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We, the rural women, small-scale farmers, peasant producers, agroecology practitioners, seed custodians, farm workers, fishers, and leaders of the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) representing eleven countries of Southern Africa: Lesotho, Malawi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe gathered with policymakers, researchers, academics, human rights and gender commissioners, partners, and regional and global experts in land and food systems from 7 to 9 June 2026, under the theme “We Have Answers: Building Resilient Food Systems.”

We meet at a moment of profound urgency: climate breakdown, uncertainty, deepening food insecurity, escalating agrarian inequality, and biodiversity loss, as global tensions reshape livelihoods across our region. Yet dominant policy responses continue to offer the same prescriptions that produced the very crises we now face.

We convene within the UN International Year of the Woman Farmer, a recognition that must translate into structural transformation, not ceremonial acknowledgement. Rural women are not a “target group.” We are knowledge holders, innovators, producers, seed custodians, and leaders. We have answers.

We Affirm the Power, Knowledge and Rights of Rural Women

We open with the collective voice of our members, who have spoken with clarity, dignity, and power:

“Seed is life. Our seeds must be cared for and protected. They are the seeds of our mothers and grandmothers, passed from one generation to the next, adapted to our soils, our climates, and our communities.”

In this era of climate crisis, it is traditional seeds that resist and endure. They are not relics; they are our most powerful tool for climate resilience and food sovereignty. We preserve, multiply, and share them, and build seed banks to hold this living treasure. We promote seed sovereignty. We do not wait to be given seeds from companies or from governments that do not know our land. Seeds are our heritage, and they belong to us.

Farmer-managed seed systems, developed and adapted across generations, are among humanity’s most important living commons, the result of millennia of women’s science, labour, and custodianship. We affirm unequivocally: seed saving and seed sharing are acts of resistance, sovereignty, and ecological intelligence, indispensable to food security, climate adaptation, and the realisation of the right to food.

We Declare: Feminist Agroecology Is the Alternative

Feminist Agroecology Feeds the World

Small-scale women and peasant farmers produce the majority of food consumed across the Global South on a fraction of the land controlled by agribusiness, with constrained access to land, water, seeds, markets, and credit. This is not simply an agricultural fact. It is a political scandal and an economic injustice.

We reject the framing that positions small-scale/peasant agriculture as backward and agribusiness as development. Rural women small scale farmers are not a problem to be solved or a sector to be modernised. We are the backbone of food systems across Southern Africa, and the agents of a future that agribusiness cannot deliver.

Feminist Agroecology Is a Climate Intervention

Industrial agriculture with its chemical inputs, fossil-fuel dependency, and monocultures is a leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions, soil degradation, and ecological destruction. Feminist agroecology does the opposite. It works with ecological processes rather than against them: restoring soil health, retaining water, sequestering carbon, and maintaining biodiversity. Intercropping, composting, agroforestry, and farmer-managed seed systems are climate adaptation interventions already happening, at scale, across our eleven countries.

Climate scientists and the IPCC increasingly confirm what rural women have always known through practice: agroecology is essential to climate resilience. The question is whether policymakers will align resources and frameworks with this reality… Read in Full.