Kandy Declaration

declaration de kandy

FROM THE 3RD NYÉLÉNI GLOBAL FORUM, SRI LANKA | SEPTEMBER 2025

We are peoples from diverse regions, territories, social movements, collectives and organizations – from more than 100 countries and diverse Indigenous Peoples – gathered in Kandy, Sri Lanka for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum.

Together, we have woven our struggles into a fabric of convergence and built a movement of movements for systemic transformation.

We are peasants, landless agricultural workers and farmers; family farmers; artisanal fishers, fisher peoples and shellfish harvesters from rivers, lakes, mangroves and seas; mobile pastoralists and Indigenous nomads; Indigenous Peoples from land, coastal and riverine communities; forest dwellers and peoples; hunters and gatherers; Afro-descendants; anti-caste and racial justice activists; feminist and women’s rights activists; youth and inter-generational activists; gender and sexually diverse peoples; differently abled peoples; artists; interpreters and translators; urban poor peoples; food system and migrant workers; trade unions; consumers; human rights, social, economic and climate justice movements; advocates for social medicine, collective health and the right to health for all; social solidarity economy actors; researchers and scholar activists; representatives from solidarity philanthropy, and other civil society organisations. With our diverse knowledges, convictions and actions, we feed the world, nurture and sustain life, defend our territories and Mother Earth, and ensure the health of all living beings.

Over the past three years, through collective processes in our territories, we have organized assemblies and gatherings of our communities and constituencies to deepen our analysis of the contemporary societies we are part of, and to clearly identify the structural obstacles that deny us justice and dignity. These consultations – that continued during the 3rd Nyéléni Forum in Kandy – have formed the basis of an agenda for Common Political Action. It is an agenda that draws strength from the convergence of our struggles and has the power and potential to bring about systemic transformation in our societies. This Kandy Declaration, and what follows hereafter, is rooted in the collective understandings developed through the creation of this Common Political Action Agenda.

We begin by recalling that over generations, with courage and perseverance, we have nurtured economies of care, cooperation, and solidarity, centering buen vivir and dignity. We have reclaimed lands, waters, and territories through peoples’ struggles; built agroecological territories; and defended the Right to Food and nutrition, public services, universal access to public health systems based on integral primary healthcare, and our commons. We have taken many steps forward in our battles against patriarchy, misogyny, casteism, racism, exploitation of workers, destruction of our territories, privatization, financialization, commercialization, automation, capitalist trade, and corporate power.

However, we still have many struggles ahead of us.

1. Understanding The Crises We Face

Capitalism and imperialism are scouring every corner of Mother Earth and nature, converting our ecosystems, biodiversity, and commons into commodities to be consumed and discarded, while devastating our communities and peoples. We are facing multiple crises related to food, health, climate, and biodiversity.

Corporate driven mining, monoculture and extractivist operations, promoted by institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), other International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), are expanding with the backing of complicit governments. New colonial frontiers, including neoliberal green and blue economies and regimes, and the growing financialization of our territories, are fueling a new wave of extractivism and resource grabbing of lands, oceans and rare earths. This is displacing communities in both rural and urban areas, while intensifying exploitation and pollution.

The agro-industrial model systematically undermines the Right to Food and health through monocultures, industrial aquaculture, pollution, so-called “blue foods”, genetically modified and gene-edited organisms, agrotoxins, chemical fertilizers, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) dependent on massive use of antibiotics and antivirals. The increasing consumption of ultra-processed products is fueling a global pandemic of non-communicable diseases.

As corporate technologies advance at an unprecedented speed, new forms of oppression, occupation and control emerge in the form of genetic modification, digitalization, commercialization and financialization, affecting every aspect of our daily lives. The push for more, faster and powerful artificial intelligence tools provide new instruments for these threats and persisting problems of colonialism.

Meanwhile, wars, genocides, and armed conflicts are escalating with impunity across many regions and continents, fueling brutality and violence marked by the use of prohibited weapons, hunger, rape, and the destruction of health systems, while contaminating the environment. Our territories are being used as testing grounds for transnational military and technology corporations.

