Issue: LAND & NATURAL RESOURCES

FIAN International Launches Annual Report 2025: Supporting Communities Worldwide that Resist Hunger, Inequality, and Corporate Control

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

FIAN International Annual Report 2025 is out!

FIAN International has launched its 2025 Annual Report, highlighting how communities across the globe are defending the right to food amid deepening inequality, climate breakdown, corporate concentration, conflict, and shrinking democratic space.

Our report reaffirms that food systems have become key battlegrounds for justice and democracy. Through initiatives such as Supermarket Watch, FIAN and its partners exposed how corporate concentration shapes markets and undermines livelihoods. Advocacy at the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the FAO, and international human rights forums has pushed for more democratic and human rights-based food governance.

A major focus of the report is the growing concentration of land and natural resources. FIAN’s landmark publication Lords of the Land documents how the world’s ten largest transnational landowners control an area comparable to Japan, exposing the links between land grabbing, environmental destruction, and inequality. The report contributed to global debates on agrarian reform and redistributive justice ahead of ICARRD+20.

The Annual Report also highlights feminist and decolonial approaches to food sovereignty. Across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, FIAN supported feminist political education initiatives and collective organizing by rural and Indigenous women, strengthening leadership, participation, and human rights-based action in contexts shaped by conflict, patriarchy, and extractivism.

Another central theme is the defense of fishing communities’ rights. In collaboration with global fishing movements, FIAN amplified community voices in international policy spaces and documented how climate change, industrial aquaculture, and the so-called “Blue Economy” threaten coastal livelihoods and food security.

Regional chapters showcase concrete struggles and achievements worldwide. In Africa, FIAN Burkina Faso and civil society allies successfully secured the termination of the controversial Target Malaria Project after nearly a decade of advocacy, while FIAN Uganda continued supporting fishing communities in their struggle for fairer fisheries governance.

In Asia, FIAN Indonesia documented the harmful impacts of top-down food and land policies, including failures in the government’s school meal program and land dispossession linked to the Food Estate Program. In Sri Lanka, FIAN worked alongside street vendors—particularly women—to strengthen legal recognition, improve protections, and defend livelihoods against forced evictions.

In Europe, FIAN Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland sections contributed to advance momentum around a European Citizens’ Initiative on the right to food, promoted agroecology and food justice policies, and supported legal and advocacy efforts linking climate justice, intergenerational justice, and corporate accountability.

In Latin America, FIAN accompanied landmark struggles for land, Indigenous territories, and food sovereignty. This included legal victories for peasant land rights in Colombia and Ecuador, support for artisanal fishing communities in Honduras, and advocacy for Indigenous territorial demarcation and culturally appropriate school feeding programs in Brazil.

The report also underscores FIAN’s ongoing work to strengthen agroecology as a pathway toward just transitions, support human rights defenders facing criminalization and violence, and advance a binding UN treaty on transnational corporations and human rights.

“In a world marked by deepening injustices, communities continue to resist, organize, and rebuild,” the report states. “Standing in solidarity with these movements is essential to building just, sustainable, and democratic food systems for all.”

The full FIAN International 2025 Annual Report is available here

Safeguarding the Hands That Feed Us for a Better Future for All 

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria; Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria; Ana María Suárez Franco, FIAN International  

Worldwide, agricultural land is controlled by the largest 1% of giant industrial-scale farms. In the EU, an estimated 1,000 farms close every day. Roughly 9.1 million people currently active in agriculture will retire within the next decade.  Wars and conflicts displace entire populations, destroy and contaminate the territories that rural communities and Indigenous Peoples dedicate to produce food, causing and exacerbating famine and starvation.  

The way land is cultivated today will determine whether tomorrow’s generations inherit healthy soil, clean water, biodiversity, and vital rural communities. The rights of peasants and Indigenous Peoples are therefore not only a matter of the present, but  are also central to intra- and intergenerational justice and the human rights of future generations.  

