Today, on International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) stands in solidarity with all peasants who are under attack—especially rural women across Africa and the Global South. Today, we remember those who were killed for defending land, food, and life itself. It is a day born from blood and resistance—a reminder that our rights have never been handed to us, but have always been fought for. It reflects the daily realities we face—land dispossession, criminalisation, corporate control over seeds, lack of water, and systematic exclusion from decision-making. 

As rural women, we know that the struggles of the past live on in our daily lives. The violence may wear different faces—corporate land grabs, restrictive seed laws, climate collapse—but the purpose remains the same: to push us off the land, strip us of power, and silence our resistance. In many communities, we are still denied the right to own land with water, to save and exchange our own seeds, and to participate in decisions about agricultural systems. We carry the burden of hunger, climate disasters, and economic exploitation—but we are still not recognised or supported across all sectors

We carry generations of knowledge. We have always known how to grow food, share seeds, care for the land, and raise our families in dignity. But today, our rights are under threat. Corporations want to control what we plant. Investors want to take the land we depend on. Laws are being written to criminalise our traditions and push us out. At the same time, we are excluded from land ownership, from leadership and from policy spaces. We are made invisible in the places where decisions are made—yet we are the ones who feel the consequences first and hardest.

Enough!

We demand secure land rights and access to land with water for women—land in our names, backed by real power and protection. We demand the freedom to save, share, and grow our own seeds without corporate interference or restrictive laws. We demand a food system that honours our labour, nourishes our people, and prioritises justice over profit. We demand an end to all forms of violence against rural women, from domestic abuse to state-sanctioned evictions, repression, and criminalisation. We demand a seat at every table where decisions about land, food, seeds, and climate are made—because no policy is just unless we shape it.. We call on states to stop weaponising hunger and landlessness against our communities and to fully implement UNDROP without delay with rural women at the centre, not the margins.

We remind the world that climate justice, food justice, and gender justice are inseparable. When we talk about land grabs, we are also talking about rape, displacement, and poverty. When we speak of seed laws, we are also speaking of control over women’s knowledge and labour. When we fight for peasant women’s rights, we are fighting for bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and the right to define our own futures. We call on all global movements to stand beside us—not with charity but in solidarity.