Photo of an assembly of members of the Lhaka Honhat indigenous association in the province of Salta, in northern Argentina. Their claim to their ancestral territory has been recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but they have not yet gained exclusive use of their land. CREDIT: Courtesy of CELS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 6 2023 (IPS)

In 1994 Argentina recognized in the constitution the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of indigenous peoples. However, enforcement of respect for their rights has fallen short and almost 30 years later the question of land is generating growing conflicts, which sometimes pit native communities against the rest of society.

On Feb. 5, a long convoy of some 500 vehicles driven by agricultural producers drove through the midwest province of Mendoza to defend “the sovereignty of our lands and private property” against growing and increasingly visible claims by indigenous people to their ancestral lands.

The demonstrators said that they do not want the same thing to happen in Mendoza as in the southern province of Río Negro, where there have been various violent incidents in recent years, which peaked in September 2022, when a group of indigenous people claiming their ancestral territory set fire to a National Gendarmerie mobile booth.“Due to economic interests over the land, we do not have a complete survey of indigenous territories in Argentina. That is the basic need, a diagnosis that is indispensable in order to solve this problem.”-- Noelia Garone

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s indigenous communities are still waiting for community property title to the lands they have ancestrally lived on, which they point to as the key to access other rights that have remained empty words in the constitution, such as participation in the management of their natural resources.

“There is no political will to resolve this issue, because there are very powerful interests in the oil, mining, or agricultural industries that oppose it,” Silvina Ramírez, a member of the Association of Indigenous Rights Lawyers (AADI) and professor of graduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

“This has been aggravated because there is a communication campaign trying to spread the idea that indigenous people want to prevent progress and are the enemy,” she added.

On the other side, Andrés Vavrik, a cattle producer from Mendoza and one of the organizers of the demonstration there, told IPS: “No one is against indigenous peoples, but we are concerned that the national government recognizes the right to territory of anyone who self-identifies as indigenous, because there we enter a very debatable terrain.”

“We came out to defend private property,” he said from the town of General Alvear in Mendoza.

A leading role in the march was played by a group of veterans of the Malvinas/Falklands Islands War, which Argentina lost in 1982 against the United Kingdom, which occupied the South Atlantic islands 190 years ago.

The reaction came after the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs (INAI), the official body in charge of the study and delimitation of indigenous territories, recognized the rights of native communities to over 21,500 hectares of land in Mendoza.

Although the INAI clarified that its resolution “does not imply in any way the restitution or handing over of land,” since the agency does not have that power, the Mendoza government objected to the decision before the Supreme Court.

More than 500 vehicles participated in a march in defense of national sovereignty in Mendoza, a province in central Argentina, which culminated in a demonstration in the city of Malargüe. The convoy was triggered by indigenous claims to their ancestral land in that province, to which agricultural producers are opposed. CREDIT: Courtesy of Diego Frutos

Land emergency

Argentina is a country that formally promoted European immigration and the exclusion of indigenous people since it became a unified nation in 1853.

In the 2010 census, 955,032 people self-identified as descendants of or belonging to indigenous peoples, just over two percent of the total population. In the 2022 census, which showed a population of 46 million inhabitants, the question was asked again, but the results have not yet been released.

Although the recognition of the rights of native communities in the 1994 constitutional reform was a landmark from a legal and symbolic point of view, implementation has been another question, with the issue of land ownership seen as the central hurdle.

For this reason, in 2006 Congress enacted Law 26160 on Emergency Matters of Land Possession and Ownership of indigenous communities, which banned evictions of native communities for four years, blocking existing court rulings ordering evictions.

The first three years were to be used to carry out a survey of the lands where indigenous communities lived and promote the issuing of collective land titles.

However, 17 years later the law is still in force, since it had to be extended several times, which demonstrates the failure of its implementation.

A photo of Kolla indigenous women in the extreme northern Argentine province of Jujuy. Although the rights of indigenous peoples have been recognized in the constitution since 1994, they have not been enforced. CREDIT: Courtesy of Amnesty International Argentina

The INAI completed surveys for only 46 percent of the legally constituted communities, as reported in late 2022. And today the road is much longer than before, because in 2007, when the communities started to register legally and the survey began, 950 registered, and the number has since grown to 1825.

But the survey does not imply that the land titling process is being carried out. This is an even more complicated step, because there is still no law in the country that regulates indigenous community property, which is different from the multi-owner residential development provided for under civil law, when there is more than one owner.

The community property law is another longstanding demand of indigenous peoples and human rights organizations, which Congress has not met.

Although some communities in the country have received their property title from the hands of provincial governments under different legal statuses, it is not known how many there are or what area these indigenous territories cover.

“The indigenous territorial emergency law was passed in a very particular context of expansion of the business of growing and exporting soybeans in Argentina, which caused a serious situation of constant evictions of indigenous communities,” Diego Morales, a lawyer with the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization, told IPS.

“Since then, no government has wanted to hand over land to indigenous people and not even the associated communities in Lhaka Honhat (living in the province of Salta, in the north of the country) have been able to access a community property title and fully exercise their rights, even though they obtained a favorable sentence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” he added.

Morales said the situation today is more difficult to resolve, because indigenous communities that have historically been discriminated against and neglected, who in recent years have become more aware of their rights, now not only lay claim to the land where they live but are also making cultural claims to territories from which their ancestors were driven.

A demonstration by indigenous Kolla people in the arid, mountainous landscape of northwestern Argentina. The country has declared a “territorial emergency” for indigenous peoples since 2006, but the vast majority of communities do not have title to their lands. CREDIT: Courtesy of Endepa

Violence and debate

Diego Frutos, who suffered several occupations and attacks on his property in Villa Mascardi, in the province of Río Negro, by groups laying claim to his property for Mapuche indigenous communities, said there are people who are trying to take advantage of indigenous rights to reclaim land that does not belong to them.

“I do not deny the rights of the Mapuches, but those who attacked my property are not a registered community. They cannot be, because they do not have blood ties and they cannot show that they have had an uninterrupted occupation of a territory. They are a group of young people who seek to take advantage of the umbrella of indigenous rights,” Frutos told IPS from his town.

Frutos is convinced that those who attacked his property are backed by the administration of center-left President Alberto Fernández, who feels pressure from both sides while walking a minefield between indigenous people and the agricultural producers who settled on their lands, with neither side feeling satisfied with what his government has done.

Sandra Ceballos, a member of the Kolla people and vice president of AADI, the association of lawyers for indigenous rights, told IPS that the government is persecuting indigenous people, as demonstrated by the fact that an unusual joint command of federal and provincial forces was assembled in Río Negro, after the acts of violence in September.

Noelia Garone, a lawyer from the Argentine office of Amnesty International, said the lack of recognition of the right to land has triggered multiple violations of other rights of indigenous communities, such as education, healthcare, water or work.

“Due to economic interests over the land, we do not have a complete survey of indigenous territories in Argentina. That is the basic need, a diagnosis that is indispensable in order to solve this problem,” she told IPS.

The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) was held in Bonn, Germany and focused on how to give land rights the visibility needed to showcase that a rights approach, particularly when it comes to indigenous people, is a solution to the climate change crisis. Courtesy: Pilar Valbuena/GLF

By Friday Phiri
Jun 29 2019 (IPS)

The Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) was held in Bonn, Germany to rally behind a new approach to achieving a future that is more inclusive and sustainable than the present – through the establishment of secure and proper rights for all.

On Jun. 22 and 23, experts, political leaders, NGOs and indigenous peoples and communities gathered to deliberate on a methodology that emphasises rights for indigenous peoples and local communities in the management and perseveration of landscapes. The forum took place alongside the  United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Bonn Climate Change Conference.

The forum focused giving land rights the visibility needed to showcase that a rights approach is a solution to the climate change crisis, and to develop a ‘gold standard’ for rights.

Indigenous peoples, local communities, women and youth, are believed to be the world’s most important environmental stewards but they are also among the most threatened and criminalised groups with little access to rights.

“We’re defending the world, for every single one of us,” said Geovaldis Gonzalez Jimenez, an indigenous peasant leader from Montes de María, Colombia.

But industries such as fossil fuels, large-scale agriculture, mining and others are not only endangering landscapes but also the lives of the people therein.

Already this year, said Gonzalez, his region witnessed 135 murders, adding that the day before the start of the GLF a local leader was killed in front of a 9-year-old boy.

According to the United Nations, the land belonging to the 350 million indigenous peoples across the globe is one of the most powerful shields against climate change as it holds 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity and sequesters nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon. 

It is for this reason that amid the urgency to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under pressure from the climate threat, dialogues about the global future have begun to wake up to the fact that indigenous peoples’ relationships with the natural world are not only crucial to preserve for their own sakes, but for everyone’s.

The drafting of the document of rights was led by Indigenous Peoples Major Group (IPMG) for Sustainable Development and the Rights and Resources Initiative in the months leading up to the GLF.

Wider discussions and workshops over the two days served as a consultation on the draft (which is expected to be finalised by the end of the year) as a concrete guide for organisations, institutions, governments and the private sector on how to apply different principles of rights. This includes the rights to free, prior and informed consent; gender equality; respect to cultural heritage; and education.