Conservatism, fascism, far-right ideology, racism, casteism, classism, xenophobia, misogyny, LGBTQIA+- phobia, anti-worker, anti-blackness, anti-Muslim, anti- Arab, anti-indigeneity, militarism, and climate denialism are on the rise. These are supported by corporate media and some State-run media outlets that spread disinformation, building false narratives, and hijacking and appropriating progressive language to push privatization, deregulation, intolerance, and various forms of supremacy, discrimination, and violence. Hate towards minorities and xenophobia against migrants aim to divide and rule us by turning the richness of our diverse cultures, bodies, languages and beliefs into tools for rejection, deportation, discrimination, oppression, and exploitation.

As inequality and inequity deepens, many among us suffer exploitation in many sectors, from poverty wages to precarious conditions and systemic violations of their rights, while others struggle to secure employment. We affirm the rights of workers, including migrant workers and workers who are particularly vulnerable, whose labour cares for our societies, but suffer low wages, unsafe housing, deportation threats, and other systemic injustices.

The capitalist system is rooted in individualism, consumption and the accumulation of wealth. It is built on deeply discriminatory and hierarchical societal structures based on misogyny, ableism, patriarchy, sexism, heteronormativity, caste, class, colonialism and racism, and has created multiple layers of oppression and exploitation that affect peoples and nature in profoundly violent ways. A systemic crisis of this magnitude, which affects us all, makes a unified global response both urgent and imperative.

2. Our Shared Histories Inspire Our Collective Actions

Over the past decades, we have renewed our spirit of struggle and solidarity, through thousands of lights of resistance and transformation across the world, and from our local territories to international spaces, we have resisted the divisive forces of the numerous systems of oppression we face.

We continue to tear down the walls of caste, class, race, religious fundamentalism, and gender and sexual norms that divide us. Our fight centers the recognition of women’s labour, the reorganization of care, redistribution of wealth, intersectional justice and the abolition of gender- and sexual-based violence.

We are inspired by our legacies of resistance—Nyéléni Forums in Mali (2007 & 2015), the Aragalaya movement in Sri Lanka, the farmers’ protests in India, and the many different struggles of peoples to be free from hunger, impoverishment, war, and occupation. These struggles teach us the urgent need for convergence among us to effect a deep systemic transformation that dismantles the different structures of oppression.

This 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum in Kandy is, therefore, a necessary step forward in expanding and strengthening our alliances and collective struggles for emancipation, justice, autonomy, and the Right to Self- determination. As we honor those who have been taken from us by conflict, criminalization, and the pandemic, and those still persecuted for defending Peoples’ rights and territories—we affirm that their courage inspires our commitment to internationalist solidarity and people-powered change.

Through music, poetry, dance, and cultural expression, we carry forward our histories. Led by popular feminist principles, we are collectively building a world rooted in dignity, equality, peoples’ rights and sovereignty, justice, freedom, peace and food sovereignty.

Our paths of resistance and transformation will converge across local, national and international levels.

Strengthening Our Struggles

We will build and defend democracy and peoples' rights, peace and internationalist solidarity. We will continue to advance peoples’ and feminist economies that center life and food sovereignty.

From the rivers and lakes, across our lands to the wetlands and sea, based on agroecology, aquaecology, and the ancestral knowledges of our peoples, we will fight for universal access to healthy and culturally appropriate food—produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods for all.

We will defend our bodies, lands, seeds, breeds, water bodies, territories, ecosystems and all public, traditional and intercultural health systems. These are our commons, which we will protect and reclaim through struggles and transformative feminist governance models. We bring together Indigenous and feminist knowledges and ways of being in the world, working in diverse collectives that do not just change who is a leader, but change what leadership looks like.

Land, water, seeds, forests, and knowledge belong to the people who care for them—not to corporations, states, or algorithms. We will defend collective, customary, and traditional rights to land. We assert the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands and ancestral domains, and we call for land back for Indigenous communities and displaced traditional custodians.

External sovereign debt and household-level indebtedness among rural and urban working classes have soared across the world. The repercussions have severely undermined people's access to education, healthcare, food, housing, and a wide range of other essential goods and services that should be part of the public realm and accessible to all, especially vulnerable populations.

In every country and territory, we will resist the financial chains that trap us in debilitating debt, and build social and solidarity economies across borders to reclaim life, dignity, and freedom from debt. We will redistribute resources, power and care, and insist on reparations for those communities who have been colonized and dispossessed of their lands and resources.

