Right to Land and Livelihoods

Ruchi TripathiHead Right to FoodActionAid International

ActionAid’s work on food, land and livelihoods

• ActionAid works through partners on the ground – CBOs, farmers organisations, landless peoples movement, indigenous peoples organisations and movements, women’s groups , people living with disabilities, forest dwelling communities, tribal groups

• Many of them are focused on land struggles and issues around access to land on a daily basis

• ActionAid’s committed engagement with local communities through local rights programmes helps with the long-term nature of struggles around access and control over land

• ActionAid’s main organisation wide campaign: HungerFREE has a focus on women’s right to land and investing in women smallholders. The campaign in Europe, US, Brazil and parts of Africa (e.g. Senegal, Ghana) has a focus on biofuels which have an impact on food price volatility and land grabs

Different ways of supporting work on land rights

• Partnerships with local and national landless movements; and working in solidarity (India, Brazil)

• Sending out urgent appeals for urgent campaign action (PSO, France)

• Technical and practical tools to access land: eg. Land accountability project in Tanzania that is developing a toolkit jointly with the Tanzania land alliance. It is also working on land matrix project tracking land grabbing. http://www.tanzanialandportal.org/

• Helping communities get access to land and stopping land grabs (Bangladesh, Mozambique, Senegal, India, Brazil, Pakistan….)

• Engagement in policy fora such as:– International Conference on Agrarian Reform

and Rural Development (ICARRD); AU Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa; Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests

• Support for mobilisation – including through Launch of HungerFREE

Women Charters• Implementing multi-country projects on

women’s right to land • Co-organising Pan African Women’s Land Rights

Conference; Partnerships with OXFAM and ACORD at continental level- Africa

• Co-organising dialogues on land grabs in Africa with regional farmers’ organisations and the International Land Coalition (ILC)

Different ways of supporting work on land rights

Key issues for ActionAid

• Women’s right to land and access to natural resources

• Land policy and agrarian reform• Support struggles against land grabs• Food production based on right to food and

food sovereignty • Support agroecological principles through local

rights programmes and wider mobilisation• Stopping Biofuels targets and subsidies/land

conversion• No to soil carbon capture• Human rights based approach: empowerment,

solidarity and campaigns for change• Land and natural resources will remain

central in the next strategy period 2013-17

• Women rarely have ownership and control over land

• Women rarely sit in the governance institutions (traditional or formal) that make decisions on land.

• Land held in trust for rural populations or pubic land, upon which women depend is most susceptible to land grabs.

• Patriarchal practices subjugate women within families and communities. In all forms of land tenure systems, women’s rights to land is often limited to access, which is often subject to maintaining a good relationship with male relatives.

• Many national constitutions and laws treat matters of land ownership, inheritance and transfer, property sharing in marriage and divorce under personal law that perpetuate discrimination on the basis of culture.

• There are real and potential violent backlash when women assert their rights to control land.

• There is an increased dispossession of land from widows and orphans due to HIV/AIDs00

Women’s rights to land – key issues

• From a right to food perspective access to and control over land is critical for food and livelihood security;

• Rights of rural women, and access and control of natural resources is a key issue but

• Land is also a resource that women must/can own in their own right – property

• Land as source of power & dignity (and identity) as its about Rights Rights are inter-dependent − right to land

enables women to exercise other rights and vice-versa

Meeting women’s strategic gender needs and balancing unequal gender relations is crucial

Women’s rights to land enables them to assert other non material rights (e.g. political participation)

Framing the issue is key