Aiming to build alliances with other actors and sectors and to advance the promotion of comprehensive agrarian reform from a perspective of justice, solidarity, reparation and sovereignty, Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) participated in the Forum of Peoples and Social Movements and the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20), held in Cartagena, Colombia, from 22 to 28 February 2026.

“ICARRD+20 marks a step forward in the struggle that social movements and organisations have been carrying out to rebuild momentum behind policies that support comprehensive, grassroots, feminist and redistributive agrarian reforms,” said Martín Drago, International Coordinator of the Food Sovereignty Programme at FoEI, ahead of the conference.

 As a space to build alliances, bring together perspectives, proposals and strategies, and continue to build solidarity, hundreds of delegates from the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC)—including Indigenous Peoples, peasant movements, fisherfolk, rural workers and others—gathered in Cartagena for the Forum of Peoples and Social Movements, held prior to the international conference. Before that, researchers and academic activists joined social movement representatives and government officials to participate in the International Academic Conference for Land, Life, and Society, where they discussed redistributive land policies, food sovereignty and agrarian justice, from 20 to 22 February.

Internationalist solidarity and collective action for transformative agrarian reform

During the forum, representatives of social movements highlighted the need for collective land rights, equal access to land for women, youth participation, free, prior and informed consent, and the defence of customary and communal land tenure systems.

“In the North and the South, the West and the East, we need agrarian reforms that recognise peoples’ rights to sovereignty in their territories, with peoples being the ones who control lands, waters and territories, not corporations,” said the General Coordinator of La Vía Campesina, Morgan Ody.

On the last day of the Forum of Peoples and Social Movements, the organisations adopted a final declaration: “Unlike the narrow, technocratic view of land as a ‘factor of production,’ the IPC views territories as living spaces that embody the spiritual, cultural, and material basis of a people’s sovereignty. To defend territory is to defend the cycles of care and renewal that sustain the planet,” they stated.

ICARRD+20 is a historic opportunity for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development

Twenty years after the first ICARRD held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the materialisation of ICARRD+20 stands as a victory for social movements: “The IPC and the social movements that are part of it succeeded in bringing about another international conference that allowed us to re-politicise the debate on agrarian reform, one of the central struggles of the people to continue living with dignity in their territories in the face of initiatives that seek to expel them,” added Drago.

Throughout the five-day conference, official activities took place alongside various side events organised by social movements. In the debates, exhibitions and panel discussions, the call for the “4 Rs” of agrarian reform—Recognition, Restitution, Redistribution and Regulation—took centre stage, along with the conviction that it is urgent to halt corporate encroachment on territories, land and water.

Following the conclusion of ICARRD+20, social movements considered that the final declaration of the official conference was rather weak and decided to reject it. One of the aspects that caused discontent was the language regarding Indigenous Peoples: “In international law, Indigenous Peoples hold distinct collective rights – including self-determination, land, territories and resources (…) The term “local communities” has no equivalent, clearly defined status in international law and does not carry the same collective rights or historical foundations. Conflating Indigenous Peoples with “local communities” risks diluting or undermining their legally recognized rights by erasing this distinct status and lowering established standards of protection,” the IPC noted.

Drago added: “The results fall a bit short of what we expected in terms of positioning, of acknowledging the structural causes of land access issues, and of the interconnected crises we are facing: the social, economic and environmental crises,” he said.

But with a more medium- and long-term perspective, it is possible to say that progress was made: “There is a commitment to continue working to build greater critical mass within governments, as well as among civil society organisations and academia, in support of Agrarian Reform policies, and in that sense we understand that we are making progress,” Drago concluded.

(Main photo and all the photos in this blog) Credit: International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty.