UNCTAD 14 presents a free market driven neoliberal trade paradigm which stands in stark contrast to the food sovereignty paradigm where smallholder farmers are social, cultural, and historical actors that make decisions based on a diversity of personal, ethical, and cultural factors and not just based on profit, business and markets.

Message of solidarity and indignation from the Africa Region 1 of La Via Campesina after our comrades Alberto Gomez and Fatimatou Hima have been expelled from the Kinshasa airport, DRC, respectively in the evening of the 29th of June and 1st of July 2012.

The militants put up posters throughout denouncing the abusive practice of using agrochemicals, which poison the food of the Brazilian population.

Community distressed after four of their leaders, including the village chief, are arrested.

(Jakarta, 2 March 2012) April 17 is the International Day of Peasant Struggle, commemorating the massacre of 19 peasants struggling for land and justice in Brazil in 1996. Every year on that day actions take place around the world in defence of peasants and small-scale farmers struggling for their rights.

The first objective is to make the hands-on struggle led by small-scale farmers’ organisations and/or local groups, supported by other organisations, partners, allies, visible.

Geneva, 11 March 2012

Direct action ‘is the only weapon of the oppressed people of the world to end all forms of oppression in the world,’ La Via Campesina has said in a statement issued at COP17. The statement also demands the implementation of the Cochabamba people’s global agreement on climate and reiterates the group’s solutions to the climate crisis.

During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2011, social movements, organizations of small food producers and other CSOs released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 650 organizations have already endorsed it. If your organization has not signed on yet and would also like to support this appeal, please do so before 7 October 2011.

You are invited to sign the following petition, which was drafted by farmers’ organisations, NGOs, religious organisations, unions and other social movements gathered in Dakar for the World Social Forum 2011.

Although a moratorium on ‘Terminator’ technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity four years ago, proposals to develop and commercialise ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ are ‘back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry’, writes Via Campesina. Ending the moratorium on ‘Terminator’ crops, modified to produce sterile seeds, poses threats to both food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity, Via Campesina warns.

reports back on the amendment of a resolution on farmers' rights at an FAO treaty meeting on the use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture held in Tunisia.

The entire world is in crisis, a crisis with multiple dimensions. There is a food crisis, an energy crisis, a climate crisis and a financial crisis. The solutions put forth by Power – more free trade, more GMOs, etc. – purposefully ignore the fact that the crisis is a product of the capitalist system and of neoliberalism, and they will only worsen its impacts. To find real solutions, in this open letter argues we need to look toward Food Sovereignty.