Resistance and hope: How the Nyéléni Forum and the Peoples’ Summit empower peasant struggles

In the face of intersecting climate, food and inequality crises, resistance led by peasants and Indigenous Peoples is gaining renewed global momentum. The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) emerged in 2018 as an essential tool for asserting land, food and environmental justice. From the Nyéléni process for Food Sovereignty, Global Justice and System Change to the strategic Peoples’ Summit process ahead of and during COP30, movements across the globe are converging with demands for system change. 

UNDROP: a legal tool in the hands of the oppressed

Adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2018, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants is more than a symbolic text — it’s a hard-won milestone forged by decades of grassroots mobilisation, led largely by La Via Campesina and its allies. At its core, UNDROP recognises peasants as political actors with collective rights to land, seeds, water, biodiversity and traditional knowledge. It affirms that these rights are essential not only for the dignity of rural communities but for achieving food sovereignty, environmental sustainability and climate justice.

Importantly, if UNDROP can be a tool for developing new policy initiatives in line with the language and provisions of the Declaration – it is not just for courts and policymakers — it’s a pedagogical tool too. Movements are using it to educate their communities, articulate their demands in international fora and pressure governments to integrate its principles into national legislation as it can be applied across countries. It turns international law into a living document, rooted in lived struggles.

In the context of today’s converging crises — climate breakdown, militarised resource grabs and energy transition injustices — UNDROP acts as a shield and a sword. It provides a framework to resist the criminalisation of peasants and other small scale food producers as well as the expansion of agribusiness and carbon markets into peasant and Indigenous Peoples’ territories. UNDROP is being invoked in local struggles to demand access to land, protect seeds from corporate patenting and stop exploitative greenwashing projects that displace communities under the guise of “sustainability” or so-called “nature-based solutions”.

Nyéléni process: building power from the bottom up to change the system

UNDROP’s power lies in the hands of organisations with the will and the work to build a fairer and more unified world — and nowhere is this more evident than in the Nyéléni process for Food Sovereignty, Global Justice and System Change. The process is organising towards a 3rd Global Nyéléni Forum in September 2025: a call from the robust global food sovereignty movement that has emerged over the last two decades and gained significant political recognition at national and international levels. 

The first Forum took place in the village of Sélingué, in southern Mail, in 2007. It was named after Nyéléni, a woman of legend in rural Mali known for domesticating fonio and samio (grains native to the West Africa region) and for being a trailblazer who resisted social discrimination and refused marriage. She even worked the land to become a better farmer than the majority of male farmers around her. 

A second Nyéléni Forum was held in 2015 where movements agreed on a common vision and understanding of agroecology as well as common strategies to promote and defend it from corporate capture.

Since the first Nyéléni Forum, the Food Sovereignty movement has achieved many victories – the democratic reform of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to give civil society a voice in that foremost multilateral space for food policy (2009), the UNDROP (2018) or the recognition by experts at the CFS of agroecology as the best pathway to resolving environmental, hunger, health and inequality crises (2019). 

In 2023 the food sovereignty movement called for a process to build an intersectional social movements-based common political action agenda for food sovereignty, global justice, and system change with a milestone in the 3rd Global Nyéléni Forum in September 2025 in Sri Lanka. For this process, UNDROP represents a key tool to defend human and peoples’ rights, including the right to access and control their territories and their commons, peace, democracy and resist corporate power and overcome all forms of oppression.

Toward the Peoples’ Summit and a just transition rooted in food sovereignty

The Nyéléni Forums’ declarations and strategy documents serve as collective roadmaps that inform global advocacy and local organising alike.

This year, 2025, the Nyéléni forum is also embedded in the Peoples’ Summit process, allowing movements to organise and align shared agendas ahead of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil. Spearheaded by grassroots organisations and social movements, the Peoples’ Summit seeks to reclaim the climate debate during COP30 from elite, corporate-dominated negotiations.

Rather than relying on empty promises of net zero and carbon offset markets that put intense pressure on land in the Global South and turn soil and territories into monocultures, agro commodities and alike products, this movement is building a space for political convergence rooted in justice and accountability. 

In Belém, movements will amplify the voices of those most impacted by climate change – communities whose survival depends on land, water and food systems under siege. The Peoples’ Summit offers a grounded vision of climate justice already being implemented by communities all over the world with real solutions such as a feminist and just energy transition, agroecology, peoples and feminist economy and community forest management. 

Together, UNDROP, the Nyéléni process and the Peoples’ Summit form a constellation of tools for hope and resistance, honouring centuries of peasant, grassroots and Indigenous struggles to build People’s Power. They show us that another world is not only possible—it’s already being cultivated by men, women and gender diversities defending the land, feeding their communities and fighting for justice all over the world.