This springtime is witness to an ancient idea returning to center stage across the Bay Area, the nation and the globe: redistributive agrarian reform. But what does agrarian reform mean, and why is it so important at this historical crossroads? In this blog, Nils McCune reflects on the experience of the UN’s 2nd International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20), reminding us that agrarian reform is the heart of the civilizational pathway that exists in diametrical opposition to oil wars and imperialism. After situating ICAARD +20 in its historical context, Nils lifts up the urgent need for People Led Comprehensive Land reform, ending by discussing the 4Rs of agrarian reform: recognition, redistribution, restitution, and regulation.
By: Nils McCune, Canticle Farm, Oakland, California; Institute for Agroecology (IFA), University of Vermont; People’s Agroecology School of Vermont; VOCES Collective.
The United Nations’ 2nd International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) was held in Cartagena, Colombia, from February 24-28, 2026. This was the highest level international gathering in decades to touch the electric third rail in national politics: the potential dismantling of landlord power and redistribution of farm land for the benefit of farm workers, peasants, and indigenous people. Adding weight to the conference, it was opened by Colombia’s head of state, president Gustavo Petro. In stark contrast to the opaque Davos and Doha culture, and even most COP climate change meetings that make civil society participation difficult and expensive, ICARRD+20 was purposefully set up to be the culmination of force accumulation by social movements. It started the day after a major social movement gathering on agrarian reform in Cartagena, and three days after an international academic conference at the University of Cartagena on Land, Life and Society read its final declaration next to the tomb of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In the long story, both Colombian and universal, of humanity’s experience with dispossession, enclosure, resistance and commoning, this conference was organized with an eye to become a landmark moment.
This article describes the journey to ICARRD+20. It is an unlikely one, given that so few governments worldwide are enacting redistributive agrarian reform. Translating the recent uptick in conversations about agrarian reform into action is an extraordinarily difficult, historic task. Partly, this is due to the longue durée context: a Western world finally forced to confront its colonial legacy, albeit in a bifurcated, extremely dangerous way, as many Western governments are doubling down on racist, classist, sexist discourse, policy, and militarism. Amid the ripples of broken hegemonies of colonialism and neoliberalism– and a renewed imperialism from the United States– the international people’s movement continues to defend its vision for agrarian reform, grounded in past and present declarations, documents, and roadmaps. This article will make the case that the best, and perhaps the only, path toward a livable future for our species and so many others is to enact radical land reform in every bioregion on the globe.
Why Agrarian Reform?
The basic case for agrarian reform is simple: it responds to the gross inequality in land access created by colonialism and exacerbated over the last four decades of neoliberalism. Of the 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land in the world, 1% of farms cover 70% of the land area, while 40% of farms are crowded onto just 3% of farmland. Of 8.3 billion people in the world, around 1.5 billion are considered landless—impoverished rural workers who could become self-sufficient producers if they had access to land. Ironically, most hungry people live in rural areas. The patterns of land concentration and landlessness are repeated across continents and the north-south divide.
Property, of course, is a social relation–one that currently reflects Mumia Abu-Jamal’s phrase that “Earth is a resort for a handful of billionaires, and the rest of us are resort staff.” Currently Bill Gates (not known for his farming prowess) is the largest farmland owner in the United States. Unfortunately, under the current political-economic order the massive transformation of farmland into conservation areas for carbon sequestration will only take more land away from small farmers while leaving most large landowners untouched. In contrast, redistribution of land from the hands of hedge funds and the wealthy into the hands of small agroecological farms would be the most effective way to simultaneously address hunger, poverty, climate chaos and biodiversity collapse, according to several UN rapporteurs on the right to food and studies by GRAIN.
Redistribution of land from the hands of hedge funds and the wealthy into the hands of small agroecological farms would be the most effective way to simultaneously address hunger, poverty, climate chaos, and biodiversity collapse.
But agrarian reform is tricky. It has a, well, reformist sound to it and can sometimes mean rural changes aimed at making capitalism more palatable. Indeed, agrarian reform in the 20th century, while often a core demand of revolutionary movements, was also a goal that development economists argued for, albeit for different reasons. In the context of the continued existence of large, unproductive landlord estates across the formerly colonized world, these mainstream economists advocated for “distributive land policies”, not for social justice or ecology, but as a way of unlocking the productive potential of the countryside—a way of producing more food to lower food prices, limit salaries, and reduce the costs of industrialization.
Adding to the confusion, the global neoliberal counterrevolution of the late 20th century employed a “market-led agrarian reform” still promoted by the World Bank, which encourages treating land as a commodity to be bought and sold in markets rather than as part of a socioecological relationship. Following the 2008 economic crisis, financial capital became fascinated with land and began purchasing and taking possession of land across the planet, in what is known as the global land grab. Proponents of redistributive agrarian reform must clarify that what they are fighting for isn’t the developmentalist approach that nibbles around the edges of the problem, let alone the neoliberal approach that commodifies land and offers it to the highest bidder. Instead, we are talking about the kind of agrarian reform that can massively amplify agroecology and people-led solutions to the global environmental catastrophe we are living through.
International agrarian reform process in a historical context
Although people often cite the first UN International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2006, as the point of origin of the UN process on agrarian reform, that isn’t exactly true, a case in which word choice reshapes reality. That’s because a UN World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development had already been held in Rome in 1979. There, member states debated how agrarian reform could be “the prime motor for sustained economic and social development.” A major outcome of that conference was the declaration of the principle that “any successful agricultural policy will need the active participation, from the inception to the implementation of projects, of farmers themselves or representatives of associations acting on their behalf, and that governments should actively encourage the establishment of representative rural organisations pursuing the economic and social advancement of their members.” This would become a major principle of La Vía Campesina’s grassroots approach to governance: nothing about us, without us.
The 1980s saw the Reagan and Thatcher years in the US and UK, respectively, and with them came the doctrine of TINA: “there is no alternative.” Privatizations, the dismantling of worker and environmental protections, deregulation, and the opening of markets became the pillars of corporate globalization that emerged triumphant from the Cold War with state-led socialism. Having outspent the Soviet Union in the arms race, Western capitalism by the 1990s had a world to redraw and did so in ways that established accelerated value flows from the global peripheries to the new center: the financial sphere. As factory production was relocated to the lowest-income corners of the globe, inequality skyrocketed, and a global casino economy was built around the emergence of markets to exploit, with the United States as the unofficial enforcer of the new rules. As petroleum is (and was) sold in US dollars, countries placed their currency reserves in US treasuries and bonds, inadvertently sponsoring the US global military footprint and its 800 bases across the globe.
The World Bank played its role in this new global enclosure by demanding that countries carry out land titling, allocating individual deeds to poor farmers on the premise that, by mortgaging their property, they could access all-important private loans and increase their productivity. Working in tandem with the Green Revolution, land titling became part of market-led agrarian reform, which scholars argue has led to higher production costs, cycles of debt, farmer suicides, and land concentration in the hands of the wealthy.
But movements fought back. In the chaos of the privatizations and food dumping of the early 1990s, two particularly crucial international platforms emerged: the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC) and La Vía Campesina. Both demanded an end to globalized, corporate-controlled, neoliberal food systems and soon defined a core vision: food sovereignty. The logic of food sovereignty goes something like this: when parts of the historically colonized world break free and create alternatives, they invariably come under attack by existing neocolonial powers.
In those confrontations, their ability to feed themselves without relying on international corporate monopolies becomes a vital source of strategic independence. And the way people work together on the land to create those spaces of freedom—their ability to challenge patriarchal structures, honor the land’s ecology, and recover ancient heirloom seeds and knowledge systems—will ultimately be the test of their political project. This is why social movements that defend food sovereignty also carry out extensive internal processes to uproot patriarchal attitudes, promote youth leadership, and recover the agroecological knowledge of peasant, Indigenous, farmworker, and Afrodescendent diaspora communities. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), among others across the world, developed an “occupy, resist, produce” direct action praxis that saw rural poor people squat on unused and underused public and private land, defend themselves from violent attempts at removal, and grow food using low external input, agroecological methods, while also fighting for legal recognition as landholders.
