Search Tips
sorted by
30 shown of 1073 entities
11 columns hidden
Title | Date added | Template | Body | Legal status | Document type | Year | Document code | Original document | Paragraph text | Thematics | Topic(s) | Person(s) affected | Year |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 3 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | For some of the groups that are the most vulnerable today, this means protecting existing access to land, water, grazing or fishing grounds, or forests, all of which may be productive resources essential for a decent livelihood. In such cases, as detailed below, the right to food may complement the protection of the right to property or of indigenous peoples' relationship with their lands, territories, and resources. In other cases, because landlessness is a cause of particular vulnerability, the obligation of the State goes further: it is to strengthen such access or make it possible - for example, through redistributive programmes that may in turn result in restrictions on others' right to property. This obligation of States is especially clear in cases in which the members of such groups have no alternative means of producing food or gaining sufficient income to purchase food that is sufficient, adequate and culturally acceptable. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 6 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The pressures on land are increasing dramatically. As rural populations grow, plots cultivated are becoming smaller per capita and per household. In India, the average landholding size fell from 2.6 hectares in 1960 to 1.4 hectares in 2000 and continues to decline; similar evolutions have been documented in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Thailand, where the decline in the average farm size is combined with an increase in landlessness. The trend is not limited to the Asian region. In Eastern and Southern Africa, the amount of cultivated land per capita declined by half over the past generation, and in a number of countries the average cultivated area now amounts to less than 0.3 hectares per capita. This phenomenon is compounded by erosion and soil depletion: worldwide, 5 million to 10 million hectares of agricultural land are being lost annually to severe degradation. And it would be difficult to expand the areas under cultivation to the degree required to accommodate the growth of rural populations, since forests have a major role in storing carbon and deforestation is already a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 7 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | These long-term trends have been exacerbated in recent years by policies that have further increased the pressures on farmland. In many regions, under export-driven agricultural policies, large-scale plantations have developed for the production of food, energy or cash crops. While the tendency towards land concentration has resulted primarily from a dominant model of agricultural development that rewards the most mechanized and capital-intensive farms, it has also been encouraged by the expansion of long supply chains. This has generally favoured large agricultural producers, which are better connected to markets and can more easily produce the volumes and meet the standards required for export. The competition among various uses of farmland has recently been increased by policies favouring the switch to biofuels in transport, which leads to competing resource claims on the part of local resource users, Governments and incoming agrofuel producers, creating the risk that poorer groups will lose access to the land on which they depend. A recent inventory by the World Bank listing 389 large-scale acquisitions or long-term leases of land in 80 countries shows that, while 37 per cent of the so-called investment projects are intended to produce food (crops and livestock), agrofuels represent 35 per cent of such projects. For all these reasons, the Special Rapporteur has insisted that investments implying a shift in land rights should be treated with great caution. At the thirty-sixth session of the Committee on World Food Security, he will detail both the risks of large-scale land investments and possible alternative business models. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 25 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The protection of land-users' rights should not be limited to improving farmers' security of tenure. Fisherfolk need access to fishing grounds and may be severely affected by the fencing-off of land that provides access to the sea or to rivers. Pastoralists need grazing grounds for the animals that they raise. For these groups, as well as those practicing itinerant forms of agriculture, the formalization of property rights and the establishment of land registries may be the problem, not the solution: it may cause them to be fenced off from the resources on which they depend, making them victims of the vast enclosure movement that may result from titling. In Kenya, pastoralists whose rights were ignored in the formalization process have reportedly been the victims of violent land-grabbing by ranchers and others seeking scarce resources. Since they have no legal claim to the land, they cannot seek redress. In the United Republic of Tanzania, five years after a major titling effort had begun, pastoralists reported their eviction from multiple common grazing areas and were under threat of losing other grazing lands because those lands had been classified as "unused". |
| 2010 | |||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 40c | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to respect the right to food, States should:] Respect the needs of special groups. States should implement the specific rights of indigenous peoples by demarcating their lands and territories and by providing them with specific protection. States should also protect access to fishing grounds, grazing grounds and water points for fisherfolk, herders and pastoralists, for whom the protection of commons is vital. The recognition of communal rights should extend beyond indigenous communities, at least to certain communities that entertain a similar relationship with the land, centred on the community rather than on the individual; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 40d | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to respect the right to food, States should:] Prioritize development models that do not lead to evictions, disruptive shifts in land rights and increased land concentration. States should carefully consider the development models that they follow, as the mainstream agro-export-led model has major detrimental impacts on the access to land of vulnerable groups, disproportionately favouring the largest producers and landowners. Land investments implying an important shift in land rights should represent the last and least desirable option, acceptable only if no other investment model can achieve a similar contribution to local development and improve the livelihoods within the local communities concerned. