Systemic Transformation Is Now or Never!

For eight days on 6–13 September 2025, the member organizations of the Food Sovereignty International Planning Committee (IPC) collaborated to organize the 3^rd Nyéléni Global Forum in Sri Lanka. The Forum’s stated purpose was to foster global solidarity and develop unified, systemic strategies for economic, social, and environmental justice through the lens of food sovereignty. It provided a space for building new alliances with movements that are not traditionally part of the food sovereignty movement, including movements working around issues of global public health, climate justice, and solidarity economy, among others, toward political formation that converges global struggles for fundamental change in the global system.

Under a call for “Systemic transformation! Now or never!” over 700 people, including 420 delegates from grassroots movements across all world regions, contributed intense work and powerful emotions to shape a Common Political Action Agenda. That document culminated in a list of priority actions and timelines to jointly launch or strengthen global campaigns and bottom-up mobilizations to uphold social justice in a world characterized by corporate capture, famines, starvation and weaponizing food. A joint declaration, read in several languages by members of the Global Steering Committee closed the Forum.

IPC member organizations and grassroots groups opened the Forum by framing their contributions to the global convergence that sought to create new synergies and values greater than the sum of its parts. For its part, HIC’s Housing and Land Rights Network addressed the Forum with a message of convergence:

“For 50 years now, Habitat International Coalition (HIC) supports and defends the urban poor and food insecure communities in every region of the world.

As a global coalition, HIC aligns wholeheartedly with the observations and analysis of the Nyéléni Common Political Action Agenda and forms part of the Food Sovereignty International Planning Committee (IPC). Many of our Members and their communities are suffering the effects of economic deprivation, living in food deserts, denied the right and opportunity to produce food and feed themselves. Their attempts to fulfill their human needs and create solutions by producing their own habitat are often outlawed and violently suppressed, especially through forced eviction, destruction, dispossession and displacement. So, our struggle has many faces.

There is no hierarchy of human rights. We demand them all at once and put much of our efforts to supporting communities through capacity development and advocacy to transform the systems that create privilege and disparity.

Within HIC is its Housing and Land Rights Network, which is dedicated to developing the norms in the global and local contexts that become tools of argument AND accountability. Whether addressing human needs and rights to food or shelter, central to our movement is the land. Land forms the common ground that unites us all, and every human needs land to realize her/his rights to both adequate food and adequate housing.

That’s why we contribute to this Forum and its Political Agenda by insisting on a human right of equitable and sustainable access to, use of, and democratic control over land. But for land to be understood as a human right, it must first be understood as meeting a fundamental human need. Everyone needs land and it attributes, including its inherent gravity, to maintain our bodies, communities and for all of nature to grow and flourish. This harmony with the land, as a human right, means that we need to achieve the organic relationship with the land that Indigenous People remind us is our nature.

To realize that, HIC sees the need to converge urban, rural and Indigenous social movements in a common ecosystem and earthly habitat. Without this convergence, our common adversaries easily divide, fragment and overpower us. We have already witnessed that happening to us all in many political forums dominated by states and their governments in these past 50 years. That is why we need greater globalism and convergence across the human habitat.

HIC also insists on the social function land, which governments adopted in current global habitat policy [AR]. That means that, to be equitable and sustainable, land use must prioritize the greatest benefit of whole society, including to ensure food sovereignty and the people’s multi-dimensional relationship with, and self-determination on their land.

We also demand the right to social production of the habitat, including collective tenure and the freedom to build to meet people’s needs. From this perspective, HIC commits to pursue food sovereignty as an organic part of this struggle for the human right to land, its social function and social production on it. We join the demand for systemic transformation, now or never.

FREE, FREE PALESTINE!

From the river to the sea, [refrain] Palestine will be free!

From the river to the sea, from the Naqab to Galilee.

Delivered by Joseph Schechla, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 9 September 2025