Understood as the right of nations and people to create, control, and defend their own food systems, food sovereignty is more than a principle: it is the political-historical project that agroecology builds, field by field, farm by farm.
Still, in Brazil’s ICARRD in 2006, social movements noted that their participation was reduced to a few testimonials while the planning and execution of the conference was led by governments, including Brazil’s Worker’s Party government. While agrarian reform was finally being given long-overdue recognition, it wasn’t understood as a process that people fundamentally must lead. This sense-making by movements, particularly La Vía Campesina, became part of the legacy of the first ICARRD. Led by the phenomenal theoretical capacity of Brazil’s MST, social movements began to discuss ways of differentiating their vision from those of both neoliberal “economic hit men” and top-down technocrats.
A key task was to make clear that the genuine agrarian reform movements demanded had nothing to do with the World Bank’s “market-led agrarian reform.” But movements also carried out a critical analysis of state-led agrarian reform processes, which took place during the 20th century in both revolutionary contexts (Haiti, Mexico, Russia, China, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, etc.) and reformist contexts (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Peru, etc.). Movements saw that previous agrarian reforms had given land titles to men, not women, thus making women dependent on their relationships with men to access land. Unfathomable violence, often hidden under the cover of “domestic issues,” was the result. And when governments embraced market-led agrarian reform, more accurately called agrarian counter-reform, male land reform beneficiaries had a higher willingness to sell their land than women might have, leading to landlessness, poverty and migration. The vision of land reform needed to include a gendered analysis of power and vulnerability.
But also, where was the land coming from, and who did it really belong to? While class conflict raged in plantation agriculture, the landless workers were not the only ones with claims to the land upon which they were being exploited. In many cases, industrial agriculture was implemented in the ancestral lands of Indigenous people, who made claims to their rightful territories. Connecting physical spaces with worlds of spiritual co-existence, practices, cosmos, and cultures, Indigenous understandings of territory began to dialog with peasant and farm worker notions of land. What would restoration of the right relationships with Mother Earth look like? How could more complex land stewardship than merely plow agriculture—such as Indigenous relationships with fish, forests, and fire—become part of a vision of agrarian reform? And how to understand the uprooted Indigenous cultures and land claims of those who had been forced to work and sweat on land not of their own ancestry, but who, over generations of enslavement and deprivation, had created cultures of their own?
Towards Comprehensive People-Led Agrarian Reform
Looking to deepen their own praxis, rural social movements carried out years of dialogue and debates within their membership base, with land-based movements of Indigenous peoples, African diaspora communities with origins in the Western Powers’ transatlantic slave trade (declared on March 25, 2026 by the UN General Assembly to be the gravest crime against humanity), intellectuals and revolutionary thinkers, and with urban movements. These conversations led them to understand that redistributing the land to those who work it, while a fundamental principle, wasn’t the whole story. To be able to hold on to land, people also need the ability to live with dignity: housing, education, health care, and transportation. They needed memory of their own history and that of others in relationship with the land. They needed support to create and recreate their own seed systems, access to markets, and cooperative economies. They needed agroecological training and room for experimentation without the threat of losing their land. All of these political, cultural, economic, and social demands were components of what became known as comprehensive agrarian reform.
Finally, movements asked themselves: who is going to do all this? Their experience told them that electoral coalitions that worked for winning elections were, in general, too weak to take on the entrenched power of landlord classes, especially given that in most countries, the unproductive landlord class is allied with foreign powers. The landlord class grants foreign powers access to mining and industrial agriculture, and the foreign powers protect the landlord class from domestic challenges to its power. This dynamic generally leads national governments to leave land in the hands of the wealthy—for them, a dose of restorative justice for the impoverished and displaced isn’t worth getting sanctioned or invaded by a Western power. Thus, movements concluded, it didn’t make sense to wait for changes from above. Agrarian reform would have to be led by the people themselves.
People-led, comprehensive agrarian reform became the rallying cry for global social movements during the global land grab that followed the financial collapse of 2008. As elite investors, hedge funds, states, and foreign governments snatched up farmland, movements deepened their commitment to women’s rights, Indigenous sovereignty, youth protagonism, and agroecological methods in the land they recovered and defended. The idea of how people access land, relate to land, and build social life upon the land, is as old as humanity itself. And in a moment when social inequality is more extreme than at any other time in human history, the question of land becomes deeply political.
