International Day of Action Against the WTO and Free Trade Agreements

The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which forms the core of the WTO’s food and agriculture trade policies, continues to wreak havoc on people’s lives. Over the past 30 years, La Via Campesina has consistently highlighted the negative and devastating effects of WTO policies on both people and the planet. Whenever the WTO convened its ministerial meetings to advance these harmful policies, La Via Campesina’s organized peasant groups took to the streets to expose its falsehoods and deceit. As the World Trade Organization subsequently entered a state of limbo, numerous regional and bilateral free trade agreements began to proliferate, with many of them resembling the highly detrimental Agreement on Agriculture. Thus, whether with or without the WTO, global trade remains entangled in these opaque agreements, frequently negotiated behind closed doors without public consultation or debates.

During the last Ministerial meeting in Geneva in 2022, La Via Campesina declared that the time had come to dismantle the WTO, discard the Agreement on Agriculture, put an end to harmful free trade agreements and establish a new trade framework for global agricultural trade based on principles of food sovereignty, solidarity, and internationalism. A new framework that respects and upholds the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP)!

It called on World Trade Organization member states, particularly those from the Global South, to lead the charge in creating this framework and establishing it as the bedrock of global trade. The global food crisis, resulting in increasing global hunger, exacerbated by speculative commodity trading practices, pandemics, conflicts and wars, is glaring evidence of a flawed global food system that primarily benefits transnational agribusiness. Numerous reports have highlighted how, even in the face of growing global hunger, a handful of large agribusiness corporations continued to accumulate profits through speculative practices. The Agreement on Agriculture serves as a pact to secure perpetual profits for agribusinesses, disregarding the suffering of peasants, individuals, and the environment.

For this reason, as we commemorate the International Day of Action against the WTO and Free Trade Agreements on September 10th, La Via Campesina will intensify this struggle for an alternative. We will lead the effort to construct this new framework through direct involvement of peasants and numerous other small-scale food producers. We will collaborate with our governments and civil society partners to generate political pressure in support of this new paradigm.