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 13 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | International human rights law protects the relationship of indigenous communities with their lands, territories and resources by requiring States to demarcate such land, protect it from encroachment and respect the right of the communities concerned to manage it according to their internal modes of organization. Although sometimes those guarantees seem to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance, case law shows that use rights derived from customary tenure can be recognized and protected by the legal system; it also shows that the right to communal property - a right of the community rather than of the individual - is an alternative to individual property rights. On both counts, it can serve as a source of inspiration, in order to enhance the protection of the rights of other users of natural resources. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 40a | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to respect the right to food, States should:] Ensure security of tenure. States should take measures to confer legal security of tenure upon those persons, households and communities currently lacking such protection, including all those who do not have formal titles to home and land. The adoption of anti-eviction laws imposing strict conditions for interference with the rights of land users should be seen as a priority. This should supplement any strengthening of the regulatory framework concerning expropriation, which itself should provide clear procedural safeguards for landowners while, at the same time, providing for the possibility of agrarian reform where land concentration is excessive; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 29 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The poverty-reducing potential of more equitable land distribution is further illustrated by statistical analyses showing that "a decrease of one third in the land distribution inequality index results in a reduction in the poverty level of one half in about 12-14 years. The same level of poverty reduction may be obtained in 60 years by agricultural growth sustained at an annual average of 3 per cent and without changing land distribution inequality". Land reforms in Asia following the Second World War resulted in a 30 per cent increase in the incomes of the bottom 80 per cent of households, while leading to an 80 per cent decline in the incomes of the top 4 per cent. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 30 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | In addition to its economic functions of stimulating growth and reducing rural poverty, more equitable access to land for the rural poor contributes to social inclusion and economic empowerment. Access to land also improves food security, since it makes food more easily and cheaply available, providing a buffer against external shocks. Evidence resulting from land redistribution in China suggests that "even though access to land insures household income only moderately against shocks, it provides almost complete insurance against malnutrition". More equitable land distribution and the development of owner-operated family farms are thus desirable on both efficiency and equity grounds. Small family-owned farms can use the land in more sustainable ways, since sustainable farming is often more labour-intensive and requires the linking of farmers to the land. Moreover, where rural areas face high unemployment and underemployment and relative scarcity of land, it is more sensible, from both an economic perspective and a social justice perspective, to raise land productivity than to try to increase labour productivity. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 35 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | It can be argued that part of the reason for this mixed outcome, lies in the strongly ideological overtones of the debate about how to implement land reform. Over the past generation, the major divide has been between centralized, or State-led, agrarian reform, effectuated through State land acquisitions compensated at below-market prices, and decentralized, or market-led, agrarian reform, based on the principle of a willing buyer and a willing seller. Although State-led agrarian reform has become less common, FAO continues to receive requests for assistance regarding such reform, and certain countries are still redistributing land or have committed to doing so. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a trend towards market-led agrarian reform, as illustrated by programmes such as the Cédula da Terra project, launched in Brazil during the period 1996-2001 and since renewed; the Colombian programme developed under Agrarian Law 160 of 1994; the South African Reconstruction and Development Programme, launched in 1994; the Community-Based Rural Land Development Project in Malawi; and the voluntary land transfer scheme in the Philippines. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 41b | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to protect the right to food, States should:] Adopt tenancy laws, and effectively implement existing laws against the pressure to free land for private investors. The adoption of tenancy laws can protect tenants from eviction and from excessive levels of rent. Such laws can also allow a tenant's heirs to occupy the land if the tenant dies, and provide the tenant with the right to pre-emption if the landowner wishes to sell (ideally, at a below-market price); they can provide for the joint titling of husband and wife as tenants, in order to protect widows from the risk of eviction; and they can ensure that the tenant will be allowed to remain on the land if the property changes hands; |
| 2010 | |||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 42a | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, States should:] Implement the conclusions set out in the Final Declaration of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development and prioritize "improved" State-led land redistribution programmes. States should implement land redistribution programmes where a high degree of land ownership concentration (which could be defined as a level of inequality higher than a Gini coefficient of 0.65) is combined with a significant level of rural poverty attributable to landlessness or to the cultivation of excessively small plots of land by smallholders. Redistributive agrarian reforms should: (a) include comprehensive rural development policies that follow the recommendations resulting from the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, including extension systems, access to credit and agricultural research and support beneficiaries, provided with sufficient budgets; (b) make use of land ceiling laws and be based on legal frameworks that clearly define beneficiaries and exempted land; (c) encourage communal ownership systems, rather than focusing solely on individual beneficiaries; (d) be implemented in accordance with the principles of participation, transparency and accountability, in order to prevent their appropriation by local elites; (e) be grounded in constitutional provisions regarding the social functions of land, where such provisions exist. All States