This webinar begins at 2:30 pm GMT (4:30 pm Western Europe time, 11:30 am Brazilian time, 8:00 pm IST) on zoom, with live translations in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
We are interested in your views! Enough time will be allocated for the discussion. Follow this link to join the webinar and interact with the panelists:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
The panelists who will introduce the debate and share their experience are:
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Ramesh Sharma – India - Ekta Parishad (moderator)
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Rajagopal PV – India - Ekta Parishad
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Hortense Kinkodila Tombo Dolores - Congo - Via Campesina
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Sofia Monsalve - Colombia- FIAN International
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Michael Taylor - Italy - International Land Coalition
This thematic discussion will continue until end of July. Register on our website to participate in the online discussions . The forum is an open space, where you can exchange through various media formats including written, video,publication of documents, and oral.
The objectives of the Forum
The organizers of this forum, from the five continents, faced with the urgency of the situations of land grabbing, but also of all the natural resources whose fair distribution is vital for our humanity, felt that it was necessary to meet throughout the world, in order to build common responses to the appropriation of land and resources by private companies and States.
To do this, we have set ourselves clear objectives:
- Strengthen and expand alliances between movements and organizations and increase their political weight: This forum aims to open a space for debate between the very different types of communities in the world directly affected by issues of access to natural resources. These communities would benefit from getting to know each other better and exchanging ideas, so that the necessary political weight for social transformation can be built up. Thus we hope to contribute to bringing together rural citizens' movements, urban citizens' movements and researchers in a collective reflection on the major problems related to access to and use of land and natural resources, and on the mobilizations and actions needed. We are also marked by the need to look at the gender issues of peasant communities. Indeed, the use, marginalization and ownership of land vary widely according to gender. It is now essential to include this perspective in our analysis of the issues raised by access to natural resources.
- To share experiences and build common responses. We believe in the growth of movements through the sharing of experiences, to advise and inspire the means of struggle. This is why the forum will be built little by little, online, during the two months that will follow each thematic webinar. The discussions will evolve with the proposals of each person and the final syntheses will be made on these bases.
- Propose binding tools to demand changes from the grabbers who no longer represent us (states) and who are handing us all over to the interests of a few (private companies), without consultation, and in a violent way. Important tools have been put in place against land grabbing, but most of them are not binding, and do not prevent inequalities from growing in the long run. This is why this forum represents an opportunity for these participants to align themselves with the power levers that could be put in place, both locally and internationally.
Ekta Parishad is a mass people's movement for land rights with 250,000 active landless members. It is considered one of the largest people's movements in India and has an iconic status globally. Ekta Parishad is known for several important successes, including securing land rights for nearly 500,000 families, building a grassroots leadership of over 10,000 people, protecting forests and water bodies, and developing several laws and policies related to land reforms in India. Ekta Parishad is famous for the scale of its social mobilisations, with its last mobilisation in 2018 attracting 25,000 landless people from across India.