ICARRD: back by popular demand
All this brings us to Cartagena, 2026. After nearly 80 years of internal armed conflict, Colombia voted in its first-ever leftist government in 2022. President Gustavo Petro has made peace the core of his government, while emphasizing that peace in Colombia means realizing long-denied dreams of social justice. The agrarian reform policies of his Historic Pact party have been multipronged, using a combination of compensation (land purchasing for redistribution) and expropriation without compensation, through a program by which land formerly owned by organized crime and convicted narcotraffickers is seized and reallocated. This last mechanism has created a process by which thousands of victims of the civil war—particularly displaced peasant farmers—have received as restitution over 300,000 hectares of land. The Special Assets Society, led by president Amelia Pérez Parra, is responsible for administering land taken from these white-collar criminals and, under the Petro government, giving it to campesina communities displaced by the war as quickly as possible, while also preparing those communities to hold on to the land for the long struggle ahead. In an interview, Dr. Pérez Parra told me that she had witnessed forced displacement as a human rights lawyer. During her investigations, she found that when organized crime violently forced peasant communities off the land, they also threatened the communities into signing documents as though they were selling their land to the landlords. “That’s why, based on my criteria, they are not owners of those lands. They stole those lands…. How did they pay? They paid by killing people’s family members and driving them off the land.” Speaking in name of the Colombian government, she uses the language of “returning the land to who it really belongs to.”
Another mechanism is one based not only on land ownership, but also and especially on autonomous territorial governance. The Peasant Reserve Zones (ZRC) are areas where local communities have agreed on a sustainable development plan and have been recognized by the national government as comprising a territory that exerts various forms of self-governance, including the prohibition of extractive industries such as mining. While the law to create ZRC has been on the books since 1994, attempts by peasant organizations and social movements to create ZRC have generally languished in bureaucratic purgatories for decades. In 2022, there were only five ZRCs in the whole country, but today there are 29, providing a novel and hopeful model for people-led, comprehensive agrarian reform that exercises popular sovereignty and carries out agroecological transformations in real territories.
Colombia’s agrarian revolution, as the government calls it, has a phenomenal ally in the minister of agriculture, Martha Carvajalino. Together with the president and other ministers, she has taken seriously the painstaking organizing work of rural social movements to put together a significant bid to redistribute land and build pedagogy around peasant land cultures. The María Cano Latin American Institute of Agroecology (IALA María Cano), outside the town of Viotá, provides integral training in agroecology for young people from grassroots peasant organizations across Colombia—and, in its third course offering this Spring, it will expand eligibility to young people from peasant organizations from across Latin America. IALA María Cano is run by FENSUAGRO, a massive peasant and farmworker organization that works to build food sovereignty and participates in CLOC and LVC. Nury Martínez, the president of FENSUAGRO, worked closely with the Colombian government to give birth to the possibility of ICARRD+20, and to ensure that it would be carried out with the true participation of social movements.
Meanwhile, intellectuals and academics have increasingly been leaning into their role as committed, critical support to social movements. An international collective of agrarian scholars of the South (CASAS) has taken form over the last decade and increasingly shares deep connections with social movements and with activists within the few progressive governments trying to enact redistributive agrarian reform. CASAS was a core motor for the creation of an academic pre-conference where scholars from across the planet could dialog about agrarian reform.
A second major event was also held under the auspices of ICARRD—a social movement gathering of the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC) —with core organizing and logistical support from La Vía Campesina. This international forum was a space for developing, debating, and deepening the social movements’ proposal for ICARRD+20. Social movements are spearheading a growing coalition around the 4Rs of agrarian reform: recognition, redistribution, restitution, and regulation.
Looking forward: the 4Rs of agrarian reform
Recognition: many Indigenous peoples, Afrodescendent diaspora communities, peasants and rural workers are currently situated in territories but are in danger of being pushed off the land. Recognition is the legal guarantee that their rights to access land and territory will be respected.