should monitor land inequalities before and after the implementation of such programmes; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 42b (i) | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, States should:] Ensure that market-led land reforms are compatible with human rights. If, despite the reservations expressed in the present report, States choose to seek to improve security of tenure through titling programmes and the creation of land rights markets, they should: Regulate such markets by taking appropriate measures to prevent increased land speculation, increased land concentration, abuse of customary forms of tenure by new landowners, and distress sales by indebted farmers; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 42b (iv) | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, States should:] Ensure that market-led land reforms are compatible with human rights. If, despite the reservations expressed in the present report, States choose to seek to improve security of tenure through titling programmes and the creation of land rights markets, they should: Prioritize the titling of land for those who are dependent on land for their livelihoods and are more vulnerable to land-grabbing, rather than for those who claim to be the formal landowners; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 43a (i) | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [The Special Rapporteur also makes the following recommendations to the international community:] Establish adequate governance instruments to operationalize the commitments set out in the Final Declaration of the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development. The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and other Natural Resources could make a significant contribution, provided that they: Encompass land redistribution issues in addition to land administration issues, consistent with the Conference commitments; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 43c | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [The Special Rapporteur also makes the following recommendations to the international community:] Governments investing in farmland abroad should ensure that they do so in accordance with their human rights obligations. They should regulate the conduct of private actors on which they can exercise an influence, thus helping to protect the human rights of the communities concerned. Similar obligations exist for development banks funding projects that have an impact on land rights (see A/HRC/13/33/Add.2, para. 5); |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 43d | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [The Special Rapporteur also makes the following recommendations to the international community:] International human rights bodies should consolidate the right to land and take land issues fully into account when ensuring respect for the right to adequate food. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights could play a leading standard-setting role in clarifying the issue of land as a human right by issuing a general comment in that regard. Acting in their monitoring capacity, human rights bodies should examine the justifications offered by Governments that fail to put in place land redistribution programmes or policies with similar aims, despite the existence of a high degree of concentration of land ownership, combined with a significant level of rural poverty attributable to landlessness or inequitable land distribution. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 18 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Individual titling can also become a source of conflict and legal insecurity if it conflicts with customary rules regarding tenure, for example, as regards communal land ownership. Indeed, individual titling, combined with the marketability of land, may not be compatible with the recognization of customary forms of tenure with respect to communal land and common property resources, putting groups that do not use the land intensively or do not occupy it permanently at a particular disadvantage. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 14 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Access to land and security of tenure are also essential for the ability of smallholders to achieve a decent standard of living. As noted above, the right to food imposes on States an obligation not to deprive individuals of access to the productive resources on which they depend. Where a community has settled on a piece of land and depends on that land for its livelihood, the obligation to respect the right to food thus requires that eviction of the community from that land be prohibited unless certain conditions are fulfilled. No eviction should take place that does not meet the criteria set out by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its general comment No. 7, on the right to adequate housing: forced evictions, and in the Basic Principles and Guidelines on Development-Based Evictions and Displacement. Those guidelines provide a practical tool to assist States and agencies in developing policies, legislation, procedures and preventive measures to ensure that forced evictions do not take place or, should prevention fail, to provide effective remedies to those whose human rights have been violated. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 4 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Access to land and security of tenure are essential to ensure the enjoyment of not only the right to food, but also other human rights, including the right to work (for landless peasants) and the right to housing. This fact led the former Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing to conclude that the Human Rights Council should "ensure the recognition in international human rights law of land as a human right". The present report confirms that conclusion, while taking the right to food as its departure point. It describes the increasing pressures on land. It then discusses the right of land users to be protected in terms of their existing access to natural resources, particularly land. It also argues in favour of ensuring more equitable access to land. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 31 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | Finally, land reform may be seen as an opportunity to strengthen access to land for women, particularly single women and widows. Article 14, paragraph 2 (g), of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women guarantees the right of women to equal treatment in land and agrarian reform as well as in land resettlement schemes. However, there remain laws and social customs such as those ensuring that the land of a deceased husband belongs to his sons, not to his widow, despite the flagrant violation of women's rights to which this leads. As a result, women still represent a significant minority of the total number of title-holders, as illustrated by the statistics set out in figure II. