The 2026 Kandy Declaration of the Nyeleni Global Forum is clear: “wars, genocides, and armed conflicts are escalating with impunity across many regions and continents, fuelling brutality and violence marked by the use of prohibited weapons, hunger, rape, and the destruction of health systems, while contaminating the environment. Our territories are being used as testing grounds for transnational military and technology corporations.” These conflicts are reshaping agriculture and trade policies in ways that undermine food sovereignty and international solidarity and responsibility. At the same time, military and agricultural technologies are increasingly intertwined. Food is used as a weapon of war. In this session we make space for grief, for fear, for anger and for care. We will identify practices and actions to advance international solidarity and justice, and pathways to hold perpetrators to account.

An agreocological food system expands beyond production and other steps in the food chain are facing similar vulnerabilities. Initiatives under the umbrella of social and solidarity economy are addressing exchanges and the construction of monetary and non-monetary (material and non-material) value beyond capitalist market exchange. Reciprocity, gifts, non-monetary exchanges are practices that enable the reproduction of life and socio-biodiversity (cuttings, seeds, food, etc.), self-sufficiency, alongside markets in all their diversity (notably embedded markets, co-construction of supply and demand, short supply chains…).

Generational renewal is essential for food sovereignty, the continued existence of rural areas, and environmental and social value farmers create. Young farmers, particularly non-cis-male farmers, face specific barriers such as recognition, access to land, financial services and the need for formal certification and training. The lack of appropriate rural infrastructure and deep rooted issues regarding farm succession and farm pensions schemes hinder generational renewal for many potential young farmers. As generational renewal emerges as a key political issue, this session will bring facilitate a discussion around the needs of young farmers and how to ensure that these spaces are liveable and inclusive.

Across the world, agrifood systems increasingly run on migrant labour. Industrial agriculture is upheld by racialised and gendered hierarchies, violent labour regimes, and migration policies that produce precarity while silencing those who feed our communities. Migrant peasant women often remain invisible and are highly precarious due to restricted rights and structural discrimination. Yet migrant women also resist through everyday acts of care, mutual support, collective organising, and struggles for dignity, justice, and food sovereignty. We invite contributions that centre migrant women lived experiences as farmworkers, peasants, and rural inhabitants, engaging with: exploitative agrifood labour regimes and racialised/gendered segmentation; housing, mobility, childcare, healthcare, and other conditions of social reproduction; workplace, domestic, and genderbased violence; sexual and reproductive rights and access to services; family, kinship, and community networks; structural and situational vulnerability; impacts of migration and labour policies; strategies of resistance, organising, and collective action; policy proposals, including social conditionality; peasant organising grounded in anti-racism and intersectionality. We particularly welcome work coproduced with migrant women and migrant worker collectives.

5. LGTBQI+ communities and non-binary identities in agroecology

Farm work faces many challenges, including specific technical needs of small scale and women farmers which are rarely recognised. But many challenges are also linked to the work that goes beyond the production of animals or crops, linked to the variety of unpaid (invisible) labour, such as socio-environmental care work or community work, very often carried out by women, increasing the time dedicated to work. Making visible this unpaid work, recognising and valuing its centrality and developing strategies to share it and democratise it exist and will be share in this session. Technical solutions developed to improve working conditions will also be discussed. Alongside this discussion, the debate taking place around the theoretical definition of the meanings of care, and particularly, care in food systems and agroecological transition.

Rural services within the feminist debate on shared responsibility for care (between family, community, the state / local authorities through public policies, and – sometimes – the market) and the sexual division of care work across these different spheres. Include aspects of farm viability and can also connect with the privatization of services, property and austerity measures that tend to disproportionately affect women and other groups that depend on public services. The role of social security (carers’ payments, pensions, unemployment benefits, parental leave payments, child support), public and community infrastructures (processing plants, abattoirs) and the potential of universal basic income and collective/communal forms of care.

Agricultural and rural policies consistently fail to address the diverse forms of discrimination that restrict full participation in the sector. Rather than dismantling systemic barriers, existing frameworks frequently reinforce patriarchal, colonial, racial, and heteronormative norms, thereby reproducing privileged access to, and authority over, agricultural and rural spaces. Within the contemporary policy landscape, institutional attempts to address gender often pivot toward individualized “success stories,” mentorship, and segregated spaces. Initiatives such as the EU’s Women in Farming Platform and activities surrounding the 2026 International Year of the Woman Farmer exemplify these trends, promoting an individualizing approach that de-politicizes the struggle for equity and obscures the structural reforms required for urgent transformation.

This workshop will make visible the diverse ways that popular and agrarian feminist movements are actively reclaiming narratives, advancing transgressive practices, and designing or resisting policies that reconfigure power and access to resources. Central to this session is a collective analysis of ‘windows of opportunity’ to reform or resist existing public policies, also by exploring intersections with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other human-rights frameworks.

Climate change is impacting our agricultural and food systems. Changes in temperature, rain patterns and extremes reduce yields, animals well-being and distribution of fishes. New plants and animal diseases appear and, pollinators are disoriented. Small-scale farmers, pastoralist, artisanal fisherfolk and the poor communities are the most affected. But they also develop community strategies to face the impacts. We will share experiences and knowledge created by people to challenge the impacts on climate change.

If you are an agroecological farmer and would like to share your experience, you may want to record a 3-5 minutes video that the SWIFT project will put together a resource available to farmers as a farmer-to-farmer training material.

In many contexts, individual and private forms of agricultural land tenure have replaced collective and communal ways of producing food, and processes of social and ecological care. Agrarian social movements and feminist researchers have called for the reclamation of the commons as a step towards the creation of more caring and equitable food systems. Contributions to this topic could look at new approaches to collective forms of property and the potential that these transformations bring in terms of increasing the inclusivity of farming (for migrants, young people, women, queer and LGBTIQ+ persons) as well as the ways that they might resolve some of the contradictions between food production and care for people and the environment.