ICARRD+20: Linking national and global land policy debates to advance land justice and reform

National Family Farm Coalition | 23 February 2026

By Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau and Jordan Treakle

While the struggle of rural communities to access land has continued for centuries, global land grabbing increased substantially following the 2007-2008 food price crisis and the concurrent 2008 financial crisis. Corporations from the Global North like agribusiness firms and hedge funds, known for their aggressive and exploitative  tactics, began to buy up land in the Global South to chase high commodity prices and the increasing price of land.

Significantly, these developments took place almost immediately after the first International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in 2006 (as well as the parallel event organized by social movements, the “Land, Territory, and Dignity” Forum). ICARRD was a historic conference, held in Brazil and hosted by the United Nations, that created new political space for social movements to advocate for land policy issues at the global policy level.

Today, rural peoples face unprecedented new threats and challenges to land tenure and democratic control over territories and lands. These threats include financial speculation and corporate land ownership; ecological destruction, extreme weather, and the climate crisis; inequality; and deepening hunger and poverty. Land grabbing, in particular, has grown bigger, more widespread, and more sophisticated. Instead of land grabbing being a local, regional, or national process, it is now global, and instead of being led by local or national elites, some of the biggest financial companies in the world like pension and retirement funds - which, with total global assets estimated to be almost $60 trillion, are the most powerful actors in the financial sector - are moving to acquire global farmland as a new financial asset class.

Moreover, global land grabbing is no longer characterized by aggressive corporate actors from the Global North preying on the Global South; now even the lands of the Global North are being grabbed, and financial funds and businesses from the Global South are being recruited into these new international land deals.

This is a critical moment for the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (or ICARRD+20 for short) scheduled to take place in Cartagena, Colombia from February 24 to 26, 2026. Taking place 20 years after the original ICARRD, global social movements of rural peoples and foodproducers “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.”