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Vicky Tauli-Corpuz said lands managed by indigenous peoples with secure rights have lower deforestation rates, higher biodiversity levels and higher carbon storage than lands in government-protected areas.

But Diel Mochire Mwenge, who leads the Initiative Programme for the Development of the Pygme in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the largest indigenous forest communities in Central Africa, said he has witnessed more than one million people being evicted from the national parkland where they have long lived. He explained that they had not been given benefits from the ecotourism industries brought in to replace them and were left struggling to find new income sources.

“Our identity is being threatened, and we need to avoid being completely eradicated,” said Mwenge.

In Jharkhand, India, activist Gladson Dungdung, whose parents were murdered in 1990 for attending a court case over a local land dispute, said an amendment to India’s Forest Rights Act currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court could see 7.5 million indigenous peoples evicted from their native forest landscapes. The act can impact a further 90 million people who depend on these forests’ resources for their survival, he said.

The amendment, Dungdung said, would also give absolute power to the national forest guard; if a guard were to see someone using the forest for hunting or timber collection, they could legally shoot the person on-sight.

“Indigenous peoples are right on the frontline of the very real and dangerous fight for the world’s forests,” said actor and indigenous rights activist Alec Baldwin in a video address.

“Granted that indigenous peoples are the superheroes of the environmental movement,” Jennifer Morris, president of Conservation International wondered why they are not heard until they become victims. “Why do we not hear about these leaders until they’ve become martyrs for this cause?”

The examples of intimidation, criminalisation, eviction and hardship shared throughout the first day clearly showcased what indigenous peoples and local communities go through to preserve the forests or ‘lungs of the earth’.

The rights approach, according to conveners of the GLF, aims to strengthen respect, recognition and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities as stewards and bearers of solutions to landscape restoration, conservation, and sustainable use. It also aims to end persecution of land and environment defenders; build partnerships to enhance engagement and support for rights-based approaches to sustainable landscapes across scales and sectors; and, scale up efforts to legally recognise and secure collective land and resource rights across landscapes.

“By implementing a gold standard, we can both uphold and protect human rights and develop conservation, restoration and sustainable development initiatives that embrace the key role Indigenous peoples and local communities are already playing to protect our planet,” said Joan Carling, co-convener of IPMG.

IPMG recognises that indigenous and local communities are bearers of rights and solutions to common challenges.

“This will enable the partnership that we need to pave the way for a more sustainable, equitable and just future,” added Carling.

And the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Director General, Robert Nasi, said when rights of local communities and indigenous peoples are recognised, there are significant benefits for the fight against climate change and environmental degradation.

“Whoever controls the rights over these landscapes has a very important part to play in fighting climate change,” he said.

In the climate and development arenas, the most current alarm being sounded is for rights–securing the land rights and freedoms of indigenous peoples, local communities and the marginalised members therein.

How can these custodians of a quarter of the world’s terrestrial surface be expected to care for their traditional lands if the lands don’t, in fact, belong to them? Or, worse, if they’re criminalised and endangered for doing so?

The basic principles of a ‘gold standard’ already exist, such as free, prior and informed consent, according to Alain Frechette of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). What has been lacking, he said, is the application of principles that could be boosted by high-level statements that could “spur a race to the top”.

Residents of the Eastern Cape's Amadiba coastal area gather in September 2015. Many fear mining would threaten their way of life by destroying grazing land and creating rifts in the community. Courtesy: Nonhle Mbuthuma

By Mark Olalde
PRETORIA, Jun 5 2018 (IPS)

South Africans await judgement to be handed down in a court case that could set a sweeping precedent by empowering communities on communal land with the right to reject new mining projects.

Calling the case a referendum on “the right to say no,” residents of several rural villages along the country’s eastern coast are asking the court to reinterpret current minerals extraction legislation to compel mining companies to gain explicit community consent prior to breaking ground on new operations.

The court case, for which arguments were heard in late April in Pretoria, stems from a dispute over a proposed titanium mine that has raged for more than a decade in the country’s rural Eastern Cape province in an area known as the “Wild Coast.” The project has pitted Australian mining company Mineral Commodities Ltd against a group of five local villages, collectively known as Amadiba. Locals consistently turned back the company’s attempts to mine, but bouts of violence have left several people dead.

“Their way of life is intrinsically linked to the land. Customary communities tend to suffer disproportionately from the impacts of mining,” the plaintiffs argued in their submission to the court, noting environmental degradation, displacement and loss of agricultural land. “Without free, prior and informed consent, they are at real risk of losing not only rights in their land, but their very way of being.”

