The Symposium on Legal Aspects of Large Scale Investments in Land: Implications for Food Security and Rural Development was held at FAO Headquarters in Rome on March 4th 2011. The Symposium was co-hosted by FAO and the World Food Law Institute at Howard University School of Law.

The articles in this volume supplement FAO Land Tenure Studies 10, Compulsory acquisition of land and compensation. The latter publication explains what compulsory acquisition and compensation are and what constitutes good practice in this area. This current volumes introductory article provides an overview of these issues. The issue of compulsory acquisition from a human rights perspective is also addressed here as are the concepts of market value, compensation value and just terms compensation.

Este manual de formación se centra en cómo gestionar y resolver conflictos sobre los derechos de tenencia de la tierra, la seguridad de la tenencia y el acceso a la tierra en el campo del desarrollo rural. Resulta de las actividades complementarias realizadas con el Programa de apoyo a los medios de vida, de la FAO, (LSP) y la Unidad de Gestión y Tenencia de la Tierra y con la Coalición Internacional para el Acceso a la Tierra.

Revista internacional de silvicultura e industrias forestales

FAO’s Land Tenure Notes provide information on land tenure in a format that can be used by grassroots organizations which work with small farmers and others in rural communities. Improving secure access to land by the rural poor is essential in order to reduce poverty and hunger and to promote sustainable rural development. Improving people’s knowledge of their rights to land is an important part of making rights real, thereby allowing people to improve their livelihoods.

Improved access to gender-disaggregated data can be a catalyst to improving gender equality and provide opportunities for the so-called “Third Sector” of non-governmental and local organizations, especially those representing women. The Voluntary Guidelines underline that gender equality is at the core of all processes and aspects of tenure governance, including policy formulation, service delivery, and access to legal systems and information.

La foresterie et l'industrie forestire sont prises dans ce vaste processus de rforme. Ce numro d'Unasylva analyse l'exprience vcue par les pays en transition dans le secteur de la foresterie.

The former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (that is, Europe east of Germany and west of the Urals, but including all of Russia) began a transition to a market economy in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. This paper looks at one aspect of that transition: the transition from state ownership to private ownership of agricultural land and the accompanying transition to a land market for agricultural land.

This paper reviews the experiences of introducing land consolidation and land banking instruments in Central and Eastern Europe, largely to address the structural problems of small and fragmented farms. The introduction has been uneven with some countries having established operational programmes while others have taken steps with differing levels of success, and a few have not taken action. The paper assesses the driving factors for the introduction and the approaches used in individual countries.

Two important resolutions for women were adopted by the United Nations last year. One was the UNHABITAT Resolution on “Women's Role and Rights in Human Settlements Development and Slum Upgrading” and the other was the Commission on Human Rights Resolution on “Women's Equal Ownership, Access to, and Control over Land and the Equal Rights to Own Property and to Adequate Housing”. These resolutions recognised the violation of women's property rights as a violation of fundamental human rights and the UN's commitment to stop such violations.