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 33 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The most recent pledges to pursue land reform were made at the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development of FAO, convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in March 2006. The Final Declaration adopted at the Conference encourages the holding of a national and inclusive dialogue to ensure significant progress on agrarian reform and rural development and the establishment of appropriate agrarian reform "mainly in areas with strong social disparities, poverty and food insecurity, as a means to broaden sustainable access to and control over land and related resources". The Governments represented at the Conference also recommended that the FAO Committee on World Food Security adopt of a set of reporting guidelines in order to monitor the implementation of the Declaration. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 34 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The preparation of the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and other Natural Resources, led by FAO, is the single most important attempt to follow up on the commitments made at the Conference, and the Declaration of the World Summit on Food Security, held in 2009, underlines that link. It is too early to assess the Guidelines in the light of what they promise to achieve. At the regional level, however, the African Union's Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa are an important step in that direction, and the Latin American project to follow up on the Conference, launched in August 2009, involves a large number of countries in the operationalization of the commitments set out in the Declaration. But the overall picture remains uneven across regions. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 12 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | In addition, the right of all peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources - as provided for in article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 and in article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 16 December 1966 - entails the protection of indigenous peoples from certain forms of dispossession from their territories or from the resources on which they depend. Article 5 (d) (v) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination also protects the right of indigenous communities to their lands. And the right of indigenous peoples to the official recognition and registration of their territories has been affirmed under relevant regional human rights instruments. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights consider that indigenous people's traditional possession of their lands has effects equivalent to those of a State-granted full property title: therefore, where members of indigenous peoples have unwillingly lost possession of their lands after a lawful transfer to innocent third parties, they are entitled to the restitution thereof or to obtain other lands of equal extension and quality. The right of indigenous communities to their lands includes the right to the natural resources contained therein. Property, as protected under article 21 of the American Convention on Human Rights, is considered to constitute a collective right of indigenous people, since land ownership is often centred not on the individual, but rather on the group and its community. Thus, States may have to recognize the customary systems of land tenure that protect communal property rights - for example, by giving the community a right to veto the alienation of its land by one of its constituent members, whether an individual or a clan, village or tribe. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 41c | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to protect the right to food, States should:] Ensure that all land investment projects are consistent with the relevant obligations under international human rights law, as reiterated in a previous contribution by the Special Rapporteur. |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 42b (ii) | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, States should:] Ensure that market-led land reforms are compatible with human rights. If, despite the reservations expressed in the present report, States choose to seek to improve security of tenure through titling programmes and the creation of land rights markets, they should: Ensure that titling schemes benefit women and men equally, correcting existing imbalances if necessary; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 42b (iii) | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [In order to ensure the enjoyment of the right to food, States should:] Ensure that market-led land reforms are compatible with human rights. If, despite the reservations expressed in the present report, States choose to seek to improve security of tenure through titling programmes and the creation of land rights markets, they should: Encourage communal ownership systems (rather than individual titling) where local communities have a need for them; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 43b | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | [The Special Rapporteur also makes the following recommendations to the international community:] Donors should increase their support for the implementation of land redistribution programmes and the strengthening of land administrations. The importance of land administrations free from corruption and equipped with sufficient resources and well-trained officials has been and continues to be underestimated in the reinvestment in agriculture since the 2008 global food crisis; |
|
| 2010 | ||||
Access to land and the right to food 2010, para. 10 | Aug 19, 2019 | Paragraph | Special Rapporteur on the right to food | Non-negotiated soft law | Special Procedures' report | The pressures referred to above exacerbate conflicts over land and lead to a worrisome criminalization of social movements aimed at carrying out agrarian reforms "from below", including by claiming land that is unused and, in their view, should be distributed more equitably. As a result, serious violations of a range of human rights occur, including murders of peasants connected to such activities, which the Special Rapporteur has documented in a number of communications to States. But the increased pressures on land are also a source of concern because of the weak protection of those who depend most on the land for their survival: smallholders, traditional fisherfolk, pastoralists and peoples (including indigenous and tribal peoples) that rely on the products of the forest. The present report first addresses the situation of indigenous peoples, which is specific insofar as the right of such peoples to have their lands demarcated and protected is recognized under international law. It then considers the position of smallholders, who cultivate the land in conditions that are often insufficiently secure, and that of other land users, such as fisherfolk, pastoralists and herders, who are particularly dependent on commons. The key message is that, while security of tenure is important and should be seen as crucial to the realization of the right to food, individual titling and the creation of a market for land rights may not be the most appropriate means to achieve it. |
|
| 2010 |