Kuluthum Mbwana remembers the day that biofuel investors arrived in her village Vilabwa, just 70 kilometers west of Tanzania's capital. In exchange for more than 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) of land across 11 villages, including Vilabwa in Kisarawe District, she said they promised to bring much-needed jobs, schools and health clinics to her community.
Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.
For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.
The First Arab Land Conference took place in Dubai early last week, from the 26-28 February. The first of its kind, it gathered land experts from across the region and beyond, in what was a fruitful and long overdue event in the region. For those of us just returning from the three-day event, we know that there was no lack of key and empowering messages, as well as carefully thought-out and innovative ideas for the way forward. If we take a moment, however, to get down to the fundamentals and to find one take-away, it would most likely be the following: each and every one of us has a rig
By Tim Hanstad, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, Landesa
This is the first blog in a series of two that are based on a keynote address made at the 2018 India Land Development Conference.
Those of you who have visited Dubai in recent years may relate to what I am going to say: Dubai is in the middle of the desert, and its land, not that long ago, was really worth nothing. Now it is one of the most vibrant international cities in the world. All this happened in a relatively short time span.
However, the road there was not easy.
Land in Tanzania is a scarce resource without which life cannot be sustained (FAO, 2007), and it is “increasingly recognized as an important governance issue” around the global (Palmer et al., 2009, p.1). Hundreds of millions of people including farmers, herders, forest dwellers and agro-industries all rely on land resources for their survival.
By Liam Kelley-St. Clair
Contracts between governments and private investors for large-scale land, agriculture, and forestry projects often play a critical role in the governance of these projects. Yet, despite their significance, such contracts are often kept hidden from the public eye. Amongst the many initiatives seeking to shed light on these deals, OpenLandContracts.org, an initiative of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), works to advance transparency by serving as a centralized online repository of publicly available land, agriculture, and forestry contracts between investors and governments.
By Sonkita Conteh, Director, Sierra Leone Program, Namati
Three years ago I wrote about how communities in Sierra Leone were getting the short end of the stick in large-scale land transactions. Many did not understand the provisions of the complex lease agreements they were signing. Not only are these leases legally complicated, they are sometimes signed under pressure and are not always translated into a community’s local language.
By Jinmei Liu, Affiliated Researcher, Faculty of Social Science, Chiang Mai University; Consultant, EarthRights International
I wouldn’t say Chinese investors are not trying to take social responsibility seriously, but they must understand that the meaning of responsible investment is much more than a few corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.
By Roy Prosterman
Asia’s Tigers, the collection of booming economies that emerged in the East following World War II, are often hailed as economic miracles. There was, though, no “secret sauce” behind that sustained and broad-based economic growth. Rather, as Myanmar is poised to show, the key ingredient for a Tiger economy can be found right beneath our feet.
