Given the recent trend of granting vast areas of African land to foreign investors, the urgency of placing real ownership in the hands of the people living and making their livelihood upon lands held according to custom cannot be overstated. This study provides guidance on how best to recognize and protect the land rights of the rural poor. Protecting and enforcing the land rights of rural Africans may be best done by passing laws that elevate existing customary land rights up into nations' formal legal frameworks thereby making customary land rights equal to documented land claims.

Aumentar el acceso de las mujeres a la tierra es crucial para combatir el hambre y la pobreza. Sin embargo, las disparidades de género en el acceso a la tierra siguen siendo notables en muchos países, con independencia de su nivel de desarrollo. La nueva base de datos de la FAO ayudará a comprender los factores que impiden que las mujeres tengan acceso a la tierra, con lo que permitirá asimismo diseñar políticas mejores para afrontar esta situación de manera eficaz.

Indigenous peoples1 must be considered an undeniable stakeholder in a development agenda shaped by such a mandate. Recent estimates indicate that although indigenous peoples make up approximately 5 percent of the world’s total population, they comprise about 15 percent of the global poor.2 The adversities faced by indigenous peoples have grown in the last few decades, but so too have the recognition of and appreciation for their potential contributions to sustainable development and natural resources management.

Land Tenure Working Paper 18. Presents the main themes that characterize the governance in land tenure and analyses the aspects related to the evolution of agricultural policy issues in various Central American countries. It also offers some examples and lessons learned from new models of land administration and land access mechanisms that Central American governments and International Cooperation have fostered over the past fifteen years in the Region. Available in Spanish

Increasing women’s access to land is crucial to fight hunger and poverty. However, gender disparities in land access remain significant in most countries, regardless of their level of development. A new FAO database helps to understand the factors that prevent women from accessing land; and to design better policies to effectively address this situation.

This paper focuses on the analysis of the right to food from an indigenous peoples’ perspective and addresses the main issues of concern to indigenous peoples that crosscut the right to food. Furthermore, it analyses how right to food is relevant to indigenous peoples and how the implementation of the right to food can benefit them.

Land Tenure Working Paper 13: Secure land rights are crucial if local populations are to engage actively as stakeholders in rural development.

This Guide aims to assist indigenous peoples and their organizations on how to use the Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security1 (hereafter “Right to Food Guidelines” or “Guidelines”) to promote their own interests in the area of food security.

Cuando en el año 2000 se aprobaron los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (ODM), la comunidad internacional contrajo un compromiso sin precedentes para satisfacer las necesidades de los pobres del mundo y salvaguardarlos de las amenazas del siglo XXI2. Los mandatarios de 147 Estados reafirmaron los principios de reducción de la pobreza, gobernanza democrática y protección de los derechos humanos, que han sido el núcleo del sistema de las Naciones Unidas desde su creación tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Land Tenure Working Paper 9. Based on international authoritative documents, this paper draws 14 principles to be taken into account when developing Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and other Natural Resources. The paper sees Voluntary Guidelines as human-rights based documents that provide a framework and a point of reference for national and international policies.

This guide is designed for indigenous fishing communities and for people in the development field working with indigenous fishing communities. Its objective is to provide guidance on impacts and benefits of the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (hereinafter the ‘Code’) from an indigenous peoples’ perspective.