletter no 48 – Nyéléni process: towards a global forum of food sovereignty