By:
Mafalda Galdames, Sarah Luiza de Souza Moreira, and Kelly Gutierrez of the World March of Women – Americas.
We, the more than 500 representatives from over 80 countries—comprising organizations of peasants, family farmers, traditional fishers, Indigenous peoples, landless communities, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, children, youth, consumers, ecological and urban movements—have gathered in the village of Nyéléni in Sélingué, Mali, to strengthen the global movement for food sovereignty.
The Process:
Global Forum for Food Sovereignty
Nyéléni, Sélingué, Mali, February 23-27, 2007
This World Forum for Food Sovereignty took place on the African continent, in Mali, within the Sikasso region, 140 kilometers from the capital, Bamako. It was held in a particularly beautiful location, in an open space beside a large water reservoir bearing the same name as the Sélingué community. The local community itself built the camp facilities specifically to host the delegates, including cabins for accommodations and spaces for discussions and debates. Given the economic conditions of the region, the setup was austere and rustic. However, the warmth, affection, and joy of the local people added great value to the days we spent together in this unforgettable event—one that marked the beginning of a process filled with symbolism, humility, and solidarity. The host organizations, including La Vía Campesina, the World March of Women, and other international organizations, believed in this project of life: the struggle for the food sovereignty of the peoples.
By unanimous decision of the participants, this gathering was named Nyéléni, in honor of a peasant woman who, according to legend, defied the rigid norms and customs of her community by taking on food production for her family during times of scarcity.
The first declaration, which had the power to bring together global movements committed to the defense of healthy and diverse food production, stated:
Most of us are food producers, and we are willing, capable, and determined to feed all the peoples of the world. Our heritage as food producers is fundamental to the future of humanity. This is especially true for women and Indigenous peoples, who are the creators of ancestral knowledge about food and agriculture—knowledge that is often undervalued. But this heritage, along with our ability to produce nutritious, high-quality food in abundance, is threatened and undermined by neoliberalism and global capitalism.
Since Nyéléni, the delegates who attended from different organizations and regions of the world have spread the principle of food sovereignty, incorporating it into our advocacy for peasant agriculture, small-scale fishing, environmental protection, and the defense of common goods. We understand that food sovereignty encompasses all these legitimate demands, as well as the human right to food and a dignified life.
Seventeen years ago, this Forum played a crucial role in affirming food sovereignty as a principle, building on previous processes within the WTO and later at a food sovereignty forum in Cuba, where it was proposed that FAO integrate food sovereignty into its programs. Even before this, we had been developing our proposals, but that moment in Sélingué reaffirmed this concept, giving a name to a struggle that social movements, feminist organizations, and urban feminist women had already been waging—the fight for healthy food and autonomy over its production, distribution, and consumption. This process also connected food sovereignty with the broader struggle for human rights, particularly sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to self-determination over one’s own body and reproductive choices.
Through this process of strengthening our struggles, we have collectively engaged in slow yet continuous work to raise awareness and integrate food sovereignty into popular and intellectual movements. These movements must incorporate this right into their social and economic demands, including land rights, water rights, and environmental protection, as essential components of the autonomy and sovereignty of the peoples. At the same time, we have also worked to incorporate into mixed movements the right of women to decide over their bodies, in the name of a full and dignified life.
It has been an important and ongoing struggle to assert the intrinsic link between food sovereignty and feminism. Historically, women have been responsible for ensuring food security within families, communities, and societies, yet their knowledge and traditional practices have often been overlooked. Feminist movements continue to challenge and fight against the sexual and racial division of labor, which has overburdened women’s bodies and harmed their health.
Seventeen Years Later: The Ongoing Struggle for Food Sovereignty
Today, seventeen years after that historic Forum, the Nyéléni Declaration remains as relevant as ever. Looking back over these years, we can confidently say that we have made significant progress in spreading our proposals—despite facing an adverse media system, aligned with big capital, that fails to amplify our messages and ignores the denunciations of human rights violations and patriarchal, racist, and colonialist violence that we continue to experience.
