Defend our Lands!
Rural Women’s Resistance Grows from Solidarity and Justice

Statement on the Day of the Landless 2026

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For rural women of Asia and the Pacific, land is intricately connected to culture, identity, traditional beliefs, livelihood and one’s overall being, so much so that losing land is as painful and as debilitating as losing a limb. Yet while women farmers and food producers have a huge role and contribution in local food systems, they have less access to, ownership of and control over land and other productive resources, comprising only less than 20 per cent of all landholders. 

Landlessness is a structural and perennial struggle faced by peasants and poor farmers in the region. This is driven by systemic, large-scale land grabbing by private corporations and even the state, often legitimised in the name of ‘development’, food security, environmental conservation and climate mitigation. Massive land-use conversion and aggressive development projects are systematically dismantling productive agricultural lands for industrial, commercial and residential use. This forced displacement of rural communities, coupled with the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity, is trapping people in a cycle of hunger and systemic poverty. 

Enabled by prevailing neoliberal policies, militarism, authoritarian governance and patriarchal system, capitalists and political elites are enjoying an unprecedented level of power and impunity in undertaking massive land and resource grabs across the region. Imperialism and the race for control over vital resources are driving wars and conflicts that exacerbate oppression and human rights violations particularly in rural communities. Financial behemoths, particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group, along with other international financial institutions (IFIs), are imposing the aggressive liberalisation of national markets and financing the privatisation and deregulation of vital industries that are hollowing out national economies and leaving entire populations vulnerable to systemic collapse. Reports link World Bank projects to the displacement of more than three million people, including rural and Indigenous women such as in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India and Pakistan among others, whose right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) are often violated.

As peasant movements around the globe observe the Day of the Landless, the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) expresses our solidarity with rural women and communities who continue to fight for land, food and justice. Landlessness has gendered consequences, disproportionately affecting women farmers who are already carrying the burden of patriarchal discrimination and oppression. APWLD asserts that women’s rights to land and resources are fundamental for the realisation of a broad range of women’s human rights and in attaining Development Justice. 

APWLD advances Feminist Food Sovereignty to achieve a radical transformation of the food system, grounded in women’s leadership and collective power in dismantling systemic barriers and fighting for gender justice, economic democracy and climate justice. Feminist Food Sovereignty demands genuine agrarian reform, sustainable alternatives such as agroecology, protection of local knowledge systems and the resistance against imperialism, globalisation, militarism and fundamentalisms, and to continue to challenge prevailing patriarchal norms. 

APWLD also believes in the power of movements and in building solidarity across the Global South. Our struggles are interlinked; hence our resistance and rebuilding of the future must also be interconnected. 

APWLD’s Cross-movement Learning Exchange with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers Movement in Brazil last November 2025 affirms our conviction that Global South peasants and rural women share the same struggles and therefore share the same demand for their rights to land and food. For four days, women leaders from Amihan-National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines and Southern Peasants Federation of Thailand (SPFT) immersed and lived among the women of the Agrarian Reform Settlements of Martires de Abril and Paulo Fonteles in Mosqueiro Island, Belém, Pará in Brazil. These settlements are land reform projects of MST that honour the lives of the landless workers who were martyred in the struggle for land, popular resistance and defence of rural workers. 

Despite the miles that separate the women from Brazil, the Philippines and Thailand, their struggles and experiences almost mirror each other. This mutual understanding and shared reality forged an instant, profound bond. The rural women from the three countries found strength and inspiration in each other as they exchanged local knowledge and wisdom in agriculture and food production. Landlessness connects their pasts, but fierce resistance and a shared vision for agroecology and food sovereignty defines their future. 

Across the Global South, rural women are at the frontlines, defending both their lands and their lives against systemic extraction. While the oppressive structures they face are formidable, they are not insurmountable. By weaving local resistance into a transnational movement for sustainable life, women are shifting the foundations of power and rebuilding a world rooted in solidarity, radical care and a lasting peace for both people and the planet. #