Defend Our Land and Territories! Forge a Future Free from Imperialist Control!
Statement for the Day of the Landless 2026
We, peasants, farmers, farmworkers, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, herders, rural women, rural youth and children, along with our organizations, coalitions, networks, and allies in civil society organizations - unite our voices and struggles against the neoliberal restructuring imposed by imperialist powers which intensified land dispossession, eroded food sovereignty, and deepened rural poverty and inequality.
We recognize that across the Global South, neoliberal policies pushed by imperialist interests have dismantled government support for agriculture, liberalized land and resource governance, and opened rural economies to transnational corporations.
We condemn the accelerating land and resource grabbing under the banners of “development,” “climate action,” and “green energy transition” driven by imperialist rivalries. This includes debt-for-nature swaps and ecotourism projects, which masquerade as “green solutions” but are fueled by the greed of international finance institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the World Bank, which in reality only facilitate the corporate capture of peasants’ land. These and mega-infrastructure, mining, dams, railways, and large-scale renewable energy projects displace peasants and Indigenous Peoples; devastate ecosystems; and criminalize resistance.
We condemn the US imperialist wars of aggression in West Asia widely affecting economies and especially hitting the agriculture sector in the Global South. The ongoing oil price shocks around the world severely impact peasants and the rural poor and will result in an increase in the prices of fertilizers, inputs, and the overall cost of production. The uneven effects of these imperialist wars are felt most acutely by small fishers who depend on fuel to secure at least a day’s catch for their families’ daily meals.
We decry the displacement of fishers from their waters, the destruction of marine systems by corporate trawlers, the false narration of renewable energy through the World Bank’s “blue economy,”, and the militarisation of our seas and oceans for corporate interests in deep sea mining. Rural communities bear the social and ecological costs of this intensifying imperial competition on both resources and geographic control.
We highlight that across the region, landlessness drives forced migration. Without much choice, peasants become migrant laborers, refugees, and precarious workers subjected to exploitation in urban centers and overseas rural production. Women, Indigenous Peoples, and rural youth endure the harshest burdens of dispossession and labor abuse. Land grabbing fuels a cycle of poverty, conflict, and ecological breakdown.
We denounce states and corporations for upholding multistakeholderism, which sidelines the interests of civil society, people`s organizations, and grassroots communities. Initiatives like the 2nd International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) and the UN’s existing voluntary instruments which still only develop and employ “top-down” development projects and strategies that ultimately fail to halt land grabs, reverse the hunger and climate crises, and deliver genuine agrarian reform as long as states and corporations connive in pushing a neoliberal agenda.
We reiterate that we, the rural poor — are not passive victims of dispossession and exploitation. Across Asia, we are advancing people-led, genuine agrarian reform as our concrete and collective solution to the deepening land, food, and climate crises.
For years, we have asserted our right to till the land and expanded collective cultivation in idle and contested estates, transforming them into productive farms that feed our communities. We are reclaiming and regenerating our territories through agroecology, and reviving sustainable farming knowledge that was eroded by decades of chemical-dependent, corporate-controlled agriculture. In rebuilding our relationship with the land, we restore biodiversity, strengthen climate resilience, and affirm food sovereignty.
We have established and strengthened community seed banks as living bastions of resistance against corporate seed monopolies. By conserving, breeding, and freely exchanging indigenous seeds, we protect our genetic heritage and ensure that farmers remain independent from costly and exploitative input markets.
In our thousands, we have marched, organized, and struggled—confronting landlords, usurers, microfinance institutions, and corporations that prey on the rural poor. We demand an end to land monopolies, debt bondage, and the systemic exploitation that keeps our communities in perpetual poverty.
We brave militarization, harassment, and red-tagging everyday. We have stood our ground against armed goons, state agents, and military encampments that more often than not only endanger our villages and communities. Despite threats and violence, we continue to assert that genuine rural development can only succeed if it is pro-people and grounded in social justice. We oppose this nominal and institutionally defined “development” imposed through coercion and repression and conclude that such is not development at all.
We stand firm in our conviction: poverty cannot be solved by criminalizing, silencing, and killing the poor. Real progress comes from securing land to the tillers, upholding collective rights, empowering rural women and youth, and building agricultural systems that serve people not profit.
We affirm that land is life. Our concrete struggles demonstrate that genuine agrarian reform and sustainable agriculture are not policy abstractions—they are living, people-led solutions to the land, food and climate crises perpetuated by imperialism.
We call on peasants, workers, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, women, and youth, along with our organizations, coalitions, networks, and allies in civil society organizations across Asia and the world to strengthen solidarity and intensify collective struggle. As we build our future from the ground up, let us forge this future free from imperialist control!
Defend our land and territories!
Defend peasant’s rights and resources!
Onward with people-led genuine agrarian reform!
No to us wars of aggression!
Forge a future free from imperialist control!
#DayoftheLandless2026
#DOTL2026
Image: Day of the Landless 2026 logo. Source: The Asian Peasant Coalition along with the International League of Peoples Struggle – ILPS Commission 6, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty – Global, Int’l Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self Determination & Liberation PAN Asia Pacific – PANAP, and the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition – ARWC jointly organize this year’s Day of the Landless 2026.
