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
