Below is the synthesis of Landless Voices: Land & Resistance held May 2024. LANDLESS VOICES is a series of online consultative forums where rural people’s groups can share their land issues and struggles amid the global food crisis. The outcomes of the consultation series were shared during the May 13 Speakout of the Landless and served as reference to the Rural People’s Development Agenda of the Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land and Climate Justice.
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We are the various organizations and networks representing landless peasants and farmers who are being disenfranchised of their ownership to their land.
Our communities have been subjected to various forms of land grabbing by private interests in collusion with our governments.
They have robbed us of our lives and livelihood, displacing us from our homes and pushing us to further poverty and destitution. Conversion of agricultural lands to infrastructures, palm oil plantations, settlements, mining pits, Special Economic Zones, and other so-called development projects have wreaked havoc to our environment and the rich biodiversity it hosts. The theft of our lands has trampled on our right to life, land, and food.
Drawing strength from our right to resist, we have fiercely faced political repression and military occupation. We engage in various forms of struggles in cognizance of our current circumstances and concrete conditions.
We employ land mapping as a means of social investigation wherein the results are the basis of our courses of action. We collaborate with various groups and individuals to share information and learn and support from each other. We document violence perpetrated against our communities to expose the atrocities and human rights violations perpetrated by various actors. We launch campaigns with militant actions to voice out our legitimate demands including genuine land reform and to hold our governments to account. We maximize all available legal instruments to serve the campaigns and gather all legal support. We mobilize support and resources for the collective cultivation of our lands, especially those in occupied Palestine. Through land cultivation, farmers assert their ownership of the land and protect them from being confiscated by authorities and their security forces.
Our collective struggle for our economic right to land has led us to successes. The steadfast resistance leading to confrontations with the land grabbers and their cohorts either halted or delayed projects that are detrimental to farming communities. While we recognize the different levels of dispositions and commitments within our ranks, we aim and strive to strengthen our unity and in turn our capacity to face the onslaught of land grabbing in its various forms. From here, we highly value the linking up with similar organizations and allies across the globe and international solidarity movements to lobby and advocate our issues to all available global platforms. #