Right to Land and Livelihoods:

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Right to Land and Livelihoods
Ruchi Tripathi Head Right to Food ActionAid
International
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ActionAids work on food, land and livelihoods

• ActionAid works through partners on the ground
  CBOs, farmers organisations, landless peoples
  movement, indigenous peoples organisations and
  movements, womens 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
• ActionAids committed engagement with local
  communities through local rights programmes helps
  with the long-term nature of struggles around
  access and control over land
• ActionAids main organisation wide campaign
  HungerFREE has a focus on womens 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

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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.)

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Different ways of supporting work on land rights

• 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 womens
  right to land
• Co-organising Pan African Womens 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)

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Key issues for ActionAid

• Womens 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

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Womens rights to land key issues

• 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, womens 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/AIDs

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Framing the issue is key

• 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 womens strategic gender needs and
  balancing unequal gender relations is crucial
• Womens rights to land enables them to assert
  other non material rights (e.g. political
  participation)