Food Sovereignty and migration

Illustration: Banksy in NY

This edition is dedicated to the issue of migration and its implications for our struggle for food sovereignty. The so-called migration crisis has taken a highly tragic turn with Trump’s new anti-migrant policy of the inhuman separation of families and the imprisonment of migrant children in concentration camps, while the deaths in the Mediterranean of refugees that attempt to enter Europe continue.

The United Nations has stated that almost 300 thousand people have had to leave their homeland and try to enter countries that reject and criminalize them. They are people without a country.
Many escape due to the violence of the wars of occupation, others do so because of the disasters of the climate crisis and many more because of the inequities of this voracious and savage capitalism system.

While a good part of society is moved by the drama of migration, especially when they see images of children drowned in the Aegean Sea or children imprisoned in concentration camps in Texas, it seems that no one knows what to do to find a solution to migration.
For our part, the Collective on Migrations of La Vía Campesina proposes to understand migration as an act of resistance by the dispossessed.

When human beings leave their families, their communities and their lands, they are challenging the system that has condemned them to disappear as peasants, as indigenous people, as women, as people of color, as youth, as another culture, as a community and as a people. So migration is an act of resistance.

By understanding migration in this way, we recognize in the struggle of La Vía Campesina the key role of migrants and their potential as actors of change.
We hope that the testimonies, articles and positions found in this edition of Nyéléni will help all of us to understand the centrality of migration in our struggles to achieve food sovereignty of our peoples.

Collective on Migrations of La Vía Campesina