Joint statement of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, Asian Peasant Coalition, and PAN Asia Pacific for World Hunger Day 2021 (October 16).

With the theme of its World Food Day this year – “Our actions are our future” – the UN wants rural peoples and small food producers to work together with corporations to feed the world. The UN and big business are doubling down on the deceptive narrative that they have been peddling since the UN Food Systems Summit (UN FSS).

They want us to turn a blind eye to the hunger, poverty, and oppression that the rural peoples suffer at the hands of giant transnational corporations (TNCs) in food and agriculture and in technology and finance, along with their agents from the local elite.

It is an injustice to the hundreds of millions of small food producers who feed the world but suffer the worst hunger. It is an injustice to the peasant and indigenous communities who lost their lands, livelihood, and way of life in the name of capitalist profits. It is an injustice to the rural women whose displacement further magnified their oppression and the youth whom monopoly capitalism deprived of their future.

We refuse the further perpetuation of neoliberalism in current food systems. We dispute that the solutions to today’s global health, economic, climate, and food crises lie in further intensifying production even as the structural causes of these crises remain firmly entrenched in how the world produces and consumes food. We do not trust the corporate science that backs these “solutions,” repackaged as “game-changing,” but in truth is greenwashing. We reject these entities that set the conditions of our “recovery” from the myriad of crises and steer us through the coalitions they helm.

We have had enough. We have long been #Hungry4Change, and we will bring about that change! We believe that we can build a future without hunger through the people’s action for food sovereignty.

Time and again, we have stood our ground, exposed, and opposed these neoliberal maneuvers, asserted our rights, and advanced people-led initiatives that challenge the corporate agenda in food and agriculture.

We have organized ourselves to resist land grabs, resource plunder, political repression, proxy wars and occupations, and the monopoly control in our food systems and agriculture.

We have fed and sustained our communities through collective actions with our indigenous knowledge and practices and agroecology, using the seeds, resources, and technology that we have defended and developed on our own throughout these years.

Our movement is a testimony that we can achieve the radical change of food systems. The world’s hungry and marginalized, and those who directly produce food can make such transformation possible. That is why we have organized our platform to counter the perpetuation of anti-people and corporate-led food systems.

Through the Global People’s Summit on Food Systems (GPS), we set the agenda and defined the terms of radical food systems transformation, committed to the struggle for just, equitable, healthy, sustainable, and diverse food systems, and concretized them through our Action Plans. The Four Pillars of Food Systems Transformation, namely: (1) Food sovereignty and democracy at the core of food and agricultural policies; (2) Agroecology and sustainability in production, distribution, and consumption; (3) People’s right to land, production, and resources; and (4) People’s right to adequate, safe, nutritious, and culturally-appropriate food served as our guide,

As we proclaimed in the People’s Declaration of the GPS: “…we declare that through the collective vigor and resolve of our communities and movements, we shall advance with unwavering enthusiasm the people’s demands for a food systems transformation that is truly built on justice, equitability, health, and sustainability.”

Our movements shall build our future.

End neoliberal, corporate-controlled food systems now!

Fight for people’s rights to just, equitable, healthy, sustainable, and diverse food systems!

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