Tenure cuts across many economic and social issues. Here we present a few of the key considerations that a company should internalize in order to act consistently with the intent of the VGGT.

This training package provides an introduction to the important, complex, and sometimes daunting theme of improving land governance as a means to enhance gender equality and grassroots participation in land matters.

To support the practical application of the OECD-FAO Guidance, in early 2018 the OECD and FAO launched an implementation pilot with over thirty companies and industry initiatives. The first stage of the pilot was a baseline survey to assess how companies and industry initiatives are implementing the OECD-FAO Guidance and other related international standards. This report presents the findings of the baseline assessment.

Enterprises involved in agricultural supply chains can create employment, raise labour standards and bring the technology to increase agricultural production or reduce pollution. But their activities can also contribute to food insecurity by leading to the eviction of local communities from their lands. Child labour and abuses of migrant workers and women are regularly reported. The production of some agricultural commodities leads to soil degradation, water resource depletion and deforestation.

This Guide aims to inform companies that hold land or purchase land directly from companies that hold land. It provides operational guidance for companies confronting “legacy land issues” and clarifies a company’s roles and responsibilities in dealing with legacy land issues in their existing holdings, while also providing direction on where to look for more detailed information and tools.

The “Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security” (VGGT), endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012, set out principles and internationally accepted standards for responsible practices and is the first comprehensive intergovernmental global instrument on tenure and its administration.

The Tenure Guidelines aim to serve as a reference, providing guidance to improve the governance of land, fisheries and forests so that it can contribute effectively to securing the right to adequate food. The Guidelines thus constitute an internationally agreed upon normative standard that assesses the actions and omissions of states, UN agencies as well as international organisations with respect to the way they regulate land, fisheries and forests in specific situations. See box 1 below.

ActionAid International has been working over the last few years with women and rural communities to challenge commercialization of land, which leads to loss of their rights to land.

Guide to determine if monitoring is actually a viable activity that can be undertaken by their organisation. Choosing to undertake monitoring is dependent on considerations such as evaluating the sufficiency of resources, capacity to design a sound monitoring system, and availability of political windows to effect change, amongst others.

This paper introduces a Legal Assessment Tool (LAT) for gender‐equitable land tenure that was developed by the Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for the purpose of providing prompt, targeted and effective policy and regulatory advice to countries working towards gender‐equitable land tenure. The LAT aims to provide a contribution to the global efforts to achieve responsible governance of land tenure by focusing on the legal issues surrounding land policy and reform processes.

Tenure is crucial to the livelihoods of billions of people. For many, their food security is linked to their tenure security. People with weak, insecure tenure rights risk losing their means to support themselves if they lose their access to natural resources. Women often have weaker tenure rights where there is discrimination in laws and customs. Tenure systems define who can use which natural resources, for how long and under what conditions. Many tenure problems are caused by weak governance and attempts to address them are affected by the quality of governance.