Young People Struggle to Farm   

Young people face major structural barriers to farming, with access to and control over land as the most critical.  Concentration and speculation push prices beyond reach, especially for those who cannot inherit. Growing competition for agricultural land – from investors, energy production, and large infrastructure projects – squeezes agriculture, particularly small-scale and family farming, out of the landscape.  Powerful retailers and corporate actors impose prices that do not cover production costs, extracting value from farmers and making full-time farming economically impossible, forcing many into precarious part-time work or debt.  Rising costs for oil and fertilizers intensified by war, land concentration and speculation further deepen existing inequalities, especially for small food producers.  

The education system makes problems worse. In many countries, agroecological training is scarce. Cooperatives and collectively run farms face administrative hurdles and lack structural support. Political participation is too often symbolic: young farmers have few meaningful channels to co-decide policy. Women and gender diverse people face oppression through patriarchal inheritance systems, structural discrimination, and the systemic invisibilisation of unpaid care work. In contexts of war, occupation or conflict, those resisting– navigating trauma and subordinated to disrupted or colonized administration- face even larger challenges and carry increased burdens of care and survival. 

Land and territories, Knowledge, and the Human Rights of Future Generations  

The consequences are intergenerational. Land, water and forests cannot be treated as speculative assets because their fertility, ecology, biodiversity and social function unfold over generations. The rights to land and water, as recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), are intergenerational rights. When current oppressive systems dismantle peasant, fisher, pastoralist, and Indigenous food systems, they leave future generations with depleted soils, destroyed biodiversity, fragmented knowledge systems, and corporate-controlled seed and land markets- undermining their ability to realize their right to food. 

Agroecological farms and other local food systems, by contrast, are pioneers for climate resilience and care for nature. They store carbon, regenerate soil, enhance biodiversity, and buffer the impacts of extreme weather. Losing them is not only a social loss; it is a blow to climate adaptation and to the right of future generations to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Protecting peasants, rural communities, and Indigenous Peoples today, means safeguarding ecological cycles, seed diversity, and knowledge that cannot be rebuilt from one generation to the next. 

The Right to Food Is the Right to Decide  

Realizing the right to food requires a political transformation to overcome injustices and redistribute power, ensuring the conditions that people need to practice agroecology and achieve food sovereignty. Ecological, social, and political dimensions are deeply intertwined: justice and peace, the right to land, seeds, a fair income and self-determination lie at the heart of any sustainable future.  

Peasant rights, as recognized in UNDROP, provide a normative compass for this transformation. They stand in opposition to violence and to the dominant industrial food regime, which concentrates power, displaces rural communities, pushes farmers into debt, and shifts responsibility for ending hunger away from States and toward corporations. Governments must fulfill their obligations to protect, respect, and fulfil the right to food and all connected rights through public policies that serve people.  

That means reshaping land governance with anti-speculative laws, capping land concentration, ensuring liability for land grabbers, and building public land funds for newcomers – guided by common-good and public interest criteria. Land should be in the hands of those who work and nurture it and feed the world.   

This means acting on these urgent issues: 

  • Fair incomes are critical. Prices must cover production costs. Public support should prioritize peasant farms and local small food producers over agribusiness and retailer dominance.  
  • Social protection must include all farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and workers, including seasonal and informal labor. Care work, predominantly carried out by women, must be made visible, recognized, valued and redistributed.  
  • Agricultural policy, like the European CAP, needs a reset. It must move away from per-hectare payments that penalize small farms and ignore newcomers and instead design policies accessible to all and reward agroecological practices and the provision of public goods.  
  • Knowledge is a public good. We need agroecological education embedded in territories, such as farmer-to-farmer learning, and mentoring that passes on the skills and wisdom built over decades.   
  • Democracy must be real. Young farmers need genuine co-decision space and women and gender-diverse people need targeted pathways into leadership free from fear and discrimination.  
  • Local markets should be strengthened to keep value in communities and reduce export dependency, while engaging globally for fair, solidarity-based trade.   
  • In situations of war and conflict, seeds and traditional knowledge must be safeguarded for the reconstruction of disrupted food systems. Weaponization of food, water, and land must end! …Wars must stop!  

Listen to and protect the growing youth movement in farming and in other rural constituencies. Their message is clear: defend land and territories as a common good, invest in agroecology, and open doors for those who want to farm.  The rights of future generations begin with the rights of rural communities and Indigenous Peoples today. Respect their life!  

For more information, please contact FIAN International Secretary General Ana Maria Suarez Franco suarez-franco@fian.org, Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria elisabeth.jost@fian.at; or Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria.  naomi.reinschmidt@viacampesina.at 

IPC releases its position paper on agrarian reform ahead ICARRD+20

Posted on by Tom

Twenty years after the first ICARRD, land, water, forests and oceans are increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporations and financial actors, driving dispossession, inequality and ecological collapse. Small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, fishers, rural women and workers continue to be excluded from their territories and decision-making spaces.

The IPC urges governments to move beyond voluntary commitments and adopt binding, measurable actions to ensure redistributive land reform, equitable access to natural resources, democratic governance, and agroecological rural development. Without secure collective rights to land and territories, there can be no food sovereignty, no just transition, and no lasting peace. At ICARRD+20, IPC brings forward a clear political vision to reclaim land and dignity worldwide.

Download here

3rd Nyéléni forum: Building global solidarity for systemic transformation

Posted on by Tom

From 6 to 13 September 2025, the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka hosted the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum. Small-scale food producers, consumers, Indigenous Peoples, trade unions, human rights defenders, climate and health justice advocates, urban poor communities, women and gender-diverse groups, practitioners of the social and solidarity economy, scholars, artists and other representatives from grassroots movements and civil society organizations gathered at the National Institute of Co-operative Development. Together, they built a Common Political Action Agenda (CPAA) for systemic transformation towards economic, social, gender, racial and environmental justice.

Over the years, the Nyéléni process has enabled collective movement building, offering a space where grassroots movements share struggles, analyse trends, and work together toward common solutions. Building on the legacies of the first and second Nyéléni fora, both held in Mali, this third forum expanded its reach by joining forces with the climate justice, people’s health, and social solidarity economy movements.

Reflecting its diversity, the forum brought together participants from all regions of the world, with a team of 72 volunteer interpreters organised by the collective COATI, working tirelessly to ensure language justice and interpretation into 18 official languages.

At its core, the forum reaffirmed that food sovereignty is inseparable from global solidarity. From Palestine to Congo, from Haiti to Sudan and beyond, participants voiced their commitment to resist oppression in all its forms and to build a world rooted in dignity, justice, and care. Standing with Palestine — and with all peoples facing occupation, war, and dispossession— was recognized as a shared responsibility and a reflection of the movement’s collective vision of justice.

The forum culminated in the acclamation of the Kandy declaration and the anticipation of an enriched CPAA, both intended to serve as a political compass guiding the actions and vision of movements worldwide striving for food sovereignty and justice.

This edition of the Nyéléni newsletter shares a selection of the forum’s highlights, capturing several of the participants’ perspectives. As the Kandy declaration states: “Across all the diversities we represent—to strengthen our struggles – we are raising our voices together, declaring: Systemic Transformation—Now and Forever!”

IPC for Food Sovereignty, Transnational Institute (TNI)    

Illustration: Mural created by the Fearless Collective during the 3rd Nyéléni Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Click here to download the English editionNyeleni_Newsletter_Num_62_EN (pdf) or read it directly on the website!          

For any further information, contact info@nyeleni.org – www.nyeleni.org

Fisher peoples denounce false climate solutions

Posted on by Tom

Despite binding obligations under international human rights and environmental law, states consistently fail to protect the rights of fisher peoples. Instead of addressing the root causes of the climate crisis, governments continue to promote so-called climate change solutions that entrench inequality and dispossession.

