La Via Campesina releases its position paper on wars around the world, marking 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 for La Via Campesina, when landless peasants in Brazil were killed by federal police for defending their right to agrarian reform. Thousands of kilometers away, and three decades after that tragedy, the world continues to bleed innocent peoples and families in an increasingly critical scenario marked by imperial pressure and geopolitical tensions.
Commemorating the International Day of Peasant Struggles, our movement presents the position paper: Food Sovereignty in the Face of War, Imperialism, and the Hunger of Peoples Around the World. This document addresses key elements to understand the impact of wars and imperial power on the food sovereignty of communities. It draws on important data provided by reports from the FAO Committee on Fisheries, through The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), as well as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), among others, regarding global conflicts and their effects on food systems in affected countries.
The paper notes:
“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.”
In the process of preparing our global position, La Via Campesina, as a movement where peasant organizations from around the world converge, has reflected on these issues. Over the years, the global movement has consistently denounced the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as well as the profiteering behind it.
Through destruction and military occupation, the economies of the United States, Israel, and many countries of the Global North benefit. This fuels ongoing genocides, enables countless human rights violations and crimes against humanity, often at risk of going unpunished, and disproportionately affects women and children, who are the most vulnerable.
We invite our member organizations and allied organizations to study and share this 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!