May 21, 2025
The IPC Working Group on Land, Forests, Water and Territories participated in the official launch of ICARRD+20, which will take place in Colombia in February 2026. The co-coordinator of the Working Group, Nury Martínez, highlighted the importance of the Conference for addressing pressing issues of land grabbing and concentration, and advancing towards food sovereignty.
On April 28, 2025, the Colombian government officially launched the preparatory process for the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20), scheduled to take place in Cartagena from February 24 to 26, 2026. The event gathered high-level representatives from Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, South Africa, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and followed the approval of Colombia’s proposal to organize another Conference, 20 years after the 2006 CIRADR in Porto Alegre, by the UN Committee on World Food Security and the FAO Council.
The IPC Working Group on Land, Forests, Water, and Territories welcomed the launch, having called for the organization of such a Conference since 2022, to provide an urgently needed multilateral space to assess progress in responsible governance of land, fisheries, and forests, and to coordinate effective public policies to address pressing issues related to land and other natural resources, including: land and resource grabbing; increasing land concentration; climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss; violence against land rights defenders; discrimination against women and girls; and conflict, occupation and war.
Speaking at the event, IPC Working Group co-coordinator Nury Martínez emphasized the need for the ICARRD+20 to reinvigorate multilateral efforts to ensure responsible governance of land and natural resources, grounded in human rights, food sovereignty and social and environmental justice. More specifically, she stated the IPC Working Group’s expectation that the CIRADR+20 should serve as a critical space to:
- Analyze the dramatic global situation of dispossession of communities, land and natural resource grabbing, the destruction of ecosystems through extractivism, and the growing concentration of land in the hands of the business sector and its associated elite, the ultra-rich.
- Conduct a factual and participatory assessment of progress and setbacks in the respect, protection, and promotion of the right to land and territories of peasants, small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, communities, and working people since the first CIRADR, the adoption of the Tenure Guidelines, and the adoption of normative instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), and General Recommendation No. 34 on the Rights of Rural Women by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
- Promote and support participatory national public policy processes to respond to the realities on the ground, taking into account the diversity of historical and sociocultural contexts. The ICARRD+20 should provide an updated conception of agrarian reform and the realization of the right to land and territories, together with a clear commitment by governments to advance the realization of human rights, food sovereignty, and agroecology.
- Define concrete measures to ensure the implementation of the ICARRD+20 outcomes through institutional mechanisms, including in global multilateral spaces such as the FAO and the CFS, and regional multilateral coordination spaces. Specifically, these mechanisms should provide support to national and regional processes to advance agrarian reforms and land policies, promote accountability, and put in place mechanisms to ensure follow-up and monitoring of States’ compliance with their commitments and obligations under international human rights and environmental law.
The IPC Working Group on Land, Forests, Water and Territories reiterates its commitment to the ICARRD+20 and calls on States, the FAO and other United Nations agencies, as well as social movements, grassroots organizations and Indigenous Peoples, to support and engage in this critical process.
The full text of Nury Martínez’ intervention is available here.