Redistribution: this is the breaking up of the large estates created by colonialism, crony capitalism, and land grabs, and their partition into parcels that can be reasonably stewarded using agroecological methods by working people of the countryside.
Restitution: across the globe, people have been unjustly forced off the land by conflict, violence, extractive industries, and urbanization. The restitution of their rights to live on and work the land involves providing them with land as reparation for the harm done.
Regulation: none of the above will work if there is no check on the power of land monopolies and the landlord class. Regulation refers to legal structures that limit the ability of the wealthy to accumulate land, displace people from it, or run roughshod over its ecology in pursuit of profit.
How can these be put into practice in places like where you live? And just as importantly, who will put them into practice? ICARRD+20 helped me see that this work takes committed movements of the social sectors who make their lives in co-production with the land. The convergence of the struggle for the dignity of small farmers and the dignity of farm workers, is crucial to the work ahead. Farmers’ contribution to food sovereignty can be recognized while also defending the rights and dignity for those doing the work in the state’s food system. Recognition means legally protecting these rights. Redistribution means identifying farmland purchased by development interests and figuring out how to return it to those who want to work it for the health and nourishment of the population.
Restitution involves working with the communities that violence or just the “dull compulsion of market relations” have displaced. Indigenous land back and Black agrarian processes for access to viable farmland are ways in which restitution is taking place. Considering how women’s access to land has, for too long, been dependent upon the relationship with the men in their lives is part of restitution. And to bring it all together requires regulations that work for smaller farmers, including maple sugaring farmers, fishers, ranchers, breeders, composters, and others. The legal structure makes a huge difference in determining whether small actors can break even and continue operating or be gobbled up by the big players.
The 4Rs are technical principles that can guide land reform in the 21st century, but they must be guided by the political principle of solidarity. As an educator, I try to connect students with a diversity of actors who are carrying out different kinds of agrarian reform today. From Turtle Island Indigenous landback to Zimbabwe’s people-led land occupation movement that forced the government to finally take land from wealthy whites and provide it to the Black majority, from farm land trusts for generational transfer to migrant worker commons, from the MST to the agroecology schools of LVC, I want my students to be exposed to the full gamut of what is possible, in terms of rewriting social life by transforming our relationship with land.
The bottom line
What emerges from this historical account is a realization that there is no single pathway to people-led agrarian reform, but rather a range of historical and contemporary experiences. Rather than trying to adhere to guidelines on which kind of agrarian reform is the “right” one to apply, each context may require its own process. Agrarian reform in Modesto is clearly going to be different than agrarian reform in Mississippi, or in Malaysia. However, the lesson of history is that by lowering expectations from the outset, for example, by excluding expropriation without compensation from the tools in the policy toolbox, agrarian reform processes tend to weaken before making any real dents in the gross inequality of land access. In contrast, those processes that proclaim key principles from the outset, such as “land to the tillers” are more successful, because they carry moral weight, mobilize key constituencies, and force the powerful to the table.
The other major lesson to share: land is essential, but it isn’t just about the land. The generations of those of us currently alive need to come together to stop the beast of capital accumulation before it simply overruns the planetary thresholds and drives us into extinction. Agrarian reform must not only break the cycles of abuse that landlordism creates but also set us upon a path to liberation. To be successful, such an emancipation should connect people to the land and to one another—by finding the scale of farming that allows people to enter into communion with the living beings on the land, forests, fungi, and animals, as well as one another, in economies that work for people. Sustainable living is a readily available possibility; it doesn’t depend on new technologies, but rather on political and cultural transformation. People-led, comprehensive, redistributive agrarian reform, with recognition, restitution and regulation, is the way to build the kind of community economies, rewilding, regenerative agroecosystems, cooperative lifeways, that can usher in abundance and thriving life, land, and society in our time.
In his time and context, Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that peace was not merely the absence of war or tensions, but the presence of justice, sisterhood, and goodwill. In this sense, agrarian reform represents the clearest vision of a just transformation, in our present context of global environmental calamity and wars for profit. Such a transformative structural change requires years of consciousness-raising, debate, and experimentation; this is the task of our generation.