Ahead of the summit – held in parallel to the official UN Climate Change Conference – a new report by FIAN International and the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), Rising Tides, Shrinking Coasts, and Sinking Rights: Climate Crisis and the Struggles of Fisher Peoples, reveals how the climate crisis is undermining the livelihoods, food systems, and cultures of millions of fisher peoples and coastal communities.

Based on ten case studies from Bangladesh, Belize, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, the report demonstrates that the climate crisis is already a human rights emergency. Across all regions, fisher peoples, collectors, and coastal communities report systematic violations of their rights to food and nutrition, territories, housing, health, and culture.

Fishing and coastal communities have already made many concessions to their governments on access to fisheries. Now they are on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe and they demand real solutions. This is a defining moment for how this global resource – the ocean, lakes and rivers – are managed for future generations.

Right to food and nutrition under threat

Millions of livelihoods are threatened by a range of false climate change solutions, ranging from Marine Protected Areas that exclude traditional fishers and carbon credit schemes that enable resource grabbing, to industrial aquaculture promoted under the guise of food security or climate resilience and large-scale infrastructure projects that serve corporate interests.

“Carbon credit projects are being sold as climate solutions but in reality they displace fishing communities and privatize the mangroves that sustain life. In Thailand, corporations now plant monoculture mangroves for carbon profit while erasing the diverse ecosystems and community rights that have protected these coasts for generations,” said Ravadee Prasertcharoensuk from Sustainable Development Foundation, Thailand, a national member of WFFP.

“Under the banner of ‘blue carbon,’ the state hands over public lands to private investors, leaving only 20 percent of the benefits to the people who have lived and cared for these forests. Climate justice cannot be built on exclusion and greenwashing—it begins with restoring community control and recognizing that the real climate custodians are the people of the mangroves.

The report reveals how core elements of the right to food and nutrition – availability, accessibility, adequacy, and sustainability – are increasingly under threat. As ecosystems collapse under climate change and fish stocks decline, fisher peoples who have long acted as guardians of biodiversity and coastal ecosystem, and as providers of nutritious food, are being displaced from their territories and deprived of their livelihoods.

Many are now forced into precarious forms of labor or are made dependent on inadequate and inconsistent external aid. This further undermines both their right to food and nutrition and their food sovereignty.

Despite the worsening crisis, states – often in close partnership with private corporations – continue to exclude fisher peoples from climate policy and decision-making. Instead of supporting community-led adaptation strategies grounded in human rights and local knowledge, they continue to promote top-down interventions that exacerbate inequality and marginalization.

A call for rights-based climate action

For decades, the peoples of the sea and the mangroves have resisted the theft of our lands and the destruction of our ecosystems. In Ecuador, we have replanted mangroves, defended our coasts, and demanded justice for the social and ecological debt owed to our communities.

“From the womb of the mangrove and the sea,” said Líder Góngora, director of Coordinadora Nacional para la Defensa del Ecosistema Manglar in Ecuador, “we, the gatherers and fisher peoples, have been restoring the mangrove ecosystem – a national public treasure and the heart of our life and culture – through our own socio-ecological efforts since the late 1980s.”

“Our struggle is collective. It rises in defiance of the criminal shrimp industry in Ecuador and across the world. We defend our living spaces, our legends, and our ancestral stories rooted in the marine territories that sustain us.”

True restoration means restitution: returning stolen territories and protecting the peoples who have cared for them with love and resilience for generations.

FIAN International and WFFP urge all states and intergovernmental organizations to fulfil their human rights obligations, including under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.

Genuine solutions must recognize fisher peoples as rights-holders, knowledge-holders, and key actors in the struggle for climate justice, food sovereignty, and the protection of aquatic ecosystems.

Download report here.

