On the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, FIAN International reaffirms its support to social movements and small-scale food producers whose right to adequate food and nutrition is systematically violated. The human rights organization stresses that the commoditization of nature and concentration of food producing resources in but a few hands needs to halt, the same way a decentralized, autonomous and sustainable peasant farming must be promoted.
The current global food system undermines peasant farming, fishing, pastoralism and other food producing systems that feed the vast majority of the world population. FIAN International emphasizes this is enabling an increasing and aggressive land and resource grabbing, sought after by the private sector and backed by some states’ national policies, and it is hitting communities and criminalizing human rights defenders across the world.
Within this context, FIAN International, together with Civil Society Organzations and social movements, is working towards shaping the Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles, a strong and united movement towards a peoples’ agrarian reform for their access to and control over vital resources, as well as the enforcement of policies to ensure the realization of the human rights to adequate food and nutrition, water, land and territories, amongst others.
This process recently gained powerful influence at the
World Social Forum in Tunis, last March. The “
Dakar to Tunis Declaration” sets out key aspirations, is grounded in human rights, and is built around the vision of food sovereignty and the struggles of social movements.
The Global Convergence is also being built to oppose other initiatives and networks that have emerged during the last years, which propose false answers to land and resource grabbing that are based on the so-called “private-public partnerships” and “multi-stakeholder” approach, therefore treating as equal the demands of right holders and the private interests of investors – or even privileging the latter. The dismantling of corporate power, and especially transnational corporations, through binding human rights instruments is another key demand and commitment of the Convergence.
Sign up the Declaration of the Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles!
