RIPESS at the Women’s Assembly of the Nyéléni Forum: For Food as a Feminist and Common Good

Dear sisters, women from all the world in resistance, colleagues, comrades, and allies,

Food sovereignty is a vision rooted in peoples’ power to define, shape, and govern their own food systems. Today, as industrial food systems are dominated by transnational corporations, our communities, and especially our rural women, face growing threats to their autonomy, their land, and even their very means of sustenance.

Through the lens of feminism and the social solidarity economy—drawing on the vision articulated by RIPESS I invite us to reclaim food as a commons, and to see the transformation of our food systems as inseparable from the struggle for gender justice and ecological survival

Global agribusinesses and extractive corporations operate through an accumulation logic that values profit over people, uniformity over diversity, and control over collaboration. The result is a system where a handful of transnational actors control seeds, land, and markets—creating dependency, driving land grabs, and eroding the basic rights of peasant women, rural women and communities.

At the same time, patriarchal and capitalist structures conspire to exclude women—especially peasant, indigenous, and working-class women—from decision-making, land inheritance, and protection of their productive knowledge.

Women are the backbone of food systems. They nurture agroecological knowledge, maintain biodiversity, and ensure the security of families and communities. Yet, their rights to land, resources, and political participation are systematically undermined

The feminist struggle within food sovereignty challenges not just gender roles, but also the very systems of ownership and control sustained by corporations and the state. Women’s collectives in our movement demand:

-Right to land and productive resources in the face of patriarchal inheritance laws and corporate land grabs.

– Right to healthcare and social protection that recognizes women’s lifelong contributions, including during retirement.

– A voice in natural resource management bodies, shaping local, national, and regional food policies to be just, democratic, and sustainable.

The Social Solidarity Economy, championed by RIPESS, offers an alternative rooted in cooperation, collective ownership, and democratic governance. Unlike models that continue to feed the corporate-driven commodification of food, SSE brings together producers and consumers as co-owners and co-decision-makers of food systems.

Let’s look at some of the transformative elements:

-Pooling production and marketing resources: Women and communities organize cooperative production centers that allow a transition from rudimentary to modern tools and shared systems, strengthening technological autonomy and reducing outside dependency.

– Creating alternative value chains: From cultivation to processing to market, SSE-based solidarity mechanisms remove speculative intermediaries, ensuring fair prices and dignified livelihoods for producers.

– Community-based finance: Through solidarity finance schemes, local currencies, and ethical investment, communities regain economic control, investing resources back where they are most needed.

Feminist transformative SSE does not stop at economic structures. It operationalizes a political and citizen vision of food sovereignty by:

– Building collective power for advocacy: Women’s alliances within SSE demand policies that recognize their rights and their knowledge, insisting on balanced participation at all stages of production, distribution, and governance.

– Ensuring social and ecological sustainability: Agroecological practices, community seed banks, and biodiversity conservation become vehicles for autonomy and resistance, led by women who are the keepers of traditional and innovative knowledge.

-Making food a commons, not a commodity: By claiming food as a right and rejecting exploitative profit-driven models, feminist SSE foregrounds the ethics of care, interdependence, and reciprocity.

Transnational corporate power relies on breaking solidarity and fragmenting communities. The SSE approach, with its feminist grounding, is the opposite:

– builds solidarity networks—locally and globally—that sustain alternative food circuits, challenge the dominance of agribusiness, and center the rights of women, small producers, indigenous peoples and the people in popular economies;

– pushes for public food policies crafted by the people most affected: women who work the land, feed our societies, and know what sustainable, just food systems look like.

– is an intersectional struggle: against patriarchy, against extractivism, and against commodification. These are not isolated battles—each is part of an emancipatory movement for the commons and for building economy, gender and climate justice.

Dear sisters, the task is momentous but deeply hopeful. In every territory, women and communities are building new food systems—grounded in democratic control, solidarity, and care for people and nature. They are not only feeding us—they are defending dignity, diversity, and life itself.

Let us commit to standing with them: strengthening collectives, amplifying their pleas for land, autonomy, and recognition, and insisting that food sovereignty is both a feminist and an anti-corporate struggle.

Food is life. Food is feminist. Food is not for sale. And through a transformative social solidarity economy, a new world is not only possible—it is, in many places, already in creation.

Thank you.

Elise Pierrette Memong Meno — Secretary General of RAESS, RIPESS Board Member, and President of RESSCAM in Cameroon.