Our commitment to food sovereignty extends across continents and is sustained through practical actions, such as:
- Transmitting ancestral knowledge on how to cultivate home gardens
- Defending native and heirloom seeds
- Encouraging the exchange of products between peasant and small-scale producers
- Supporting local markets
- Preserving seasonal foods
- Promoting the production of handmade textiles
All of this is part of a cycle that requires care for nature and its biodiversity, including mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, as well as the protection of life, health, and the body-territory of women.
What Do We Mean by Sovereignty?
Sovereignty is the political will of a people to make their own decisions, freely expressing their autonomy without external interference.
Food sovereignty is the freedom and capacity of peoples and communities to exercise their right to feed themselves and produce their own food, resisting the power of transnational corporations and other forces that seek to destroy popular food systems. It is the right of every person to access quality food in sufficient quantities, in a way that respects their culture.
- The right to food is not only an individual right but also a collective right, tied to how food is produced. This includes practices that respect the environment, promote equality, and ensure access to natural resources like water, land, seeds, and local markets.
- Food sovereignty is based on principles of justice, solidarity, and cooperation, which strengthen peasant agriculture both at the household and community levels and through broader networks of cooperation.
- It is a broad and transformative proposal, advocating for agrarian reform, community control over territories, local markets, biodiversity, autonomy, health, and quality of life.
- Agricultural communities recognize the economic, social, and cultural contributions of peasant food production and women’s role in local distribution circuits. They demand the power to define policies, allocate resources, and establish research and extension programs that support these priorities.
The Role of Women in Building Food Sovereignty
The women of La Vía Campesina declare:
We are protagonists in the construction of another possible world. We are committed to defending, strengthening, and expanding organizations that fight for food sovereignty; for the right to land, water, and territory; for comprehensive agrarian reform; for the defense of seeds as the heritage of the peoples; for women’s economic sovereignty; and for the sovereignty of our bodies and territories.
Broad sectors of the women’s and feminist movements, including us from the World March of Women, support the proposals of La Vía Campesina and join this struggle.
The Home Garden: A Living Practice of Agroecology and Food Sovereignty
- The home garden is a sustainable space where common food crops grow alongside trees, flowers, and herbs with aesthetic, culinary, ritual, and medicinal purposes. It forms an ecosystem inhabited by birds, small animals, and insects that interact with the plants, generally benefiting them.
- Women and home gardens: Women take on the primary responsibility for managing, organizing, and caring for these productive spaces. They make key decisions, handle seeds, and oversee cultivation and harvests, primarily for household consumption.
- Women possess valuable ancestral knowledge, passed down through generations. This includes an understanding of edible plants, their seasonal availability, and their diverse uses, ensuring the sustainability of food systems.
This movement continues to grow, reinforcing the struggle for food sovereignty as a central element in the broader fight for social, economic, and gender justice.
The World March of Women and Food Sovereignty
Within the World March of Women, we have gone through a journey—first by accepting and defining ourselves as feminists. We have a long history within feminist movements and deeply recognize the contributions of the women who came before us, those who fought tirelessly for women’s rights. This history, which belongs to women’s and feminist movements, has been something we have worked to territorialize in our continent, the Americas—our Abya Yala.
There are many feminist struggles led by women in Abya Yala and other regions of the world. However, not all of these movements define themselves explicitly as feminist due to the territorial realities in which they exist—such as the quilombos led by women like Teresa de Benguela. From these diverse struggles, we have developed and shaped our feminisms, incorporating into our movement a popular feminism, a class-conscious feminism, and a feminism that identifies with the specific territories we inhabit. This feminism is deeply connected to the other class-based organizations we participate in within social movements. It is a feminism that is autonomous—free from public institutions, religious institutions, and committed to the fight for autonomy in all aspects.
