Pakistan Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice!
Press Release | October 18, 2023
Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) and Roots for Equity held the first Pakistan Peoples’ Caravan (PPC) on October 18, 2023, in Shikarpur, Sindh, as part of the Global Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice. There are other caravans already organized for other parts of Pakistan in the coming weeks. The caravans will build up to the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) of the UN Climate Change Conference happening in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), from Nov 30 to Dec 12. Similar caravans or actions in various countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other regions are planned throughout October-November 2023.
For Pakistan in general, and for the rural communities of our country in particular, the COP28 provides an excellent platform to draw global attention from the public, mass media, and policymakers to the rural people’s demands to address the interconnected issues of hunger, land and resource grabs, and the climate crisis. Rural people’s movements are rising to confront unprecedented global hunger, displacement, and environmental and climate destruction. They are holding into account imperialism – the global empire of the wealthiest countries’ finance oligarchs and their monopoly corporations. We need to continuously strengthen and expand these movements for truly deep-rooted policy reforms to take place and address the multiple crises plaguing the world’s peoples, including the rural sectors, which are most vulnerable.
Speakers at the Caravan highlighted the plight that small and landless farmers, especially women are facing in context to the extremely high level of inflation, exorbitant cost of agriculture production that is being thrust on them based on the desire for monopoly capital to extract humongous super profits form the most marginalized, vulnerable sector of our society. Rural communities face not only the disastrous effects of neoliberal trade liberalization in food and agriculture but also that of climate imperialism; Pakistan’s monster monsoons of 2022 is one of the prime examples.
In response, rural people movements are rising to meet the challenges before us. We are tackling the unprecedented crises of environmental destruction with staunch determination, global hunger and displacement. Instead of addressing the structural issues underlying these crises and the failure to face them head-on, the UN has allowed monopoly corporations from imperialist countries to exploit the food, hunger, and climate crises to pursue a despicable plan to gain more control over and take advantage of the world’s food systems.
While governments and institutions are forever promising to support the most vulnerable peasants amidst the ongoing climate crisis, many of the proposed climate solutions and promises are entirely false; in the first place the fossil fuel addiction of the imperialist countries is responsible for some of the worst calamities that rural people face across Pakistan, and the renewable energy solutions are also being used by monopoly capital to further exploit our communities and are resulting in further land and water conflicts across rural communities, leading to the displacement of these communities and the disruption of their way of life, while funneling public resources and shaping policies to fit into the corporate agenda.
We must not allow imperialist powers and interests to manipulate the climate, food and development agenda at the expense of the peoples’ rights and interests. If we want genuine sustainable development, are serious about achieving zero hunger, and are committed to taking real climate action to save our planet, we must expose and oppose these profit-motivated schemes.
We must break the chain of imperialist plunder through (1) breaking the domination of imperialism over global governance, (2) breaking TNC control over our food systems, and (3) breaking away from fossil fuel-hungry food systems.
We must shift the future through (1) shifting the bias of policymaking toward the peoples’ rights and aspirations, (2) shifting the control over lands and natural resources, and (3) shifting financing toward genuinely radical food systems transformation.
We must work tirelessly to strengthen and expand our movements, pushing for fundamental, lasting policy reforms to address the numerous crises afflicting rural peoples and all working people worldwide.
Released by: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT)