For more information please contact Yifang Slot-Tang slot-tang@fian.org

International community must stop weaponization of food and starvation in Gaza

Posted on by fredsaxo

By blocking 116,000 metric tonnes of food at its border with Gaza – enough to provide basic rations for one million people for four months – Israel and its supporters violate their obligation to respect the right to food for the Palestinian population, impeding access to adequate food needed for survival and a life of dignity.

No one in Gaza has access to sufficient food and water. Some, including young children, have already starved to death with thousands facing acute malnutrition. Gaza’s agricultural infrastructure and crops have been decimated, and agricultural systems have almost collapsed. Severe fuel restrictions have crippled water infrastructure and electricity supply, leaving only limited power from solar panels and generators.

Food prices in the Gaza Strip have surged by 1,400 percent since the culmination of the last ceasefire, making it nearly impossible for affected communities to secure affordable food. This crisis impacts not only the current population but also severely threatens future generations’ health and other related rights.

Currently, residents in Gaza rely primarily on canned vegetables, rice, pasta, and lentils, as staples like meat, milk, cheese, and fruit have all but disappeared. The result is a significant deficiency in both the quantity and quality of food needed to fulfill their right to adequate food and nutrition. Children are going to bed starving, according to the UN.

This dire escalation stems not only from recent hostilities but also from Israeli occupation, systemic oppression and longstanding human rights violations of the Palestinian people. These include the destruction of food and health infrastructure, restricting water supplies, environmental destruction and other violations of economic, social, and cultural rights – as well as the right to self-determination. These ongoing violations have precipitated a food and health catastrophe that the international community has allowed to persist, breaching its obligations to ensure the right to food within and beyond their borders and for present and future generations.

The international community must act to redress this violation, adopting all necessary measures to prevent the weaponization of food and uphold the rights of the people in Gaza. States should immediately cease any support — be it military, economic, or political — to Israel and the transnational corporations complicit in this ongoing genocide.

In the short term, nations are urged to deploy diplomatic efforts to facilitate the delivery of food supplies currently blocked at the border. However, these measures alone are far from sufficient. The international community must restore local food systems and infrastructure in Gaza, respect the Palestinian’s right to self-determination and ensure access to food, remedy and justice. It is impossible to realize human rights and exercise food sovereignty in the context of settler colonialism and occupation.

The establishment of the Hague Group is a positive step towards addressing this crisis, but additional states must join this initiative and immediately take effective actions to ensure justice and peace for the Palestinian people.

For more information or media queries contact Ana María Suárez Franco: suarez-franco@fian.org

 

 

UPR: Malawi must protect Phanga village community

Posted on by fredsaxo

The report builds on the previous report submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and highlights the current situation of the affected community members who have returned to Phanga village in the central Malawi district of Dedza a decade after they were forcefully evicted.

The community members’ land was sold to Crown Plantations, a Southern African company, but was never exploited by the company and was subsequently sold by village chiefs to several new owners. The affected community members contest these transactions and claim they are the original owners, under traditional customary ownership rules.

“Community members in Phanga village, have shown the courage to defend their human rights by deciding to retake their land and defend it,” says Tobias Jere, Project manager at the Center for Social Concern.

One of the key recommendations provided by the UN ESCR Committee requires the State of Malawi to:

“Accelerate the implementation of comprehensive land titling and registration systems to secure titles for individual and communal landowners, promptly resolve overlapping claims through transparent mechanisms, and pay special attention to Phanga village community members in Dedza district.”

Valentin Hategekimana, Africa Coordinator at FIAN International says it is crucial that the Malawi state implements the UN ESCR Committee recommendation to ensure that the community members in Phanga village are adequately compensated.

“They must be protected from any further forced evictions and their customary rights over their land must be protected,” he adds.

Read the full UPR parallel report on Malawi here.

