The 2026 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group took place from October 12th – 18th in Bangkok, Thailand. La Via Campesina and several other peasant and farmer organisations, including Thailand’s Assembly of the Poor (AOP), took to the streets to denounce the World Bank and IMF’s destructive policies and the EU-Thailand Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

On September 23^rd, over 100 farmers’ groups marched through Bangkok and submitted a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives protesting the possible adoption of UPOV 1991 in Thailand’s Plant Variety Protection Act. Adopting UPOV 1991 is part of the negotiations for the FTA between Europe and Thailand, but its adoption creates further barriers to protecting peasants’ and small-scale farmers’ seeds, while at the same time allowing legal gaps for misappropriation of local plants’ genetic material.

Thai and European farmers and peasants (organised across over 100 farmers’ groups, including the Assembly of the Poor, and the European Coordination of the Via Campesina) are standing together against the EU-Thailand FTA. In Thailand, the FTA agreement is also expected to expand the poultry and corn monoculture production, reinforcing pathways towards increased greenhouse gases resulting from large-scale stubble burning and benefiting only a handful of poultry industry giants. In Europe, food sovereignty will be threatened by the incoming flux of cheap industrial poultry from Thailand. The FTA agreement will put at risk food sovereignty and peasants’ rights in both Thailand and Europe, advancing only concentration and contamination.

CASAS stands with peasant organisations and farmers protesting the possible acceptance of the UPOV 1991 and the FTA agreement and supports La Via Campesina’s demands for placing people and ecologies at the heart of economic policy, instead of corporations’ interests. We support the need to cancel debt in Global South countries, tax corporations and reallocate the budget towards farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and local communities’ needs.  We support the transformation of the global food system through food sovereignty and agroecology, as part of the wider socioecological change needed for addressing the multi-faceted crises evident today.

Read our full statement below: