At the opening of the event, 1,300 landless peasants marched towards a boat parade with 200 vessels navigating the waters of the Guajará Bay.
The People’s Summit, a parallel event to the 30th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP30), kicked off on November 12 with a flotilla protest of more than 200 boats, carrying around 5,000 people from popular movements. The event will continue until November 16 at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Guamá campus, in Belém.
A delegation of 1,300 landless peasants from the Amazon region and all over the country marched through the capital of Pará to join the boat parade.
“We will navigate the Amazon rivers to plant our flags, and above all, our flag of Popular Agrarian Reform, to say that there is no climate justice without Popular Agrarian Reform,” stated Bárbara Loureiro, from the coordination of the National Plan to Plant Trees and Produce Healthy Food of the MST (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement).
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The People’s Summit is built through the efforts of more than 1,100 civil society organizations and, over the course of five days, will provide open dialogues for the public, through plenary sessions and activities. The event also features a space dedicated to children and adolescents, a community fair, a solidarity kitchen, and cultural activities.
The People’s Summit’s discussion program is based on six themes: territories and food sovereignty, historical reparations and environmental racism, just transition, democracy and internationalism of the people, just cities and vibrant peripheries, as well as the theme of popular feminism and women’s resistance.
“We are here to denounce the false solutions being presented at COP30, in official spaces, solutions from large corporations in countries that do not consider the real needs of the people affected by climate change. So our boat parade is a cry for the waters of the Amazon,” Bárbara emphasized.
Expected to gather more than 30,000 people, the meeting is also a concrete response from the people to what they call the inertia and lack of commitment of the Conference of the Parties (COP), which, according to the summit’s leaders, despite reaching its thirtieth edition, with high investments in its organization and billions in donations to mitigation funds, has shown little or no results.
First published on MST website in Portuguese.
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