"For millions of people living in the world’s poorest countries, access to land is a matter not of wealth, but of survival, identity and belonging. Most of the 1.4 billion people earning less than US$1.25 a day live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, while an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture.

In line with the conventional view that customary land rights impede agricultural development, the traditional tenure system in Nigeria has been perceived to obstruct the achievement of efficient development and agricultural transformation. This led to the Land Use Act (LUA) of 1978.

Food First Backgrounder, Spring 2014, Vol. 20, No. 1

Introduction: Land, Race and the Agrarian Crisis

The disastrous effects of widespread land grabbing and land concentration sweeping the globe do not affect all farmers equally. The degree of vulnerability to these threats is highest for smallholders, women and people of color—the ones who grow, harvest, process and prepare most of the world’s food.

28 May 2014

GRAIN | La Vía Campesina

For immediate release

Forest Peoples Programme and the Amerindian Peoples Association are pleased to announce the publication of a new special report:

Edited by Kate Dooley and Tom Griffiths

Authors: Oda Almås (FPP), Lawrence Anselmo (APA), Laura George (APA), Tom Griffiths (FPP), Solveig Firing Lunde (RFN) and Jean La Rose (APA)

May 2014

ISBN 978-0-9544252-8-9

This briefing paper makes the case for proactive business engagement in respecting land rights and ensuring legal, fair and inclusive practices on land use, access to natural resources and equitable development opportunities. It outlines key challenges, provides an overview of existing instruments that can help companies address issues related to land, and points to practical entry points for improved business practices.

Unequal access to natural resources, especially to land, is a major issue that lies at the heart of social movements throughout the world. Population growth, development models and intensive agriculture are transforming many regions into battlegrounds where conflicts are waged over natural resource use, damaging the lives of the farmers who depend on such  resources. In India, the Ekta Parishad movement was created during the 1990s to support and defend the landless in a country marked by significant land pressure and where 70% of the population lives in rural areas.

This Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC) matrix has been extracted from the GLTN publication entitled Designing and Evaluating Land Tools with a Gender Perspective: A Training Package for Land Professionals

Language: English, Spanish, French, Arabic

This publication provides an overview of the findings of a review of land tenure security in Asia and the Pacific region in collaboration with key partners. It highlights the major land challenges, barriers and opportunities as the basis for future decisions about partnerships and engagement in the land sector at sub-regional and country level. The findings are based on an extensive literature review, interviews, a questionnaire, validation at several multi-stakeholder meetings and peer review.

This is covers land administration and
reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is highly relevant to all
developing countries around the world. It provides simple
practical steps to turn the hugely controversial subject of
"land grabs" into a development opportunity by
improving land governance to reduce the risks of
dispossessing poor landholders while ensuring mutually
beneficial investors' deals. This book shows how Sub

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative