PCFS
Global Speakout of the Landless! | May 13, 2024
Organized by Asian Peasant Coalition, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, PAN Asia Pacific, Int’l Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self Determination and Liberation, and International League of Peoples’ Struggle – Commission 6
Rafael “Ka Paeng” Mariano is the KMP chairperson emeritus and former secretary of the Department of Agriculture in the Philippines. He has been decades-long dedicated to the struggle for land justice, food security, and genuine agrarian reform.
From the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) or the Peasant Movement of the Philippines and Commission 6 [or] the Peasant Commission of the International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS), we would like to convey our warm greetings of solidarity to everyone.
Undoubtedly, there is a big challenge for us, not only to continue but to further strengthen and intensify the people’s resistance against [the] World Bank’s anti-people policies. And also, there are challenges in order to address the remaining fundamental problem of landlessness among peasants and other toiling masses in the rural areas of our countries, primarily from the Global South, to implement a genuine land reform [that] is genuinely thoroughgoing and distributive, with free land distribution as the central goal and basic principle, primarily based on the principles of social justice.
And we have to not only face, but really advance our campaign and activities to contribute to addressing [the] climate crisis, debt crisis, and even economic crisis under the underdevelopment of our countryside due to neoliberal policies. And we have to really advance forward, further isolate, and prostrate imperialist plunder, exploitation, oppression, war, occupation, and aggression. We have to protect and defend the peasants’ democratic rights and fundamental freedoms against political harassment, political persecution, and to prostrate the trump-up charges and criminalization of peasants and their struggle for land.
And we have to defend and consolidate the gains and victories of our struggles and campaigns against imperialist dictates and policies, but also particularly the policies and programs of the World Bank, including of the IMF’s. We have to hold the World Bank accountable for the worsening crisis brought about by its neoliberal policies, and we have to expose further and prostrate the continuing implementation of the World Bank’s neoliberal model of land reform, that is the market-assisted land reform with the formula of willing to sell, willing to buy, but at the same time maintaining the monopoly and control of a few big landlords over vast tracks of landholdings, and the landlords continuing campaign to prostrate the struggle of the peasants to liberate themselves from various forms of exploitation.
And by implementing genuine land reform, our goal and our aim is to really abolish completely the remnants of domestic feudalism and other forms of unjust tenure or
arrangements. And coupled with the implementation of genuine agrarian reform is the implementation of a genuine program of industrialization and economic development.
So, we have to further strengthen our people’s anti-imperialist movement and struggle in various parts and continents of the world. We have to defeat imperialism, and we have to further strengthen the people’s movement, most primarily, with the movement of landless peasants including rural women, peasant women, women agricultural workers and farm workers, and also indigenous peoples defending their ancestral lands from imperialist plunder and exploitation. We have to defend and consolidate our peasant movements and organizations in our countries [and] aim at building genuinely self-reliant independent communities of peasants and indigenous peoples. So we have to further strengthen the [anti]-imperialist movement.
On behalf of the Commission 6 of the International League of People’s Struggles, we are inviting you and other organizations to actively participate in the upcoming 7th International Assembly of the ILPS, including the activities of the upcoming International Festival of Peasants’ Rights and Struggles.
The people united will never be defeated!
Down with imperialism!
Long live international solidarity!
