Season’s Greetings from Navdanya International:
A year of Community Resilience united in Care for the Earth and All Life

As 2025 draws to an end, we are reminded of our role as collective stewards of nature and food sovereignty, with the responsibility to shape society and how we treat our world and the living beings within it. We look back on a year that has exposed the fragility of our democratic systems and institutions. We have witnessed war and food crises sweeping across many parts of the world — spoken and unspoken of.  

We witnessed multiple social, economic and climatic crises, which exposed the poorest and most vulnerable on our planet even more. Political decisions that prioritize profit through armed conflict and the privatization of all available resources continue to be made far from the communities that first suffer the effects of the climate crisis, desertification, and the loss of natural resources, biodiversity, and agrobiodiversity.

Against a paradigm of control and hierarchy, we live as part of a whole, and thanks to the gifts nature has bestowed on us: air, water, food – a livelihood and a web of living beings. Navdanya International champions the rights of nature and the rights to seed sovereignty against a new wave of attempts to patent natural genetic resources, from trees to crops, and to keep seeds where they belong: our communities.

This year, our report on new genomic techniques traces the new GMO legislations that endanger, once more, food security and biodiversity through a false promise of sustainable gene editing, while in fact hiding an assault on natural resources and the very freedom of all communities and nations to be in charge of their food production, —an analysis that reached a wide international media audience. The report was presented at the Semillas en Resistencia Global event in Mexico, which gathered civil society organizations, farmers’ movements and indigenous communities from all over Latin America, as well as experts from Europe, Africa and North America, in order to inform, discuss and strategize for the protection of food sovereignty worldwide. 

As part of civil society, which speaks the language of people and nature, not of profit, it is vital to stand against a democracy ruled by private interests and to fight for our spaces of participation wherever possible. For this reason, Navdanya International continued its effort to regenerate communities through agroecology, securing seed sovereignty of resources. As this year's CFS closed the work on urban and peri-urban food systems, the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism works to bring local perspectives, needs and solutions on resilient food systems into this global forum. The institution of the CSIPM reminds us that it is possible for civil society to become a part of global policy-making through collective action. 

To bring global policies back to local communities, as politics in many parts of the world continue to move away from democratic principles of shared social values and mutual understanding, we have strengthened our educational programmes, “Ecoculturae” as pathways to regenerate and build community resilience through agroecology: This year, we built our first natural classroom. Our Terrae Vivae pilot in Italy featured adult, high school and agrarian institutes as a way to connect institutions, citizens and civil society, to build the core values that permit local food systems to flourish and biodiversity to be protected. Our initiatives bridged education and social justice, connecting school projects with plants grown through prison-based programs focused on rehabilitation and care. To celebrate this year’s World Soil Day, we launched a video featuring one of our associated regenerative farms, where years of regenerative practices have increased soil organic matter to 6%, rebuilding fertile and resilient topsoil.

Our historical courses on agroecology at the Earth University in India took place in October, where experts from all over the world shared their knowledge on real and realistic solutions for farmers and communities to end food scarcity and protect biodiversity. The Navdanya model demonstrates that cultivating ecological wisdom is an act of care, collaboration, and connection—whether in Dehradun or Rome, Brazil or Ghana. Through place-based learning and international exchange, Navdanya’s educational work bridges tradition and innovation, fostering resilient, just, and sustainable communities for the Earth and all her inhabitants.​ Navdanya International especially defends the rights and role of women in agriculture through its longstanding programme Diverse Women for Diversity. And while it is present every year in our courses in India, this year, we also joint the international alliance Stop the Pushback on Women’s Rights to strengthen our ongoing work to advance ecofeminism and extend the principles of our manifesto Making Peace with the Earth.

All actions, networks and collectives that we created, participated in or reported on – from the Wild Salmon Caravan in Turtle Island (Canada) to strengthening local Biodistricts and University Lectures on the rights on Nature – testify to how true resilience is born in diversity and connection. Just like the sun passes through its solstice, an event celebrated in so many ways and in so many cultures all across the globe, we see that true stability is not made of control and rigidity, but is cyclical in nature. Learning from all those worldviews that honour the cycles of nature, understanding them, and building lasting food systems through regeneration and diversity are possible, we look towards a future of regeneration: next year, we aim at expanding our educational processes on community regeneration and strengthen international and local processes of participation and agroecology.​ 

For Navdanya International, this year ends with a plea to connect, to see, to narrate all those thousand places, villages, cities and forests where true regeneration nurtures the web of life and all those connected to it.​

As the year comes to an end, we extend our heartfelt thanks to all who have supported Navdanya International in this journey. Your solidarity has been instrumental in advancing our mission to protect the Earth and its biodiversity.​

Season’s Greetings from all of us at Navdanya International. Let us continue this journey together, united in Care for the Earth and All Life.