The idea was to facilitate the convergence in a common space for representatives of communities, organizations and social movements affected by climate change and its “false solutions”.

“Small-scale food producers and consumers, including peasants, indigenous peoples, hunters and gatherers, family farmers, rural workers, herders and pastoralists, fisherfolk and urban people – the frontline communities – are increasingly confronted by the grabbing of natural resources and by systematic violations of human rights”, stated the official invitation to the activity. “They are also directly affected by the impacts of climate destruction. The climate change mitigation schemes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which are presented as ’solutions’ to the man-made climate crisis are false solutions, given that they are intrinsically linked to these resource grabs and human rights violations”, it adds.

The Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles is an initiative launched and led by grassroots organizations and social movements in order to link and strengthen the struggles for food and peoples’ sovereignty and human rights. This process started in October 2014, as several social and grassroots movements from Africa as well as civil society organizations gathered at the African Social Forum in Dakar to protest against all forms of natural resource grabbing and the systematic human rights violations that accompany them.

Below we share a video of the Transnational Institute of the Netherlands and Radio Mundo Real at the activity, focusing on four interviews with Shalmali Guttal (Focus on the Global South), Riza Damanik (Indonesia Traditional Fisherfolks Union, KNTI), Sophia Ougutu (World March of Women Kenya) and Jennifer Franco (Transnational Institute, TNI of the Netherlands).