Land Rights
Zenia Rueben, a Malawian farmer, was able to claim her land by learning about land rights.
Photo: ActionAid
Despite its importance for realising the right to food, many poor and excluded communities around the world, especially women, lack access to and control over land due to perverse government policies.
In situations like this, the rural poor are considerably disadvantaged as a result of discrimination and the exclusion from key decision-making processes and access to justice.
Natural resources play a critical role in the lives of poor people. Having secure access to and control over land increases peoples’ resilience in the face of hunger and poverty, enabling them to look into ways to manage them sustainably. Not only access to land but security of land tenure is also important in ensuring the right to food and other human rights, like the rights to work and housing.
That is why we are supporting farmers in their struggle against land grabs and campaigning to ensure that corporations and governments are accountable for abuses of the rights to land, water and other natural resources.
Sign the Dakar Appeal Against Land Grabbing!
During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal in February 2011, social movements and organisations released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 150 organisations have already signed.
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is currently negotiating the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGs). These Guidelines are supposed to protect and strengthen the access to land, fisheries and forests of small food producers. Unfortunately, some powerful governments are reluctant to adopt strong guidelines - they rather prefer a governance of natural resources by corporate investors and other strong private actors.
Peasants affected by land grabbing will hand over the Dakar Appeal, together with the names of organiations endorsing it, to the governments during the negotiations on the VGs in Rome on 10-14 October.
Land grabbing has to be stopped - it cannot be made "responsible"!
Please read and sign the petition here: http://www.dakarappeal.org
In my district, there are two sugar companies that are grabbing land. In 2006, we started to have small portions of land grabbed, but in 2009, our whole land was grabbed and irrigation channel was closed by the municipality president to irrigate his own camp. When we went to ask him to open it, we were beaten. We were called as opposition and some of us were put into jail.
- Margarida Paulo Ubisse, 46 year old smallholder farmer in Manhiça District, Mozambique
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