Author: RIPESS Europe
The 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka, marked a decisive moment in the collective journey toward systemic transformation. Bringing together peasants, Indigenous Peoples, workers, women, migrants, climate and health activists, and solidarity economy practitioners from across the world, the forum reaffirmed a powerful truth: food sovereignty is not a sectoral demand, but a political project rooted in global solidarity, justice, and care.
At the heart of this convergence is the Common Political Action Agenda (CPAA), a collective roadmap built over nearly two years through grassroots consultations across all regions. The CPAA does not offer just policy fixes. Instead, it confronts the interconnected crises of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and corporate capture with a shared vision for people’s democracy, peace, food sovereignty, agroecology, health, climate justice, and people-centered economies. Structured around who we are, why we act, what we seek to transform, and how we will move forward together, the CPAA is designed as a living political compass for movements on the ground.
A key strength of this process has been the deepening of alliances beyond the traditional boundaries of the food sovereignty movement. RIPESS is playing an important role in this expansion. Joining the Nyéléni process as a full movement actor, RIPESS helped bring the solidarity economy clearly into the political centre of the debate. For years, RIPESS and its members have argued that food sovereignty cannot be achieved without transforming the economy itself. In Kandy, this perspective resonated strongly: the solidarity economy was recognised not just as a set of alternatives, but as a bottom-up methodology for rebuilding economic life around cooperation, care, community control, and ecological balance.
RIPESS’s participation in the Steering Committee and its diverse global delegation reinforced the idea that transforming food systems can catalyse broader systemic change. By linking food sovereignty with feminist economics, care work, and collective ownership, RIPESS contributed to grounding the CPAA in practical, lived alternatives already being built in territories worldwide.
Feminist organisations reaffirmed that there is no food sovereignty without feminism, highlighting how women’s everyday struggles and economies of care sustain life while resisting extractivism and green capitalism. Indigenous leaders reminded the forum that food sovereignty is inseparable from land, culture, and self-determination, and that solidarity must translate into concrete support for Indigenous rights. Migrant movements exposed how corporate food systems depend on exploitation and displacement, while also pointing to sites of food production as spaces of resistance and dignity. Health movements, climate justice networks and unions each brought their realities into the collective analysis, strengthening the CPAA’s intersectional character.
The Kandy Declaration and the forthcoming CPAA1 signal a shift from convergence to coordinated action. They call on movements not only to resist oppression, war, debt, and corporate power, but to actively build the alternatives that make another world possible.
“This edition of the Nyéléni newsletter shares a selection of the forum’s highlights, capturing several of the participants’ perspectives. As the Kandy declaration states: “Across all the diversities we represent—to strengthen our struggles – we are raising our voices together, declaring: Systemic Transformation—Now and Forever!”
Kandy declaration is a political and action-oriented statement from the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum! held this September on Sri Lanka. The Declaration is a result of deep democratic consultation with regions and global movements in several rounds acclaimed by the Forum. It is translated in 18 languages and was publicly presented first time at the People’s Summit in Belem during COP30 in November this year.
Kandy Declaration is a call for a convergence of global movements’ struggles for a peoples’ rights and peace, sustainability and climate justice, feminist and solidarity economy, health for all and commons.
You can see the Kandy Declaration here
