(Statement drafted following the assembly held on 9 June at the Aemed Open Space, subsequently discussed and amended collectively during an important democratic assembly process on 10 June, and finally approved by consensus during the last plenary session of the Aemed Congress on 12 June 2025)
We come together, not only as participants in a Mediterranean agroecology congress, but as members of a global movement rooted in justice, dignity, and the right to food (FAO, 2025). Agroecology is not neutral. It is also political. It is a collective commitment to transform food systems and to dismantle the economic, colonial, ecological, environmental, and military structures of violence that continue to deny people’s sovereignty.
The Nyéléni Declaration, the cornerstone of the international agroecology movement, envisions a world where “all peoples, nations, and states are able to determine their own food production systems… where we share our lands and territories peacefully and fairly among our peoples—peasants, Indigenous peoples, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, or others.” (2007 p.2). That vision is incompatible with the ongoing occupation, siege, and systematic destruction of Palestinian land, food systems, tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and life itself. The same principles are affirmed by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas – UNDROP (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2018), and these are systematically violated in Palestine and communities worldwide (Human Rights Watch, 2016, OHCHR, 2024).
We are shocked to witness food, water, and farmland, which are supposed to be intrinsic to human life, used as tools of war. The bombing of vital infrastructure, food supply chains, and healthcare and education systems, have caused the loss of thousands of lives, the destruction of traditional ecological knowledge, the very capacity to reproduce life, and regenerate soil and water (FAO & UNOSAT, 2025, World Health Organisation, 2025). Palestinian farmers face criminalisation and land dispossession on a daily basis. In Gaza, agriculture is militarily restricted. In the West Bank, settler violence and occupation prevent farmers from accessing their fields. These are not isolated events, they are part of a long-standing strategy of erasure, fragmentation, and control. The oppression has spread to the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. The agroecological community must stand against this. We must not allow the language of sustainability to be co-opted by states and institutions complicit in systemic injustice.
The Mediterranean has become a graveyard for those undertaking perilous migration routes to escape war, poverty, and climate disaster. Their deaths are not tragic accidents, but the result of political choices and hardened borders. Those who survive face overcrowded camps and exploitation, especially in the agricultural sector. These are not isolated issues, they reveal deeper cracks in our commitment to human rights and dignity (United Nations, 2023, IOM, 2024).
Meanwhile, several underrepresented and oppressed communities are displaced and ecosystems destroyed, even beyond the Jordan river and Mediterranean sea. This devalues human and non-human life, and facilitates genocide and ecocide.
“Agroecology is the answer to how to transform and repair our material reality in a food system and rural world that has been devastated by industrial food production and its so-called Green and Blue Revolutions. We see agroecology as a key form of resistance to an economic system that puts profit before life.” (Nyéleni, 2015).
As a practice, agroecology must not be an accomplice to the murder of “small-scale food producers and consumers, including peasants, Indigenous Peoples, communities, hunters and gatherers, family farmers, rural workers, herders and pastoralists, fisherfolk and urban people” (Nyéléni, 2015 p.1), land grabbing, displacement, the denial of access to resources, the contamination of groundwater and soil, and the destruction of vital infrastructure, traditional seeds, and olive groves.
As a science, agroecology cannot be conducted on stolen and occupied land. Agroecological science must not overwrite biocultural diversity, it must protect and amplify food justice.
As a movement, agroecology must stand against genocide, ecocide, warfare, and colonisation. Agroecology is a movement which fights for “small-scale food producers and consumers, including peasants, Indigenous Peoples, communities, hunters and gatherers, family farmers, rural workers, herders and pastoralists, fisherfolk and urban people[’s]” (Nyéléni, 2015 p.1) rights and food sovereignty.
As the agroecological community convened at the AEMED Congress in Agrigento, June 2025, we affirm our unwavering solidarity with Palestinian farmers, youth, and communities. We demand that agroecology not serve as a façade for greenwashing colonialism and the displacement of “small-scale food producers and consumers, including peasants, Indigenous Peoples, communities, hunters and gatherers, family farmers, rural workers, herders and pastoralists, fisherfolk and urban people” (Nyéléni, 2015 p.1), but rather a way of liberation, socio-ecological justice and peace.
We call on:
● All Mediterranean and European countries to immediately demand a ceasefire, end all weapons trade and military support to Israel, and for governments to uphold international law.
● Researchers and institutions to boycott and refuse collaboration with apartheid, and to align with ethical and decolonial frameworks, by starting to discuss real solutions based on fair and agroecological principles aligned with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement (BDS Movement, n.d.)
● Movements and networks across the Mediterranean to support the rebuilding of a sovereign, self-determined Palestinian food system, rooted in agroecology, intergenerational knowledge, and land justice.
Agroecology is not only a method of farming—it is a cosmovision. A path of resistance, repair, and return. For Palestine, and for all peoples struggling for freedom, it must remain a means for collective liberation.
Ceasefire now. End the occupation. Food sovereignty for Palestine.
Agrigento, June 12, 2025 2/3
References
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