I left Augsburg on the 20th of February, with the Bavarian winter clinging on a stubborn grey sky pressing down on the red roofs. Leaving Germany in winter always feels like leaving a world held in stasis: a world of order, schedules, and heavy, quiet introspection. It’s a world where, politically, the air feels thick with the opposite of hope. From the heart of Europe, you feel the pulse of a rising tide, fascism, populism, the brutal simplicity of the far-right and it feels, at times, like a coming ice age. My flight took me west, travelling with the sun. I was a scholar funded and supported by CASAS (https://casasouth.org/), our collective of agrarian studies scholars from the Global South, heading first to Cartagena de Indias for the pre-conference “Land, Life and Society” on the road to ICARRD+20. The journey itself felt like a rehearsal for the theme: a movement against the easy flow of time, a push into the glare.
Stepping off the plane was a physical shock. The grey was gone, replaced by a thick, warm, vibrant air that wrapped around me like a welcome. The stasis was replaced by a riot of life: the sound of Caribbean Spanish, the bold colours of the buildings, and the relentless, life-giving heat of the sun I had been chasing. On the streets, this vibrancy was edible. Vendors sold a dazzling, rich diversity of fruits—mangoes, papayas, corozos and dragon fruits—their beautiful aromas and colours bursting forth as they were peeled and artfully placed into plastic glasses. They were so much more beautiful and attractive than the picture-perfect, shrink-wrapped fruits of a European supermarket. They were life, unapologetically alive.
But the real shock, the real warmth, came at the conferences. Here, the metaphor of my journey snapped into sharp, political focus.
At the academic pre-conference, we grappled with hard truths. The Cartagena Declaration, we issued starts from a fundamental awareness: land, water, marine spaces, and forests are life. It cannot be reduced to a commodity or a financial asset. It is livelihood, identity, memory, and dignity. We, as scholars, affirmed our commitment to stand with social movements that are advancing an agrarian reform agenda redefined around the inseparable 4 R’s: Recognition, Redistribution, Restitution, and Regulation. Redistribution without recognition, we noted, has historically pitted peasants against Indigenous peoples, a divide-and-rule tactic that weakens us all.
The analysis was given stark evidence by Professor Ruth Hall’s input on the FAO’s Status of Land Tenure and Governance report , launched during ICARRD+20. She highlighted that the world has a land inequality problem, bad for people, poverty, democracy, and the planet. The percentage of people who feel their land rights are insecure has risen by 21% in just four years. International norms have been strengthened, but access to land is becoming more precarious.
The message is clear: we need more than guidelines; we need binding commitments and redistribution back at the centre.
This call was amplified by the global social movements gathered at the Peoples’ Forum. As La Via Campesina’s declaration makes clear, they demand ICARRD+20 move beyond technocratic fixes. Their vision for an “Integral and Feminist Agrarian Reform,” rooted in the same 4Rs, rejects the commodification of nature and demands public policies that shift power from corporations to people.
In the midst of all this, to sit in a room and hear from Colombia’s young ministers—of agriculture, environment, and economics—was to witness something I had forgotten was possible. While the world I left behind was succumbing to the easy darkness of division, here were women and men articulating a vision of governance rooted in social justice and tangible land reform. They weren’t just speaking abstractly. They were describing real actions, a genuine attempt to heal the historical wounds of the land and its people. They are building an alternative political realm, one that doesn’t just manage crisis but actively cultivates life.
As I prepare for the journey back to Germany, I will travel against the sun, heading east into the oncoming night. I will return to the grey, to the rise of populism, to the feeling of political stasis. But I will carry this with me: the memory of a place where the political sun is rising in a different direction. The memory of fruit, bursting with life, sold on a vibrant street. And the certainty that the alternative to the coming ice age is not just a dream. It is being built, right now, on the land, for life, and for society.
Author’s bio: Fizza Batool is currently pursuing her PhD at the Augsburg-Munich International Doctorate Program “Rethinking Environment: The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society”. The programme is based at the Environmental Science Center WZU (Augsburg) and the Rachel Carson Center (Munich). Her research focuses on the agrarian change and and transformation in food systems due to state subsidized wheat in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. She is currently based at the Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg.
Fizza’s ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5447-4519
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