The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS) organized “Solidarity with Lumad Youth: Discussion on the Role of Indigenous Youth on Agro-Ecology” in partnership with PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP), and Save Our School (SOS) Network last October 15. This activity is one of the globally-coordinated activities for the 16 Days of Global Action on Agroecology themed “Youth March On for Agroecology and Food Sovereignty!” of PANAP.
“There is hunger amid plenty. Unless food sovereignty takes center stage in our food and agriculture policies, we are far from achieving Zero Hunger in ten or twenty or even fifty years from now,” said the PCFS official. “They are fooling themselves in believing that neoliberal globalization will take us to a hunger-free world.”
On October 16, World Hunger Day, we shall expose the failure of Zero Hunger and the SDGs: that the global hunger situation is caused by the control and domination of oppressive structures and policies on our food and agricultural systems that favor corporate interests. Let us assert food sovereignty, our power to realize our right to food and produce food, the full realization of people’s democracy in all aspects of the food and agriculture system, as the genuinely sustainable, and people-centered alternative against neoliberal globalization on food and agriculture policies.
PCFS hopes that the APF adopt into its statement to the ASEAN Summit the genuine concerns to uphold people’s sovereignty and human rights while abandoning the neoliberal strategy the local elites, TNCs, and international financial institutions have dictated the ASEAN region to take and holding accountable governments and the private sector to their commitment and actions by ensuring that civil society have meaningful participation in decision-making.
We must advance our resistance to fascist attacks and corporate plunder by strengthening peoples’ movements. Our hope comes in harnessing our movements’ energies to create structural changes in the region through our collective and militant assertion, vis-a-vis prevailing neoliberalism in ASEAN governments’ economic policy, global powers’ struggles for influence in the region, and attacks on people’s fundamental freedoms.
We reaffirm our assertion that the people’s rights to land and resources of the rural communities in the Mekong must be respected and protected, and that all forms of state repression on civil society and communities resisting land and resource grabbing must be stopped.