Read in French/Portuguese
On the International Day of Peasant Struggles, we are not just commemorating. We speak as rural women, as peasants, as fishers and as food producers from lived realities. We are tired of a world that continues to depend on our labour while pushing us deeper into hunger, poverty, and violence. What we are facing is not a set of separate crises. War, hunger, climate disasters, land dispossession, and the control of seeds are all connected. War disrupts fuel supply chains and drives up global oil prices, which then increases the cost of transport, food production, and basic goods, pushing already struggling communities deeper into hunger and making everyday survival more expensive.
Evidently, even without gunfire war, we are already under attack. War is not just bombs and guns. War is when our land is taken. War is when our food systems are destroyed. War is when women’s bodies become battlegrounds. War is when communities are displaced and expected to survive on nothing. Across the globe and here in Africa, we are seeing how conflict is being used to break down food systems and push people further into hunger and malnutrition. We are producing food, but we are the ones going hungry. We are feeding nations, but we have no control over land, water, or seeds. Governments continue to prioritise corporations and investors over the very people who sustain life. Seed laws are tightening. Land is being grabbed. Our knowledge is being dismissed. And when we organise and resist, we are criminalised.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) already recognises our rights; our right to land, to seeds, to water, to food, to dignity, and to participation. But governments are quick to speak about rights, and slow to implement them. UNDROP cannot remain a document on paper. It must live in our communities. It must be implemented to protect our seeds, secure our land and defend us when we are criminalised.
It is essential to recognise that this is not a failure of the system. This is the system working exactly as it was designed. And as rural women and peasant farmers, we are carrying the heaviest burden. We are expected to hold households together, produce food, respond to climate disasters, and still survive economic hardship, all while being excluded from decision-making spaces. We are spoken about but rarely listened to. Despite the adversary, we are organised. We are resisting. We are building alternatives every single day through agroecology, through saving and exchanging seeds, through defending land, through protecting our African food sovereignty and through standing together across borders.
What we are calling for is clear;
We refuse a food system that prioritises profit over people.
We refuse laws that criminalise our seeds and our knowledge.
We refuse land systems that exclude women while depending on our labour.
We refuse governments that ignore us while claiming to represent us.
We are demanding land in women’s names, with real control and protection.
We are demanding the right to save, use, and share our own seeds freely.
We are demanding food systems rooted in agroecology, dignity, and justice.
We are demanding the full implementation of UNDROP at national and regional level, with rural women and peasants at the centre.
We are demanding an end to all forms of violence against rural women, whether in the home, in the fields, or through state and corporate power.
We are demanding to be at every table where decisions about land, food, climate, fishing and development are made.
There is no climate justice without food justice, and there is no food justice without the leadership of rural women. And we will continue to organise, resist, and advocate for a world where land, food, and life are not controlled by profit, but held in dignity by the people who sustain them.
