Food Sovereignty in the Face of War, Imperialism, and the Hunger of Peoples Around the World
This Press Release was originally published on La Via Campesina’s website on 17 April 2026.
La Via Campesina releases its position document on wars around the world, in the framework of the 30th anniversary of the International Day of Peasant Struggles.
Bagnolet, April 17, 2026 | Today marks 30 years since the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, a tragic event that became a milestone within La Vía Campesina, where landless peasants in Brazil were killed by federal police for defending their right to agrarian reform. Kilometers away and 30 years after what happened, the world continues to bleed innocent peoples and families in an increasingly critical scenario marked by the pressure of imperial power and geopolitical tensions.
Commemorating the International Day of Peasant Struggles, our movement presents the position document: Food Sovereignty in the Face of War, Imperialism, and the Hunger of Peoples Around the World, a document that addresses key elements to understand the impact of wars and imperial power on the food sovereignty of peoples. The document has considered important figures provided by reports from the FAO Committee on Fisheries through its report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), among others, regarding global conflicts and their impacts on food systems in affected countries.
“We are living in an era of unprecedented convergence of crises. Never in recent history have so many armed conflicts erupted simultaneously across so many continents. The wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Mali, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria are not isolated tragedies. They are symptomatic eruptions of a single structurally ill global system, built on the logic of endless capital accumulation, structural racism, escalating geopolitical power tensions, resource extraction, and imperial neo-colonialist domination.”
La Via Campesina, as a movement where peasant organizations converge at the global level, has reflected on this and has constantly denounced the use of hunger as a weapon of war and the business behind it. With destruction and military occupation, the economies of the United States, Israel, and many countries of the Global North benefit; promoting ongoing genocides and carrying out an incalculable number of human rights violations and crimes against humanity, at risk of going unpunished, where women and children are the most vulnerable.
We invite our member organizations and allied organizations to study and share the document as a popular educational tool and as a contribution from the global peasantry in its own voice.
United against imperialism, neocolonialism, the criminalization of our struggles, and the dispossession of our territories!