For many years, since La Vía Campesina proposed the principle of food sovereignty to grassroots organizations, the World March of Women has aligned itself with this vision. In alliance with other organizations involved in CLOC, La Vía Campesina, and other networks dedicated to defending human rights, land, and water, we have recognized a fundamental truth: without land and water, there can be no seed production and, therefore, no free and sovereign food production. From our feminist perspective, we have contributed to these collective struggles by introducing discussions on the socialization of domestic labor, inviting women from community kitchens to engage in this reflection.
From peasant organizations to groups advocating for healthy, agrochemical-free food consumption, we have worked through the Nyéléni process to build collective visions around food sovereignty and seed protection. We have strengthened our popular feminism through women’s organizations both in rural areas and in cities, as urban women also participate in these struggles. Our movement includes rural women, peasant women, young urban women, and professional women. Therefore, our political duty is to deepen ties with environmentalist organizations, to promote the socialization of domestic labor and care work, and to encourage participation from community kitchens and other collective initiatives.
This commitment extends to the organizations we support and take part in, such as peasant women’s organizations within CLOC. Agroecology, seed protection, and food sovereignty are central pillars of peasant feminism, which has now become a permanent part of peasant organizations. This popular peasant feminism is defined by its deep-rooted identity with land and territories, by its connection to sustainable agricultural practices, local commerce, knowledge exchange, and the intergenerational transmission of farming traditions aligned with agroecology and permaculture.
What is now called agroecology has always been peasant agriculture—the agriculture that respects nature’s cycles, that understands the exhaustion of land when subjected to indiscriminate planting and excessive agrochemical use. Throughout history, this peasant wisdom has continuously evolved, advancing alongside new knowledge in agroecology, food sovereignty, popular peasant feminism, and care work. These interconnected principles are becoming increasingly intertwined in our struggles.
Thus, we are united in this feminism that defends food sovereignty, agroecology, and feminist economics. Feminist economics has been developed within class-conscious and popular feminism, reinforcing the intersections between these different feminist perspectives—class feminism, popular feminism, and community feminism. That is why we speak of feminisms, in the plural. We do not believe in a single feminism, but in many feminisms, each shaped by ideological currents that are deeply connected to territories, identities, Indigenous peoples, and the diverse cultural backgrounds of the women who form our movements.
We are also united in this feminism that defends food sovereignty, agroecology, and territorial struggles—standing against extractivism and the capitalist-patriarchal systems that prioritize profit over life. These systems exploit nature relentlessly, extracting wealth without regard for sustainability or future generations.
We have many disagreements with the capitalist system, which continues to expand, constantly seeking to dominate and destroy in pursuit of profit. One of our greatest challenges is how capital now disguises itself, painting itself green or red, in an attempt to conceal its destructive, extractivist, and violent processes. Technology is being used to advance “Agriculture 4.0,” digitizing agriculture as another tool of territorial control. These are clear challenges that demand collective resistance, solidarity, mutual respect, and the ability to confront crises with critical reflection. We must be self-critical of the processes we ourselves build, recognizing both our achievements and the aspects that need to change. It is essential to eliminate practices that reinforce capitalism and to fight for practices rooted in solidarity—practices that resist the increasing commodification of our bodies, our territories, and our natural resources.
We must also address these challenges within governmental, institutional, and global spaces. We must clearly denounce those institutions that claim to work for humanity while, in reality, serving the interests of big capital.
We make an urgent call to unite and act collectively against the capitalist system that continues to advance in a destructive and exploitative manner. It is crucial that we center solidarity, mutual respect, and self-criticism in our struggles, as only through these principles can we build a more just and sustainable future for all. The global challenges threatening our food sovereignty and social justice cannot be ignored. We must defend our land, our water, our native seeds, and the sustainable agricultural practices that have been passed down for generations.
It is also urgent to promote a feminist economy that respects the rights of women and communities and to fight against the extractivist and patriarchal system that endangers both our natural resources and our lives. This struggle is not just about preserving what we have; it is about changing the course of history—building a critical perspective that allows us to transform current systems and adopt fairer, more equitable, and more sustainable practices. We must protect our bodies, our communities, and the nature that sustains us.