Box 1
Toward the ICARRD+20 to advance food sovereignty and climate justice
The Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) will take place in Colombia in February 2026, following a call from grassroots organizations of peasants, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, artisanal fishers, and rural communities. Colombia, one of the few countries advancing agrarian reform, offered to host this global event.
ICARRD+20 comes at a critical moment, as land grabbing, speculation, inequality, and ecological destruction continue to displace millions and deepen hunger and poverty. For rural communities, land and territories are the foundation of life, culture, dignity, and food sovereignty. Therefore, this conference is not just a policy forum – it is a space to demand justice, challenge corporate power, and push for systemic change rooted in people’s rights.
The first ICARRD in 2006 was historic, opening space for both governments and social movements, who organized the “Land, Territory and Dignity” forum. It paved the way for major gains such as the Tenure Guidelines, the UN Declaration on the Right of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which strengthened recognition of land as a human right. However, despite victories in some countries, implementation has been limited.
Twenty years later, and in light of the multiple crises the world is facing, small-scale food producers’ organizations expect ICARRD+20 to go further: to confront land concentration, secure collective and customary rights, advance redistributive agrarian reform, ensure gender and generational justice, and defend territories as spaces of resistance, hope, and transformation.
Box 2
Greening through data but data can’t be green
While the movements for food, agricultural and climate justice want to sync their struggles towards system change, carbon markets blossom with digital tools and processes: finding information, making calculations, programing a productive activity, transmitting information across seas or automating the nurseries—among others—, and they appear as frictionless, precise and clean.
Under the new digital world order, small and micro farms, community forests, and even the backyards in peasant homes can enter the carbon markets as their capacity for CO2 sequestration can be calculated and auctioned.
Satellite measurements, precision agriculture with sensors in fields and forests, increased connectivity, widespread use of smartphones and tablets, modeling with artificial intelligence, increased robotization and automation in factories—these are some of the deployments that corporations hope to scale up as part of their efforts to offset their emissions. This would be combined with the payment of carbon credits, green and blue bonds, climate bonds, and other financial instruments to be discussed at COP30.
The boost that digitalization is giving to carbon markets must be denounced as the scam it is, a snake biting its own tail. Digital technologies can never be clean because they depend on fossil fuels to power data centers and gadgets, and require the most aggressive extractivism to obtain their materials.
Will we see large digital technology companies at COP30 looking to lure people in with compensations, while offering their tools to measure speculative emissions?
Box 3
Agrarian reform, agroecology, and the struggle for climate justice
The climate crisis we face today is rooted in a long history of dispossession—where our peoples have been forced from their territories— and colonization whose legacy continues today in and the corporate control over our food systems.
The industrial agriculture model, which puts profit ahead of people and nature, has systematically destroyed biodiversity, polluted the planet, and worsened the climate crisis. Every year, we see this in extreme weather events, with the heaviest burden falling on those who work the land, fish the waters, and grow food for our communities.
To push back against this destructive corporate-led food system requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to land, water, commons and territories—and how control over them is shared.
Therefore, for peasants, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, and all small-scale food producers and land workers, the fight for agrarian reform is central to the broader fight for climate justice. This is because, simply put, without peoples’ control over land, water, seeds, and territories, agroecology—the practice that heals the earth and supports communities—cannot be practiced.
Integral agrarian reform is thus more than just redistributing land. It’s about reclaiming the commons needed to build territories of care and economies based on solidarity.
This must happen through the democratic participation of those who produce and consume food. The agrarian reform called for by social movements like La Via Campesina is therefore a struggle for the material conditions that allow small-scale producers to live with dignity and grow food in harmony with nature, through agroecology.
Why Agroecology? Peasant agroecology rejects dependence on chemical inputs and corporate seeds. Instead, it nurtures biodiversity, conserves soil and water, and rebuilds lost or damaged ecosystems. It is a production model, a political vision and a way of life grounded in respect for Mother Earth and collective well-being of all.
By combining biodiversity, soil health, water conservation, and local knowledge, peasant agroecology builds resilient food systems that store carbon in soils and vegetation. These farms absorb significant carbon, helping reduce atmospheric CO₂. Tree cover, crop diversity, and ecological balance revive the soil, restore the landscape and prevent erosion, while regulate regulating local climates, maintain moisture, prevent erosion, and cooling the earth both locally and globally. Applied to fisheries and pastoralism, agroecology protects aquatic ecosystems, preserves biodiversity, and ensures fair access to resources. Pastoralists use mobility and rotational grazing to prevent desertification and maintain soil fertility.
The struggle for agrarian reform and agroecology must therefore advance hand in hand if we are to dismantle the corporate food system and achieve true social, economic and climate justice.