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.

At the turn of the 21st century, farmland was still considered an investment backwater by most of the financial sector. Although some insurance companies have had farmland holdings for years, most financial investors found farmland, and agricultural investment in general, unappealing compared to the much higher returns to be made in financial markets.

Introduction: Farmland, A Safe Investment in Troubling Financial Times

28 May 2014

GRAIN | La Vía Campesina

For immediate release

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

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 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 paper sets out how one crop – sugar – has been driving large- scale land acquisitions and land conflicts at the expense of small-scale food producers and their families. At least 4m hectares of land have been acquired for sugar production in 100 large-scale land deals since 2000, although given the lack of transparency around such deals, the area is likely to be much greater. In some cases, these acquisitions have been linked to human rights violations, loss of livelihoods, and hunger for small-scale food producers and their families.

In Defence of Life follows the struggles and triumphs of four communities resisting large-scale mining projects in Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa and Romania.

Courageous environmental and human rights defenders from these communities describe how they have suffered and why they are standing firm to protect their families, land, water and life from destruction by mining.

Their inspiring David and Goliath struggles demonstrate that when injustice and destruction become globalised, so does resistance.

In 2008, three sugar companies were awarded nearly 20,000 hectares of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) in Oddar Meanchey province.

The new research finds that associated land grabbing totaling more than 17,000 hectares has affected more than 2,000 families. Of these, 214 families were forcibly evicted.

Meanwhile, at least 3,000 hectares of the misappropriated land has been used for logging rather than sugar plantations, according to the report, ‘Cambodia: The Bitter Taste of Sugar’, commissioned by ActionAid and Oxfam GB.

Eight years after releasing its first report on land grabbing, which put the issue on the international agenda, GRAIN publishes a new dataset documenting nearly 500 cases of land grabbing around the world.