In the first six months of 2006 the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela announced plans to introduce wide-ranging reforms governing access to and control over land, in order to enhance the capacity of the poor and the marginalized to construct a livelihood. During the same period, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) convened the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which was the first such major intervention hosted within the UN system in 25 years, and which reaffirmed the need to wider, more secure and sustainable access to land in order to secure poverty eradication and sustainable development. While the conference was underway, La Via Campesina, the international peasants’ movement, was involved in a major confrontation with the Brazilian government over the grabbing of land by international biotechnology companies engaged in research designed to promote monocropping. Finally, six weeks later the national general secretary of the Philippines peasant movement, UNORKA, was assassinated, in an escalation of violence that had, at its heart, the issue of deepening conflicts over land between peasants, governments and international corporations. In short, 2006 saw a sharp reassertion of the primacy of land reform for all major actors involved in the global politics of development.