Voices from the Nyéléni Regions
We prepare for the 2025 Nyéléni Global Forum as our region goes through an Israeli terrorist war, including a genocide on Gaza, a destructive war on Lebanon, and continuous attacks on Syria and Yemen, in addition to a plunderous war by the Gulf princes on Sudan.
The amount and extent of wars that the NENA region has experienced in the last 100 years and is still experiencing, has affected its food sovereignty, amongst other people’s rights in the region.
This, in addition to indirect and political intervention from the global north, has meant that the region’s food sovereignty has also been absent from the agendas of the civil society and states’ policies. Additionally, it is approached through the food security lens, while dismissing a very much needed intersectional approach to the issue.
To put it in perspective:
Food sovereignty lies in the hands of the people and their small-scale food producers, while food security is predominantly controlled by multinational corporations. Food sovereignty ensures access to nutritious, context-appropriate food in sufficient quantities, whereas food security under corporate control prioritizes profit, often failing to guarantee real access to nutrition. What we need is food sovereignty—where communities take charge of their own food systems, ensuring equitable access to healthy, local food, free from corporate exploitation.
Consequently, and while developing the Nyéléni process, we are also producing a list of expectations from and hopes for the Nyéléni Global Forum. We think that this forum is an opportunity for our region to globalize its causes and find solidarity, but also to learn from other contexts and experiences, and to pitch in with our local culture and the heritage of our decolonial movements.
In this sense, the Global Forum seems like an opportunity for our region as well as other regions, to process the rooted intersectional character of food sovereignty, and create a space of sharing knowledge, learning and radicalizing our conceptions and movements.
There is no doubt that patriarchal, capitalist, colonizing powers are launching renewed terrorist offensives on peoples of the global south. And we can only resist them through a collective grassroots and intersectional world view, which posits food sovereignty, access to basic human rights—such as access to housing, land and resources, education, health, etc.—the liberation of peoples and women, as well as personal liberties, as inalienable rights.
By Jana Nakhal, Nyeleni’s Near East and North Africa (NENA) region
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