Global social movements rallied in Cartagena, Colombia, at a ‘Forum of the Peoples’ on 22-23 February. It was an opportunity for movements to agree on a collective vision to put forward ahead of the second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, ICARRD+20.
‘For over 30 years, Colombia has had a constitution that doesn’t recognize campesinos,’ said Elsa Nury Martínez. ‘As a result, our institutions don’t recognize campesinos; everything is against them… We need an agrarian reform that involves structural change, that takes into account access, not just to land, but to territory, seeds, water. That recognizes the social subjects who exist there, campesinos, Indigenous people, Afro-descendant communities. And there needs to be legislation that truly allows for this social function of land, that doesn’t just benefit corporations.’
Elsa is President of the Federación Nacional Sindical Unitaria Agropecuaria (FENSUAGRO) and Secretary of the Americas region of La Vía Campesina. She was taking part in an online panel discussion ‘Past, Present and Future of Agrarian Reform in Colombia’, hosted by the Association for Improvement of Land, Water and Natural Resource Governance (AGTER), held in the lead-up to the Forum of Peoples. It aimed to chart the background of the historical injustice faced by the campesinado in Colombia and to examine the agrarian reform agenda of the Petro administration.
Afterwards, Elsa was one of the approximately 300 delegates representing peasants, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists and rural workers from over 70 countries who gathered in Cartagena, Colombia, for the Forum of Peoples and Social Movements: United for Land, Water, Territories and Dignity. The two-day event, organized by the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), was an opportunity for movements to agree on a collective vision to put forward at the second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20), which began on 24 February.
No peace without land
The conference comes at a crucial time when violence, displacement, land grabbing and environmental degradation are increasingly threatening the lives of rural inhabitants around the world. As Jenniffer Vargas Reina, a researcher and professor in the Department of Social Work at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) observes, ‘on an international level we’re seeing a turn to the right, an unprecedented increase of corporate control over land, water, strategic resources, strategic minerals, but also information and data. And this directly impacts land policy.’
It is also significant that the event is being hosted by Colombia, a country marked by armed conflict and with some of the most unequal land distribution in the region. In an interview with Tierra Viva, Carlos Duarte, professor and researcher and current Chair of the UN Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, notes that the Petro administration has made considerable efforts to revive agrarian reform, understanding that without it, there can be no real peace process. ‘If there’s no land redistribution, if there aren’t any rural development mechanisms to provide an alternative to criminal economies, it’s been proven time and again that people return to the ranks of irregular armies. There’s a connection between access to land, rural development, and peace,’ says Duarte.
Some of the progress made in recent years includes constitutional recognition of campesinos as subjects of rights and doubling the number of Zonas de Reserva Campesina (ZRCs) from seven to 14. Vargas Reina points also to the formalization of 900,000 ha and redistribution of 206,000 ha through the Agencia Nacional de Tierras (ANT) and the reform of notoriously corrupt institutions such as the Sociedad de Activos Especiales (SAE), the entity responsible for confiscating and managing assets seized from illicit groups.
However, she also warns that 2026 is an election year, so these changes are at risk of being reversed: ‘We’re at a crossroads because we have the opportunity to defend, safeguard, protect the progress this government has made with regard to land redistribution and rural policy but we are also faced with a scenario that could threaten some of this progress.’
Making rights a reality
Nury Jatsu Martínez Novoa is a lawyer and Coordinator of Land and Territorial Rights at the Comisión Colombiana de Juristas (CCJ). She says that while the Petro administration has made significant headway, there is still a lot of work to be done: ‘Recognition is very important because it strengthens campesino territoriality, autonomy and access to land. But it continues to exist primarily in legal discourse and not in practice.’ To give an example, she says agrarian lawsuits should normally take between one and three years to resolve. But there are cases in Colombia that have been ongoing for over 30 years. ‘We have cases where the land authority ruled in favour of campesinos; higher courts like the Constitutional Court have got involved; and yet justice has still not been served,’ she adds.
Duarte agrees that justice remains out of reach for many campesinos: ‘On the one hand, it’s very difficult for someone from the countryside to access the judiciary, which is generally located in the city, and when they go to local courts or authorities these are often co-opted by landowners… What’s more, almost nowhere is the judiciary equipped to understand the complexity of agrarian conflicts. It doesn’t take into account environmental rights, the rights of nature, of Indigenous communities, of campesino populations, and in territorial legislation these special rights intersect with one another.’
‘We are part of the solution’
Meanwhile, social movement representatives at the Cartagena conference, demanded that governments commit to redistributive reform and uphold the rights of peasants and rural workers. In their position paper, the IPC urged governments to ‘move beyond voluntary commitments and adopt binding, measurable actions to ensure redistributive land reform, equitable access to natural resources, democratic governance, and agroecological rural development. Without secure collective rights to land and territories, there can be no food sovereignty, no just transition, and no lasting peace.’
La Vía Campesina, proposes a vision based on four pillars – redistribution, restitution, recognition and regulation. – ‘Integral and popular agrarian reform for our times,’ it says, ‘must be understood as a transformative, ongoing and global political process, one that concerns the Global South and the Global North alike. Agrarian reform is not only a response to contemporary land grabbing but also to historical processes of colonization, enclosure, and rural displacement that expelled peasants from their territories and fueled settler colonial expansion across the world.’
Nury Martínez, speaking on behalf of FENSUAGRO and La Vía Campesina, concluded: ‘If we consider that everything on the agendas of grassroots movements concerns the issue of food, that also means placing the industrial agri-food system that is destroying the climate and the land at the centre of the conversation. If there is no redistribution of land, if small-scale production, which cares for biodiversity and produces healthy food, continues to be ignored, global crises will remain unsolved. We believe that we are part of the solution.’
Main image: The Forum of Peoples and Social Movements: United for Land, Water, Territory and Dignity held in Cartagena 22–23 February 2026. (Photo: La Vía Campesina)
