Below is the synthesis of the online consultation series Rural Voices: Our Climate Struggles for Food & Land held May 2025. The RURAL VOICES SERIES – first launched in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – is a continuing effort from this year’s commemoration of the March 29 Day of the Landless, which put spotlight on how today’s climate crisis has been exploited to further imperialist plunder of our lands, seas, and resources.

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Across South Asia, what is framed as progress and climate action amounts to a systematic assault on the sovereignty, health, and food systems of rural communities. Green programs are taking over the land, water, and forests of rural and Indigenous communities, deepening the hunger, displacement, and undermining of long-standing food systems worsened by the climate crisis. “Climate action” is also increasingly being used to justify land grabbing, militarization, and corporate expansion. 

False climate solutions are being peddled to downplay and disguise these assaults on land and life, like how corporate landgrabbing schemes are now packaged as carbon credit programs. Contract farming, for one, is binding farmers in Maharashtra, India into exploitative contracts that pressure farmers to cultivate climate-resilient, non-food monocrops as renewable energy sources especially in drought-prone and economically vulnerable areas. As a result, households lose access to their own food supply, soil health deteriorates, and communities become increasingly dependent on unstable market systems. 

The country also promotes renewable energy projects such as solar and wind farms as “green” interventions, but these disrupt local agriculture and take over lands that communities depend on. Tree-planting campaigns—backed by the Forest Department—are imposed on communities that actually live in and sustain the forests, and these are exposed to be ecologically irrelevant.

While corporations profit from these schemes, especially through carbon offsets that allow polluters to continue emissions elsewhere, farmers receive inadequate compensation and face greater exposure to climate-related shocks. Indian farmers and informal workers are denied any form of meaningful compensation or long-term rehabilitation amid heatwaves, as these are not yet declared as official disasters but are now becoming regular occurrences along with droughts and unseasonal rains.

In the same breath, governments in South Asia are pushing corporate-backed development aggression projects that aggravate the climate crisis. Under the banner of “national development,” the Indian government handed over vast tracts of land to extractive industries and state-backed infrastructure projects. In Jharkhand, the government installed military camps in forest villages without local consent for the protection of Adani Power’s coal mine and power station. Affected Indigenous communities reported the widespread destruction of sacred lands, forests, and watershed ecosystems, leading to the disruption of ecological balance, food insecurity, and cultural erosion.

The Sri Lankan government’s partnership with agribusinesses has enabled the takeover of fertile farmlands into plantations, and along with it the intensive use of chemical pesticides and  fertilizers. The operation of Pelwatte Sugar Company, for one, has resulted in widespread water contamination, a surge in chronic illnesses—including kidney disease and child mortality—and alarming biodiversity loss in Monaragala District, Uva Province. Women are also disproportionately affected, as they bear the responsibilities of water collection, caregiving, and food preparation. These pressures have also exacerbated food insecurity, contributed to youth migration away from agriculture, and hastened the erosion of Indigenous farming including traditional seed systems as well as medicinal knowledge. 

In the face of systemic violence and state neglect, rural communities are taking matters into their own hands. They are actively educating, organizing, and fighting back.

Across India, peasants haves continually worked to demystify climate science through local language booklets, educate communities about the dangers of carbon markets, and mobilize farmers and agricultural workers around justice-based climate responses.

Particularly in Jharkhand, tribal groups have launched campaigns to reclaim forests, defend sacred lands, and assert their rights. They have organized state-wide shutdowns, revived ethnomedicine clinics, and held legal education programs to empower communities on their constitutional rights. 

In Sri Lanka, women-led efforts have built community seed banks, revived traditional farming practices, and created learning networks that allow knowledge exchange between rural women and youth. 

From Jharkhand’s forest villages to the farmlands of Maharashtra and Sri Lanka, the call is clear: we need people-powered solutions, not corporate greenwashing. The path forward lies in amplifying these voices, exposing false solutions, and fostering cross-border solidarity to confront the climate crisis and forge a life-affirming future rooted in the rights of people to food, land, and dignity. ###

Participant organizations: National Alliance of People’s Movements (India), Torang Trust (India), Vikalpani Women’s Federation (Sri Lanka)

Written by Raevi Fojas, PCFS intern.