For more information, please contact Valentin Hategekimana hategekimana@fian.org

All community members should receive compensation from Kaweri Coffee

Posted on by fredsaxo

In January 2025 the government of Uganda compensated 54 plaintiffs (representing almost 550 evictees). This was a first step towards putting into effect a Kampala High Court ordered consent for compensation. The whole case concerned 401 plaintiffs (representing approximately 4,000 evictees); 143 of them rejected the amount offered as being far below the value of their lost land belongings, and their suffering due to the eviction and violence and are continuing their legal battle.

“What we encountered since 2001 is an injustice and violence due to the loss of our land. Those of us who chose to continue the battle in the court will do so until justice is done,” says Peter Kayiira, one of the complainants.

Powerful advocacy

Over the last decade of their struggle, and in a remarkable display of creativity and resilience, women evictees formed an advocacy group using art to amplify their message. They composed songs and skits that captured the difficult realities of their struggle and their demands for justice.

These performances served as a unique way to communicate their plight to decision-makers, making their voices heard in a way that resonated deeply with both the local community and the broader audience. They also galvanized support for their cause, proving that advocacy can take many forms and be as powerful as it is creative.

This court-ordered compensation is a step forward but also a drop in the ocean. The lives of the evictees have worsened in the last 23 years, and many are destitute. At the same time Kaweri Coffee Plantation Ltd., a subsidiary of the Hamburg based Neumann Kaffee Gruppe continues to make profits.

“We have suffered a lot; we lost everything – this compensation is symbolic and I am in poverty conditions so I can’t refuse it,” said one community member.

FIAN has been supporting the evictees in advocacy and monitoring work since the beginning of their struggle, submitting regular reports to UN human rights mechanisms (ESCR/CEDAW/UPR) and assisting with the making of a documentary.

“The Ugandan government must ensure that the rights of the evictees are restored and adequate legal remedies and compensation are provided as suggested by the UN ESCR committee,” says Valentin Hategekimana, Africa Coordinator at FIAN International

Together with other allies, FIAN will continue to support the evictees in their struggle for justice.

Read more about the Kaweri case in this factsheet

For more information, please contact Valentin Hategekimana hategekimana@fian.org

Let's talk about agroecological transitions    

Posted on by fredsaxo

The impacts of the triple planetary crises mean that we can no longer maintain the status quo. The world urgently needs a just transition towards fair, healthy, and sustainable food systems. To support this process, we present a new series of popular education materials on agroecological transitions.  

The series is produced by FIAN Ecuador and based on a FIAN International briefing paper. It explores just transitions from the perspective of human rights and agroecology and has been translated to Spanish, English, Portuguese and German, and shared by FIAN International’s national sections.  

It argues that only a systemic, multisectoral and human rights-based transition can guarantee a safe, sustainable, and just future for all. A just transition must address socio-economic inequalities, including gender inequalities and transform processes of marginalization and exploitation.        

“UNDROP is a key instrument to promote a just transition to agroecology. Indigenous Peoples, peasants, fisher peoples, pastoralists, and other rural people must be recognized, and their rights must be respected, protected and fulfilled,” says the paper’s author Sibylle Dirren. “Small-scale food producers can only practice agroecology if their access to and control over land and other natural resources is ensured.”  

Drawing upon the arguments of United Nations experts and concrete experiences from diverse communities, the briefing outlines specific legal and policy actions that governments can take to facilitate a just transition to agroecology.    

For more information please contact Amanda Cordova Gonzales at cordova-gonzales@fian.org

 

The Role of Local Governments in Constructing Human Rights-based Food Systems

Posted on by fredsaxo

This study is based on in-depth conversations with members and associated organizations of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition and FIAN national sections from Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Indonesia, Nepal, India, and Palestine (Gaza Strip).

Based on their experiences and perspectives, discusses opportunities for local governments to adopt progressive policies and laws around food systems. It provides examples of where this has happened and examines the challenges encountered as well as local citizens’ participation and international engagement.

Local policies can directly impact how human rights are operationalized. These policies and policy spaces must be held to the same standards that are expected of national government. Civil society can work closely with local governments, bringing concrete demands and offering tangible grassroots support.