Statement by La Via Campesina – 10 September 2025 | Bagnolet, 10.09.2025
International Day of Action Against WTO and Free Trade Agreements
10 September 2025. On this International Day of Action Against the WTO and Free Trade Agreements, La Via Campesina, representing millions of peasants, Indigenous peoples, landless workers, women, youth, and small-scale food producers around the world, reaffirms its call for a new global trade framework rooted in food sovereignty.
We rise together—against the tyranny of neoliberalism, against the false promises of free trade, against the weaponization of food trade, and in honour of all those who have struggled and sacrificed for the right to produce, distribute, and consume food in just and sustainable ways.
We remember with pain and reverence the sacrifice of South Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae, who took his life outside the WTO Ministerial in Cancun in 2003 with a placard on his chest that read: “WTO Kills Farmers.” His death was not in vain. It was a cry against a trade regime that was destroying lives, forcing peasants off their land, and stripping entire communities of their dignity and futures. Today, we carry forward Lee’s legacy and that of countless others who have resisted the violent imposition of free trade policies on rural communities.
Over the last 30 years, La Via Campesina has led and amplified countless mobilizations against trade agreements designed to benefit transnational corporations at the expense of people, ecology, and sovereignty. From Asia to Latin America, from Africa to Europe, our member organizations have fought – most times successfully – to defend local economies, fair prices, income guarantees, and access to land and seeds.
At the global level, the WTO has shown itself to be completely incapable of delivering justice for peasants and small-scale food producers. Its agricultural trade rules have only intensified inequality, depressed prices, privatized land, water and territories and opened national food systems to speculation and exploitation.
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic – and the subsequent wars and conflicts – have revealed the fragility of global supply chains and the vital importance of local food systems, the WTO continued to push for deregulation, export liberalization, and the removal of state support to small producers. Today, its dispute settlement body lies broken, its agenda stalled, and its legitimacy in deep crisis.
Yet, far from leading to its abolition, the dysfunction of the WTO has triggered a new phase of trade weaponization.
Under the newly elected Trump administration in the United States, we are witnessing a brazen use of tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) as political weapons. Trade policy is no longer just unjust – it has become overtly coercive, used to reward allies and punish dissenters, to bully nations into compliance, and to protect corporate interests under the guise of national security. This shift has deepened the disillusionment among the countries that have been targeted by punitive use of these tools.
The hope once placed in a multilateral ‘rules-based order’ has crumbled. The promises of development, equity, and market access made by the architects of neoliberal globalization lie in ruins.
Today, in occupied Palestine, especially in Gaza, the violent blockade has weaponized trade itself—denying people access to food, seeds, fuel, and life-saving goods. This colonial siege is a brutal reminder that trade, when stripped of justice, becomes a tool of domination and collective punishment.
The impunity with which these actions are carried also poses a threat to principles of multilateralism and sovereign equality among countries and therefore requires a necessary intervention from peoples’ struggles.
BUILDING AN ALTERNATIVE – ANOTHER TRADE IS POSSIBLE!
It is in this historical moment—marked by geopolitical realignment, the erosion of legitimacy in global institutions, and the undeniable failure of the neoliberal order—that La Via Campesina renews its call for a new framework for agricultural trade – based on the principles of food sovereignty.
This call is not new. We are defending multilateralism and building on decades of struggle, including the visionary but unfinished agenda of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), proposed through UNCTAD in the 1970s as a part of the decolonization process. The NIEO imagined a world where trade would serve development, not domination. But the debt crises of the 1980s and 90s, coupled with structural adjustment policies and the imposition of neoliberal reforms, forced an abandonment of that vision in favour of market liberalization.
Today, we reclaim that decolonial aspiration.
We say: another trade order is not only necessary—it is urgent.
The BRICS+ bloc may offer geopolitical alternatives to U.S. or EU hegemony, but it too has largely adopted neoliberal economic models. What we need is not new hegemons but a fundamentally new logic—a trade framework grounded in food sovereignty, agroecology, solidarity, internationalism and human rights.
Trade must be subordinated to the democratic right of peoples to define their own food and agricultural systems. It cannot be weaponized to sanction peoples or inflict collective punishment or as an instrument of war. We call for the central involvement of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and UNCTAD in shaping this new framework. These are spaces where peasants’ voices have been heard, where human rights frameworks like UNDROP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas) are being discussed, where weaponization of food is prohibited, and where food sovereignty is not dismissed as a slogan but recognized as a political, economic, and ecological necessity.
In this alternative framework, key principles must prevail: the right of countries to protect their domestic markets from unfair imports, the right to use public procurement and public stockholding to support small-scale producers, the right to set minimum support prices and supply management, the protection of local markets and informal economies—especially those operated by women and the historically oppressed communities—and the recognition that food is not a commodity, but as a right and as commons.
The rights of peasants and Indigenous peoples must be prioritized over the rights of investors. Agricultural policies must be based on agroecological principles, respect for biodiversity, and the redistribution of land and resources.
Since 2022, La Via Campesina has tirelessly built alliances, held webinars, mobilized protests, and developed policy positions that reflect these principles. In our recent July 2025 webinar, small-scale food producers, scores of activists and scholars came together to discuss this alternative trade agenda. From Africa to the Americas, Asia and Europe, there was a shared understanding that the current system is broken beyond repair, and that food sovereignty provides a coherent and actionable vision for the future.
We are not asking for reforms at the margins. We are demanding transformation at the roots.
On this 10th of September 2025, at the historic 3rd Nyeleni Global Forum being held in Kandy Srilanka, we reaffirm this collective commitment of global social movements and civil society organizations to build an alternative that is rooted in our lived realities.
We call on all our allies – peoples’ movements, Indigenous communities, and food system workers everywhere, as well as progressive governments of the Global South, to join us in this struggle.
We demand that states immediately stop negotiating agricultural trade rules in the WTO and other corporate-led ‘multi-stakeholder’ arenas. We urge governments to strengthen public policies that support peasant food systems, including price guarantees, institutional markets, land access, and investment in agroecology.
We insist that the voices of rural peoples be central to any discussions on the future of food and trade.
From Cancun to Colombo, from Dakar to Bogota, from Seoul to Geneva, the peasant struggle for food sovereignty is rising again. We carry with us the memory of Lee Kyung Hae and countless others who resisted, who fought, who dreamed. Their sacrifice was not in vain.
We are building a future where food feeds people, not profit.
Where trade serves life, not capital.
Where food sovereignty is not a demand—it is a right.
Globalize the Struggle. Globalize Hope.
Lee Kyung Hae Lives In Our Struggles!
A New Trade Framework Now!
For Food Sovereignty and For the Rights of Peoples!
Systemic Transformation is Now or Never!