File Photo: Social Movements protest at the UNFCC in Bali, 2007. (LVC Archives)
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) hosted a high-level forum in Rome on the 12th of May on the topic of tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation through the right to food.
The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) was also present at the forum to represent the small-scale food producers’ movements. Zainal Arifin Fuat, who is a member of the IPC’s Working Group on Land, Water and Territories, drew attention to the real challenges posed by corporate-led false solutions to climate and ecological crises and how they threaten the right to land and territories.
“We are in a time of multiple crises and existential danger for peace and humanity: hunger crisis, climate and ecosystem crisis, biodiversity crisis, economic and social crisis, and geopolitical crisis. The Report of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2024 has confirmed that the world is still far off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger. The global prevalence of undernourishment persists at nearly the same level for three consecutive years after COVID-19,” Zainal, who is also on the International Coordinating Committee of La Via Campesina and a senior leader of the Indonesian Peasants’ Union (SPI), said.
The intervention also highlighted the five driving factors of this situation: land and commons grabbing, increasing land concentration, creation of land markets or land banks, large-scale chemical agriculture, and liberalization of trade and investment policies that prioritize global commodity production and extractivist industries.These factors have dispossessed peasants, rural communities, and Indigenous People, and have also massively contributed to climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction.
“In recent years, false solutions to climate change and ecological destruction have emerged, such as carbon markets, the 30×30 conservation target, biodiversity offsets, and even using genetic engineering as climate-smart agriculture seeds. These so-called solutions are pushed instead of peasant agroecology, which can and is cooling the planet. Such corporate-led solutions are threatening to the right to land and territories of rural people and Indigenous Peoples,” Zainal added.
Social movements have long maintained that the food systems of small-scale food producers – such as peasants, smallholder farmers, small-scale fisheries, pastoralists, forest dwellers, youth, rural women, Indigenous Peoples, and mountain farmers, especially those implementing agroecology – are critical for feeding the world. They are the stewards of land, territories, and ecosystems. They contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and biodiversity protection. However, these food systems depend on access to and control (ownership) over land, fisheries, forests, and other natural resources.
IPC also took the opportunity to reinforce the importance of organizing a global, inter-governmental conference on these issues. While addressing the Chair, Zainal said:
“Based on this situation, it is a good and positive sign that the Committee on World Food Security and the FAO Council have endorsed Colombia’s proposal for a second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in February 2026. There is also interconnection between ICARRD, the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, the United Nations Decade for Family Farming, and the topic of this panel.”
He also added that by implementing agrarian reform and redistributive land policies, it is possible to produce more, but also to produce more diverse and better-quality products in a more sustainable manner, revitalize the rural economies, and create rural jobs.
La Via Campesina and other members of the IPC firmly believe that redistributive land policies are a key solution to current food and ecological crises. The 2024 report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also echoes this view. The report explicitly calls on states to implement agrarian reform measures that promote more equitable land and resource distribution in line with human rights obligations, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and rural communities in the context of human rights-based climate policies.
“Hence, the dialogue to be had at the proposed ICARRD+20 must also link FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure with other instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),” Zainal said.
At the high-level forum, social movements also emphasized that ICARRD+20 should also promote and support participatory, multisectoral national public policy processes that respond to territorial realities, taking into account the diversity of historical and sociocultural contexts. It was also pointed out that the conference should be a space of convergence to tackle the interconnected food and environmental crises. The social movement interventions made it clear that the results of the proposed conference must be fed back to the CFS, FAO, and the Rio Conventions.
Addressing the Brazilian government in the room, social movements also emphasized that the upcoming COP30 in Brazil can also build concrete proposals towards ICARRD+20, as well as to the Global Alliance Against Poverty and Hunger, by putting the issue of land distribution and land use at the heart of human rights-based approaches in tackling the pressing challenges confronting the world today.