In a joint statement, the groups stressed that the rural people have been among the most vulnerable to the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The statement was released to mark the annual “Day of the Landless”, which various groups use as an event to highlight the issues on and struggles for land of peasant communities.
The neglect of public health, combined with the rural people’s overall destitution due to fundamentally wrong economic and agrarian programs, neoliberal attacks against agriculture, and massive land and resource grabbing, expose the landless and rural poor to extreme peril when pandemics flare up.
This is the second in a three-part series of features on global landlessness. | Landlessness as a crucial issue of our time is just as unseen as the landless rural peoples of the world
This is the first in a three-part series of features on global landlessness. While landlessness has been a centuries-old crisis brewing in the global countryside, it’s exacerbated today by a growing corporate appetite for land, nonstop wars of aggression in rural areas of some regions, and extreme climate-related events.
The global economy is dipping into recession as a global pandemic and overproduction in oil trigger the weaknesses of a globalized neoliberal economy, and the most vulnerable are the rural poor and landless. Neoliberal actors want the world to turn a blind eye to landlessness and the rural landless peoples, but the landless will always take a stand. Landless peoples of the world, we will rise!
As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to wreak havoc on thousands of lives and millions of livelihoods across the world, we call on governments to exert all efforts to ensure the food security of the people, especially those from the most vulnerable sectors. We also urge that initiatives to monitor and test for possible coronavirus infection be made available to those in the rural communities and afford the people timely treatment. We note that while the new coronavirus could infect and impact anyone, it must be emphasized that the effects of the pandemic are far more magnified for the poor, including the rural people. Lastly, we warn against using the current public health crisis to legitimize more state repression of the people’s fundamental rights.