We will continue our fights for freedom and for reparations, education, dignified employment, workers’ rights to organise and to strike, right to adequate and healthy food (including the right to breastfeeding), rights to universal health, social and solidarity economies, and climate justice. We will implement a feminist just energy transition that secures energy justice for all peoples, makes energy a common good for all, enables peoples’ ownership and control over their energy resources, and advances community-led renewables.

We recognize that the transnational corporations (TNCs) and imperial powers enabling the genocide in Palestine and the crimes against humanity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar, and other regions are the same forces responsible for oppressing the people of Cuba for decades and placing our communities and peoples at the frontlines of social, economic, and climate crises. We will step up our agitations against these imperial forces.

Our internationalist solidarity demands uncompromising opposition to the ongoing genocide in Palestine destroying lands, lives and resources. Therefore, we express support for the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) movement and holding accountable Zionism, and those who are complicit in the genocide, who fuel it and who benefit from it.

Reclaiming the Multilateral System

We will defend and fight to transform the multilateral system of the United Nations (UN) so that it serves the people, not corporations. This system must reflect the voices and needs of communities, workers, peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and all those who struggle for justice – not the interests of powerful governments or transnational corporations.

In this regard, we are committed to ensuring that UN instruments—shaped through decades of our struggles, activism and engagement—are properly implemented. We demand real power for social movements in global decision-making and full protection of our right to resist oppression, as well as strong measures to stop corporate capture of global institutions such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO). We will support the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), as the UN policy space that, so far, best ensures meaningful participation of our peoples in food governance decisions and agriculture policy development and we will seek to defend it against the intrusion of corporate interests and geopolitical clashes.

We demand full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). The FAO must fulfill its commitment to amend the International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management to include Indigenous Peoples' collective rights, especially their right to free, prior, and informed consent. We demand that the UN separate and not conflate, in all its documents and decisions, the concepts of Indigenous Peoples with local communities.

We support movements opposing and stopping the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and protecting peasants’ and Indigenous Peoples’ seed sovereignty, and traditional knowledge systems. We will fight to stop digital biopiracy at national and global levels and will continue to agitate against this within the International Treaty on Plant and Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).

We support making the UN Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries legally binding and officially recognizing November 5 as the Global Day of Fisherwomen. We urge the WHO to recognize food sovereignty and agroecology, ensure independence from corporate and philanthropic influence, and create space for grassroots participation.

We recognize the rights of pastoralists as guardians and defenders of commons and wild flora and fauna. We will support the Global Pastoralists Gathering during the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (2026), affirming these rights.

For over a decade, we have been resolutely negotiating—and will continue to do so—for a legally binding treaty to hold transnational corporations accountable for human rights violations and to close the loopholes in existing justice systems that have created an architecture of impunity. We will resist the corporate lobbies attempting to block this demand to subject TNCs to human rights law and to provide affected communities with access to justice. We firmly support the demands for a strong Global Plastics Treaty to end plastic pollution and digital biopiracy. We call for the full implementation of the Durban Declaration and an end to all forms of racial discrimination and intolerance. Furthermore, we demand concrete action on gender- and sexual-based violence, using Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the CFS Gender Guidelines on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls.

3. Our Collective Commitments Towards Systemic Transformation

We have agreed on the following collective commitments to strengthen our solidarity, deepen our struggles and advance systemic transformation across our lands, territories and movements through feminist and popular communication.

We will hold mobilizations and solidarity actions, including: a World Day of Mobilisation against imperialism, wars, conflicts, genocides and to resist the use of famine and destruction of health systems as weapons of war.

We will develop collective actions against fascism, conservatism, and all forms of oppression and discrimination, including those on the basis of caste.

We will organize an annual Nyéléni day that will bring together movements to expand, deepen and strengthen the Nyéléni process.

At global events such as the Belém Peoples’ Summit towards COP 30, the International Conference on Agrarian Reform (ICARRD+20), and the World Social Forum of Social Movements, among others, we will organize assemblies of social movements, Indigenous Peoples, and Afro-descendants, ensuring that the Nyéléni agenda is integrated into these and other policy processes.

