Much of the world’s population is still the rural productive class–encompassing farmers, rural women and youth, agricultural workers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and rural-semi proletariats. They are the most peripheralized social sector by imperialism who are subject to grave inhumane living conditions, facing the joint onslaught of feudalism and corporate capture. At the front of which is US imperialism and its increasingly violent, extremely militarized, aggressive maneuvers across the globe that cuts through economics, geopolitics, and mass media and culture, advocating for US “democracy” characterized by free market rhetoric. 

Three main factors under the banner of US imperialism directly afflict the peasantry: (1) imperialist plunder and exploitation marked by monopolization of land, waters, and productive resources such as seeds, farm inputs, agricultural technology, markets, and entire chains of food systems; (2) erosion and curtailment of their democratic rights, especially in the face of struggle for peasant and indigenous rights, the states’ responses (represented by indigenous collaborators and the ruling local elites) are on-ground violent and fascistic maneuvers against the rural masses completely subservient to the interests of imperialist expansion, and; (3) imperialist wars and aggression, the hall mark of course being the most heinous crimes against humanity in the 21st century being carried out in occupied Palestine whose people remain victimized by the US and the Zionist entity’s genocidal war. Climate imperialism crops up as an urgent dimension of wars, affecting global food systems, conditions of production, and human life.

So long as the peasantry is displaced and forcibly separated from their means of production–land and waters–which are both economically and symbolically linked to rural well-being and development, the rural folk is pushed to poverty, hunger, and social-, political-, and economic-marginalization. Rural communities are the most vulnerable sector to both outbreaks of bourgeois state wars as well as the assault of natural calamities. As direct producers of the world’s food and reproducers of necessary labor power, the whole of humanity has a stake in the peasants’ primary struggle for land, a struggle that will also determine just and lasting peace, social justice, and a genuinely democratic world system. 

The profit-driven model perpetuated by big imperialist powers is unsustainable, exploitative, oppressive, and responsible for the grinding poverty of the working class. Amassing wealth is hinged to overproduction, hunger wages, and joblessness. In the semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries, the collusion between the comprador class and imperialists has led to escalating national debt and the resulting IMF conditionalities have forced downgrading local production, exacerbating the exploitation of the working class with long hours of work, contract work, piece-rate work, and working for pittance. Women face massive exploitation, domestic and state violence, especially with worsening economic and social conditions bred through the implementation of neoliberal policies. Privatization and deregulation have wiped out social security, leaving the most vulnerable populations including elderly, the disabled and children without access to health and allied care. Critical basic needs including shelter, food, water, energy, transportation, education are now beyond the reach of the urban poor; no doubt working-class women face the brunt of the atrocities that monopoly capital has unleashed. At the same time, the imperialist structures hand-in-hand with oppressive elite authoritarian regimes in the neo-colonies have been increasingly using authoritarian and fascist tactics to try and subdue peoples struggles and resistance to corporate and feudal control. 

Though capitalism is the main hurdle to genuine sustainable development as well as threatening the well-being of the planet, it continues desperately to mask this fundamental contradiction; an effort at hand is the United Nations organized Summit of the Future (SOTF) on September 23-24, 2024. Supposedly, the SOTF aims to get the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track but the current draft of the Pact for the Future — a negotiated political declaration of the SOTF – has nothing more to offer than continued promotion and implementation of neoliberalism, export-oriented growth, and investment liberalization. Climate imperialism through climate finance remains on the agenda, while no recourse is provided for its lust of highly destructive fossil fuel-dependent production. Economic development remains hinged to promotion and use of digital and automated technologies, a death knell for the working classes and the peasantry. The people of the world are not ignorant of the SOTF aims which are to further consolidate and deepen corporate monopoly control over global governance through multistake-holderism, hinged on a public-private partnership between the UN and transnational corporations or TNCs,  and create more profit-making through science, technology, and innovation or STI (the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution), which monopoly capital falsely presents as a cure to the multiple crises that are the mark of imperialism. 

To combat the neoliberal false solutions of the Summit of the Future, The Global Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice (GPC), launched in 2023, is hosting a Peoples Summit to produce a Rural Peoples’ Development Agenda to raise the people’s demands for land, life and livelihood against imperialism and feudal reaction. ILPS is proud to sponsor this Peoples’ Summit in the fight to build a united front for the oppressed and exploited masses to forward their future through grassroots struggles, campaigns, and policy advocacies. No doubt, a bright future for the working class, the peasantry and all marginalized sections of society is only possible through seeking self-reliance in national economy, overthrowing the shackles of oppressive regimes and imperialist powers. It is only possible through national struggles as well as through organized united fronts that seek social and national liberation, fighting for climate justice, freedom from debt, hunger and poverty, and just and lasting peace.