Systems Change Now or Never – A Note from The Third Nyéléni Global Forum

If food sovereignty means having local control over food systems, how can we do that if we’re all in debt?” The question hung over the hills above Kandy in September 2025, as 700 delegates from six continents gathered for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum on Food Sovereignty. Nyéléni is convened every decade by a wide range of organizations and social movements through the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) comprised mainly of food producers around the world. Recently the People’s Health Movement and RIPESS were recruited in. In the vanguard is La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement with 200 million members. Farmers from the Philippines, fisherfolk from Senegal, migrant workers from Central America, and Indigenous people and allies from around the world had all traveled to Sri Lanka to share strategies on how to confront a brutal paradox: everyone wants change, but chains of debt maintain the status quo.

That Sri Lanka should host this gathering carried particular bite. After citizens had stormed the presidential palace in 2022 and a left-leaning government finally took power in 2024, many expected change. But the new administration arrived with its hands already cuffed. The same parliament that had orchestrated the crisis under deposed President Rajapaksa had, in 2023, submitted to an IMF package that required Sri Lanka to bail out its creditors. Democracy, it turned out, was no match for the shackles of debt.

Three years after citizens had gone for a dip in the president’s pool, the island’s credit rating had been rebaptised by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF’s rituals were standard: suppress inflation, balance the budget, hold down wages. Each objective was achieved through the time-honoured method of taking money from those who have little and protecting those who have much. Value Added Tax, which falls disproportionately onto the shoulders of the poor, jumped from 8 to 15 percent in twelve months. The poor paid; the rich were spared.