MONLAR, the Sri Lankan member organization of La Via Campesina, hosted a public symposium on August 18, 2026, on the sidelines of La Via Campesina’s South Asia regional meeting.
The event brought together peasant union leaders, researchers and lawyers from five South Asian countries to discuss the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) and its implementation nearly eight years after adoption, along with alternatives to the current global trade system that peasant movements are advancing.
Here is a brief report:
Sandun Thudugala of MONLAR opened the symposium by pointing to Sri Lanka’s recent economic crisis as a moment when existing economic and political arrangements had visibly failed – creating room to push for structural changes to the food system. UNDROP, he said, is a tool that offers a framework for such transformation.Moderator Chintaka Rajapakshe traced UNDROP’s origins to a 17-year campaign led by La Via Campesina. He noted that Ecuador, Colombia, Kenya and Nepal have already taken formal steps to adopt or legislate around the declaration. Yet, decades of liberalization and corporatization of farming under pressure from multinational corporations and international financial institutions have meant that governments routinely sign human rights declarations.
“They set aside this Declaration when it comes in conflict with lending conditions from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.”, Chintaka added.
Shalmali Guttal – a member of the UN working group responsible for tracking UNDROP’s implementation – noted that the declaration uses a broad definition of “peasant,” ensuring that UNDROP covers a diverse range of rural rights holders, including small-scale farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, forest-dependent people, agricultural workers, migrant and seasonal workers, Indigenous Peoples and others working in rural areas.
“The diversity and scale of the communities covered by UNDROP underscore the importance of this as unique policy tool because it specifically addresses topics that are missing in other international human rights instruments.”, she added.
Prof. Ravivarma Kumar, a senior counsel who served on the committee that drafted UNDROP, a senior member of the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association (KRRS) and now the International Coordination Committee member of La Via Campesina, addressed how UNDROP might translate into policy.
He called for comprehensive agrarian reforms that would recognize the tiller as the rightful owner of land, guarantee prices for all crops, and draw on local and Indigenous agricultural knowledge. He also insisted that public policies should follow a climate justice framework built on the principles of intergenerational equity, distributive justice and a polluter-pays approach, developed with direct participation from small-scale farmers and Indigenous groups.
“From a legislative sense it takes four steps to implement UNDROP, beginning with its incorporation into the constitution, followed by national legislation, provincial legislation and, finally, the issuing of supporting rules, guidelines and regulations,” he added.
The second session focused on seed rights and trade justice. Afsar Jafri, a policy analyst at GRAIN, described a legal dispute in India in which PepsiCo sued a group of potato farmers for growing a seed variety they were contractually obligated to supply exclusively to the company. Pepsi withdrew the suit in 2019, but in August 2026, India’s Supreme Court affirmed the company’s rights over the seed variety while placing the burden of proof on farmers in any future seed-rights dispute.
While elaborating on the corporate concentration in agriculture – Afsar said four companies control roughly half of the global seed market, and argued that plant variety protection regimes, particularly the 1991 version of the UPOV convention, are structured to recognize corporate breeders while restricting farmers from saving, exchanging or reusing seed from their own harvests. He said Sri Lanka, if it seeks to join UPOV, would be eligible to accede only to the 1991 version.
A Sri Lankan government official involved in drafting a plant variety protection law said the current draft, modeled on India’s law, includes clauses on compulsory licensing that could offer some protection to farmers, though it remains under pressure to align with UPOV standards.
As the discussions tapered towards trade justice, Kannaiyan Subramaniam, a peasant leader from Tamil Nadu, presented La Via Campesina’s proposal for an alternative global trade framework built around food sovereignty rather than existing World Trade Organization rules.
He said the proposal would protect public food stockholding programs, such as the one in India, from international trade challenges, and would set limits on the use of food aid as a political tool during conflicts. The framework also calls for fair pricing mechanisms and protections for seeds, water and land held as commons – he added.
In the afternoon, representatives from Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh described their countries’ experiences applying UNDROP domestically.
Nepal – as Dayalaxmi from ANPFA elaborated – has incorporated food sovereignty into its constitution and banned genetically modified seed, though a farmers’ rights law remains unapproved.
Farooq Tariq of Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee said his country’s government has pursued industrial agriculture policies that run counter to UNDROP despite having endorsed the declaration internationally, including the transfer of over six million acres of land to corporate agricultural projects.
Chukki Nanjundaswamy of the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association (KRRS) cited India’s high rates of farmer suicides and attributed this to a combination of factors, including rising indebtedness, the absence of a properly calculated minimum support price, dumping of cheap imported produce under free trade agreements, poor-quality seeds distributed by government agencies and climate change.
“To democratize and transform our food systems is a permanent struggle and a sum of the actions we take and the agitations we lead. In Karnataka, we take direct action when the states are slow in responding to our demands for a fair price. Over the last few years, we have built a direct marketing model led by our own farmers, and built our own peasant cooperative, Namdu, run by KRRS, in which farmers sell directly to consumers at prices they set themselves, cutting out middlemen. It is working well, with even the youth getting actively involved, because they see immediate results and returns. It is these concrete actions that we take on the ground which will remind the states that alternatives are possible and viable, and that with state support, it could go a long way.”, she said while insisting that UNDROP offers States a good framework on how to build public policies that work in the interests of small-scale farmers.
Golam Sorowar of the Bangladesh Agricultural Farm Labour Federation said UNDROP, in his country, has functioned more effectively as an organizing and advocacy tool than as enacted law, and that farm workers in Bangladesh still lack basic protections despite existing International Labour Organization standards.
“We use it while negotiating with State officials on how to build policies that include labour protection and fair wages to farmworkers.” he added.
The symposium allowed for further exchange between the participants and speakers, in which the recurring emphasis was on educating farming families about the existence of an instrument like UNDROP, the different Articles that specifically speak to the concerns of small-scale producers, and on evaluating how existing and future policies align with those Articles.
