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.

News, views and experiences of policy makers, practitioners, academics and communities on making rangelands more secure.

Enhanced transparency, accountability, and government or donor responsiveness to people needs are imperative to achieve better and more sustainable development results on the ground. The rapid spread of new technologies is transforming the daily lives of millions of poor people around the world and has the potential to be a real game changer for development.

Friends of the Earth’s report, ‘What’s your pension funding? How UK institutional investors finance the global land grab’, highlights the investments of UK institutional investors, such as British Airways Pension Fund, Legal & General and Standard Life, in companies accused of grabbing land, destroying the environment, and undermining sustainable livelihoods.

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.

This research paper from USAID calls attention to the challenges faced by vulnerable populations with respect to land. The paper identifies five vulnerable groups who have weak claims on land rights and are particularly vulnerable to changes in land tenure systems and property rights reform:
Women
Households that have been directly affected by HIV/AIDS
Pastoralist communities
Indigenous populations

This paper documents a participatory approach for supporting black South Africans in developing knowledge and skills to use land, acquired under the land reform scheme, more effectively. This approach enables land reform groups to work jointly through a sequence of steps in order to develop and implement a land management plan.The participatory planning method can be summarised into four main stages. First, the land reform group seeks to understand how the agricultural sector operates in its area, and identifies those agencies that provide technical and managerial support.

The Promotional Paper Forest Land Transformation in Latvia by Gunta Bāra has been developed at the Forest Faculty of the Latvian University of Agriculture between 2001 and 2007. Goal of the Promotional Paper: to identify the main problems in transformation of forest land in the Republic of Latvia and gaps in legislative instruments regulating the process of change of land use type, to prepare recommendations for their elimination, to develop a methodology for calculation of compensation for the losses caused to the state as a result of destruction of natural forest environment.

The concept of land consolidation is new in Latvia. Its main tasks are to eliminate land fragmentation and to facilitate farms of optimal size. One of the most important preconditions of land consolidation is forming of optimal size farmland plots in property and use, and land fragmentation, which has a major impact on both the operating conditions and other rural development processes. Land fragmentation affects not only land management, but it also increases transport costs.

Since the year 2000 with the help of the specialists from the Land Consolidation Division of the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, pilot land consolidation projects have been started. Besides the simple territorial readjustment of land parcels, these projects aimed to encourage local initiatives as well as to develop the land consolidation mechanism as an essential tool for the development of the integrated rural development including environment protection, development of infrastructure together with the creation of competitive farms.

Already during the Land Reform, land properties of several land parcels were formed in the rural areas. Another factor that benefits to the fragmentation of farm properties is development of land market because buying or renting land for farm size building, it is not always possible to find adjacent land plot. Consequently, the land fragmentation not only makes land management difficult, but also increases the transport costs. With this rural land tenure system, competitive and efficient agricultural production cannot be discussed, so a large part of rural areas remains untreated.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Ghana and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups.In Ghana, deeds registration has been in place since colonial times, and enables right holders to record their land transactions. However, very little rural land has actually been affected by this registration process. The research shows a general lack of awareness of the registration process among the majority of cash and food crop farmers. High monetary and transaction costs and a long and cumbersome process also constrain use of deeds registration.