April 17 was declared the International Day of Peasant Struggles in homage to the 21 rural workers and landless peasants who were massacred by the police of the state of Pará, in the municipality of El Dorado de Carajás in Brazil. This tragic event occurred in the midst of a process of struggle waged in the municipality against the landowners who usurped the lands of the peasantry. Therefore, as a gesture of rebellion and solidarity, this date is commemorated every year and continues to be part of our history and commitment to the struggle of peasants in defense of land, water, territories, human rights and to improve living conditions in the countryside and in urban-rural areas.
It is important to mention that our struggle is part of the defense of human rights and life, as stated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). In the face of capital’s advance over territories once deemed “marginal”, peasants, indigenous peoples and other rural inhabitants represent the main frontier of resistance against the hydro-agro-extractivism of transnational megacorporations.
Our territories, whose climate and biodiversity are continually being destroyed as capitalist interests impose ever more dangerous technologies without debate, consultation, or public participation. Our ways of life remain under constant threat. Political and social instability is widespread as a result of systematic assassinations, massacres, forced disappearances, high rates of femicide, imprisonment and arbitrary detention, intimidation, harassment and threats, persecution of defenders of territories, forced migration, interventions, blockades and wars against our peoples.
While a multipolar world is on the horizon, the demands for the Right to Land and the Comprehensive and Popular Agrarian Reform, Food Sovereignty and denunciations against criminalization and persecution of social leaders, remain in force and active as the fundamental basis of historical struggles that have brought victories to the peasant movement.
April 17 is a date to maintain the call for ratification of our position and banners of struggle, to reaffirm that for our diverse societies it is a continuity of the process of advocacy on Food Sovereignty through the practice of agroecology and its role in response to the climate crisis, local food production, peace, popular peasant feminism, self-determination with dignity and sovereignty of peoples. It also calls on governments to implement it through public policies and to guarantee the good living of the peasantry.
Therefore, pressure must be maintained to build an alternative systemic model that guarantees social justice and the achievement of local, regional, continental and international actions.
In the current context we are experiencing corporate grid, environmental crisis, wars, genocides, pandemics and in this complex world we must strengthen the peasant movement to reverse the weight of corporate power in favor of the rights of the social majorities of the planet. This is a collective priority that commits us all to act from the global to the local, without exception.
As social movements we have many challenges ahead of us, it is essential to unite, to seek solidarity, respect, mutual understanding, to be critical and self-critical of the processes we build. It is important that communities and peoples are aware of reaffirming at all levels the right to self-determination in solidarity and build strong networks of resistance at the local, national, continental, and global levels.
Today in the countryside, poverty is forcing peasants to migrate to other countries, one of them being the United States, whose president is currently waging a campaign against migrants to force them to return to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, we call on the peoples and governments, the United Nations organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the research centers to facilitate public policies, land, credit, that reach the vulnerable sectors, especially those of us who produce food.
In addition to being a day of resistance and peasant struggle, April 17 calls us to place agriculture at the center of the most important tasks of the moment in order to get out of extreme poverty and the crisis, improve our living conditions and build stability. The world is complex but at the same time has great possibilities of moving forward due to the importance that peasant agriculture plays in this context.
For all of the above reasons, popular movements from all over the world are calling us to the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum to transform the systems from the movement for Food Sovereignty, to expand our struggles from the peasant movements and Indigenous Peoples and to the whole society because humanity needs us, the planet Earth needs us.
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