We commit to organizing a general strike to highlight care work and its centrality in our societies. Our strike will be a united call to defend the rights of caregivers— especially the informal and unpaid ones - and to challenge the patriarchal and capitalist system that has systematically made invisible caregivers within the realm of labor rights.

We will strengthen our movements by establishing political formation process with platforms and schools. Drawing from our Common Political Action Agenda (CPAA), these schools of formation will cover themes such as popular feminism; anti-racism (including anti- Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and others); anti- casteism; gender and sexual diversity; care; feminist and solidarity economies; knowledges and rights of Indigenous Peoples; food sovereignty; and agroecology for systemic transformation. These educational efforts will prioritize and empower young people, incorporating their concerns and ideas into decision-making spaces, ensuring inter-generational knowledge transfer, and promoting the inclusion of all genders and diversities.

Central to this is building our own narratives through the strengthening of popular feminist communication and people’s communication networks—both digital and non-digital—for internationalist solidarity and support for peoples and social movements in their territories.

We will continue and deepen dialogues between the entire diversity of Nyéléni and trade union movements based on the connections between food sovereignty, people's health, solidarity and feminist economy, just transition, environmental justice, and popular sovereignty.

We commit to building collective struggles for the radical transformation of the multilateral system and the United Nations, moving them away from corporate control over global governance.

We will continue the dialogues between social movements and Indigenous Peoples with researchers, solidarity philanthropy and other social movements.

4. Processes, Actions and Campaigns That We Committ to Support

We commit to collectively supporting campaigns and actions that secure food, health, and economic sovereignty. Central to our efforts is resisting corporate monopolies over vital resources—land, water, seeds, animals, genetic materials, and territories —and opposing the commodification of life in all its forms. Our actions will focus on reclaiming territories, advancing popular, inclusive, and comprehensive agrarian reform, and defending the commons from industrial exploitation. This includes halting industrial aquaculture and fishing, the blue economy, privatization of oceans, as well as industrial and factory farming. We will strengthen pastoralist rights and movements worldwide, united in confronting the impunity and power of transnational corporations and other exploitative actors.

Globally, we will join actions to end and prevent famine and to stop the destruction of food and health infrastructure used as weapons of war. We will rally against the exclusion and harassment of migrants and refugees, fighting to defend their rights and amplify their voices.

We will build alternatives from below, in tune with our lived realities by creating peoples’ solidarity economies and peoples’ health systems. We will continue to counteract the privatization and commercialization of health systems and defend social protection, including ancestral medicines. We will build grassroots pressure and participate in international negotiations to establish an international framework for trade based on food sovereignty and to promote mutually beneficial and transformative trade relations locally and globally.

The campaigns on food, health, and economic sovereignty are not possible without control over financial resources and debt cancellation. It is therefore imperative that we support efforts to transform the global debt architecture, while recognizing the need to converge with anti-debt movements to raise grassroots concerns.

We are committed to bringing Nyéléni agenda, our values, principles, strategies and campaigns into policy and political processes at all levels, from local to international, to galvanize our solidarity. Our commitment extends to combating all forms of discrimination—based on caste, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual diversity, religion, and faith. Across all our actions, youth inclusion is essential. We will ensure youth voices are represented in decision-making spaces, promote grassroots entrepreneurship, facilitate the intergenerational transfer of ancestral knowledge and practices, and build youth leadership through popular education rooted in feminist, anti- racist, anti-caste, and decolonial values.

5. To The Peoples of the World

This Kandy Declaration summarizes our collective wisdom and reflections. In Sri Lanka we resolved to struggle in unity—communicating in eighteen different languages, a remarkable achievement made possible by our dedicated interpreters and translators, to whom we offer our heartfelt gratitude.

This Declaration is our lantern—lighting the path ahead as we confront capitalism, imperialism and multiple interlinked and cascading crises. These paragraphs capture the commitments we have made to continue the journey toward systemic transformation. It is our collective call to action: to dismantle the systems of death that have been imposed on our peoples. We are converging to build a system rooted in peace, dignity, and life—for all of humanity, for all beings, for our future generations and for our Mother Earth.

It is a call for unity among Peoples, social movements, and civil society organizations.

Across all the diversities we represent—to strengthen our struggles - we are raising our voices together, declaring:

Systemic Transformation—Now and Forever!

We are in this together.

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