Across the world, debates on land, water, territories and agrarian reform are shaped by historical experiences, contemporary struggles, and divergent sociopolitical economies.
In Africa, Asia, Latin America, Caribbean, the Arab region including Palestine, and across Europe and North America, movements for food sovereignty face both old and newly intensified pressures on land, waters and territories. The imprint of colonial conquest and imperial expansion continues to define forms of control, access, and ownership. Meanwhile today’s capitalist demands for minerals, energy, carbon markets, industrial agriculture and geopolitical wars and spheres of influence are creating a renewed and accelerating wave of dispossession.
Palestine – even before it became the site of a brutal genocidal war – stood as one of the most explicit and ongoing examples of settler colonialism, where land and water are systematically appropriated through military, legal and infrastructural means, with absolute impunity. The Israeli occupation – enabled by the imperial powers – imposes a regime of territorial fragmentation, settlement expansion, land expropriation, water apartheid and the destruction of agriculture and fisheries. Palestinian farmers are denied access to their own lands, while water resources are transferred to settlements and controlled through a complex matrix of military orders, permits and surveillance. Agrarian reform in Palestine – therefore – cannot be understood as apart from the political struggle against occupation. While Palestine stands as the locus of struggles for land, water and territories – these patterns of dispossession repeats across continents and regions.
Unchecked state power, granting fiscal and territorial concessions to private interests, has facilitated the concentration of fertile land, forests, and water resources in the hands of corporations and foreign investors, undermining the livelihoods and rights of peasants, Indigenous Peoples, pastoral communities, and fishing communities.
Financialization of nature, the process by which global finance “puts a price-tag” on land and ecosystems, turns natural territories into speculative assets and enables massive investment by pension funds, banks and asset managers—leading to dispossession, environmental destruction and commodification of the commons.
The market-linked reforms actively promoted by institutions like the World Bank reinforce a model of individual private property, which leads to the dispossession of small farmers, Afro-Descendant peoples and Indigenous Peoples, and to the development of export-oriented monoculture, mega-infrastructure projects, industrial agriculture, and special economic zones. It reinforces inequalities, undermines communal and customary tenure systems, weakens food sovereignty, and entrenches patriarchal, caste-based, and racialized hierarchies in access to land, water, and territories. The “willing-buyer, willing-seller” approach of the World Bank treats land as a commodity rather than a historical right. This model prioritizes individual title deeds, undermining communal and Indigenous systems, particularly affecting women and marginalized groups, and channels land, water and territories into commercial agribusiness, further promoting export-oriented production instead of supporting food sovereignty.
Often, the myth of “unused” land, or “Terra Nullius” justifies such dispossession – despite the fact that much of the so-called vacant land supports grazing, shifting cultivation, foraging, and cultural practices. Across regions, evidence shows that market-led reforms erode food sovereignty, rarely improve livelihoods and often legitimize unequal structures of control on access and ownership.
Corporate-led renewable energy expansion adds a parallel layer. Vast greenfield solar and wind farms – on land and water, the “green hydrogen” zones, mining for minerals used in batteries and carbon-offset plantations are marketed as climate solutions. Such green-washing efforts obscure the dispossession these projects cause, allowing states and corporations to frame these blatant forms of grabs as “sustainable development”.
To top all this – wars, conflicts, and geopolitical competition and rising militarization are driving a new wave of land, water and forest grabbing across the world. Governments invoke “national security,” “energy security,” and “technological sovereignty” to justify converting vast territories into military bases, missile-testing zones, space launch sites and fortified border zones. The global race for energy – and water-intensive infrastructure—AI data centers, semi-conductor facilities, nuclear plants, mega-dams, ports, logistics corridors and strategic mineral extraction—demands enormous territorial footprints.
All of these factors are driving peasants and Indigenous Peoples out of rural areas in massive numbers. Youth who have grown up in this neoliberal era watching small farms disappear are migrating to seek opportunities in cities. Peasants who have been dispossessed of their agrarian livelihoods are forced to embark on long, often dangerous journeys for a chance at economic stability. Those who remain face crumbling infrastructure, a lack of services and public transportation, and heightened social isolation. De-ruralization has been a conscious choice on the part of policymakers and corporate giants without the consent of rural people: capitalism and colonialism have violently created the conditions for such dispossession.
As countries compete for power and strategic and economic advantage, environmental safeguards and community rights are sidelined – and those who organize to defend these rights are criminalized and persecuted by the State and its institutional mechanisms. The result is a pervasive pattern of land concentration, financialization of nature, dispossession, and social inequality across the globe. This dispossession has taken a distinct but equally devastating form. Rather than classic land grabbing, agrarian restructuring, market liberalization and counter-reforms have led to the systematic elimination of small and medium-scale farms. This process has undermined the social function of small farmers, whose primary role is to feed the population, and has accelerated rural depopulation and land abandonment.
As peasant farmers are pushed out of agriculture, agrarian policies increasingly rely on precarious migrant labor to sustain the primary sector, while local farming knowledge, food sovereignty and rural livelihoods are steadily eroded. At the same time, inadequate social protections and retirement mechanisms for aging farmers block generational renewal, preventing young people from accessing land and sustaining farming as a viable livelihood.
These dynamics disproportionately affect women, youth and gender-and-sexually-diverse people, who are already more vulnerable to landlessness and exclusion. Clearly, there is an urgent need to support small farmers, guarantees dignified retirement, enables inter-generational land transfer, and affirms food production as a public and social responsibility rather than a market-driven function.
Effective agrarian reform must address these intersecting threats by protecting communal tenure, restoring historical justice, ensuring equitable access for women and marginalized groups, strengthening local governance, promoting food sovereignty and democratic control over territories.
In this evolving global landscape, the vision articulated by La Via Campesina – as it prepares to join the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Colombia – emphasizes the need for agrarian reform that is not fragmented or technocratic, but rather political and integral, recognizing the diverse realities around the world and placing the control over land, water and territories in the hands of those who work, guard and steward it.
Our vision is grounded in four mutually reinforcing axes: restitution, redistribution, recognition and regulation (4Rs).
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