Nonhle Mbuthuma is the secretary and acting leader of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, which represents many residents of the villages. She took over the group’s mantle of leadership when the committee’s chairperson, Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Radebe, was gunned down in front of his home in March 2016. Radebe was widely thought to have been murdered for his activism against the mine, and Mbuthuma’s name is believed to be written on a hit list alongside his.

“The land is our identity. When we lose that land, we lose who we are. And when you lose who you are, that’s no different than just someone killing you,” Mbuthuma said.

Nonhle Mbuthuma of the Amadiba Crisis Committee is believed to be on a hit list due to her opposition to a proposed titanium mining project on South Africa’s east coast. Credit: Mark Olalde/IPS

The communities and civil society organizations that have joined the plaintiffs asked that if the court does not side with their argument for consent, that it at least grants them the ability to negotiate terms such as royalties prior to mining. If the court declines that too, then the plaintiffs asked that the current legislation be found unconstitutional.

In the court filings, a subsidiary of Mineral Commodities argued that the plaintiffs misinterpreted the law well beyond its intended purpose in an effort to halt the mine, which already earned permits. The company noted that “if granted, [the plaintiffs’ application] will affect land and mining rights all over the country.”

“We hope that if the judge rules in favor of us, it will help all African communities, not only Xolobeni, because the problem of mining pushing people off their land is all over Africa,” Mbuthuma said, referencing one of the five villages in Amadiba that has become synonymous with the conflict.

Formerly under the control of the oppressive apartheid system, South Africa democratically elected a new government in 1994, which worked to return the country’s mineral wealth to its citizens while also fitting into international, capitalist markets. Under current legislation, mineral rights were claimed for the state in an attempt to foster economic development.

However, as the government handed out mining licenses, conflicts arose between mining companies and rural communities living on communal land. About 13 percent of the country’s land area remains held communally in the vestiges of apartheid-era “homelands” that were created as sham independent states to remove black South Africans from urban areas. An estimated 18 million South Africans live on these lands.

Traditional leaders such as chiefs, kings and queens and councils preside over communal land, but their mandate comes from the people, according to customary law. In this set of laws, these leaders cannot make decisions for their communities without the consent of the people.

In many cases, though, traditional leaders strike deals with mining companies that open up communal land to mining, often without community-level consent. This happened in Amadiba, where one chief supported the proposed mine and was made a director of a company linked to the project. In return, the chief said in a signed statement provided to the South African Police Service, he was promised that challenges to his chieftaincy would disappear and that he would earn profits from the mine.

Through a company spokesperson, Mineral Commodities CEO Mark Caruso declined to comment for this story.

Johan Lorenzen is an associate at Richard Spoor Inc. Attorneys, which is part of the community’s legal team. He said that such conflicts are common in rural areas that are struggling to realize the full benefits of a democratic South Africa.

“The majority of rural South Africans live on communal land such as the Amadiba community. Particularly as the world’s largest platinum producer, South Africa has seen a wave of mining right applications over customary land, and, without clarity over this question of whether there’s the right to say no, it has had sweeping effects on tens-of-thousands of people in rural South Africa,” Lorenzen said. He estimates a judgement will be delivered in several months.

The minister of the Department of Mineral Resources announced an 18-month moratorium that temporarily halted both the project as well as any new permit applications for the area. That is set to expire later this year, and it remains unclear what will happen when it does.

As part of the moratorium, the department committed to commission “independent social specialist/s to…investigate the deeply rooted cause of the problems and document the causes and possible solutions” of conflict surrounding the mine.

In a statement to IPS, the department admitted to eschewing that obligation. “There was no independent investigation conducted, due to the well-publicised challenges between the parties in the area,” the statement said, also noting that the department was yet to decide whether to renew the moratorium.

As an alternative way of elevating these residents’ voices, British photographer Thom Pierce recently shot a series of portraits of Xolobeni residents and made the frames into postcards that he plans to mail to the minister of the Department of Mineral Resources. On the postcards, community members described the importance of holding the final say over their own land.

Themba Yalo invoked the memory of the Pondoland Revolt, a 1960s uprising where residents of Amadiba and surrounding communities took up arms against the apartheid government and its supporters. “My grandparents fought for this land, for me to live freely. I will never agree to a mine coming here and destroying the land and the graves of my family,” he wrote.

Others, including Mamthithala Yalo, argued for agriculture instead of mining: “I have pigs, cows and goats that I farm on this land. I also grow all of the food that I need. I will never allow the mining to come and change the way I live. This land is not for sale.”

Women's secure tenure rights lead to several positive development outcomes for them and their families, including resilience to climate change shocks, economic productivity, food security, health, and education. Here a young tribal woman works shoulder to shoulder with her husband planting rice saplings in India's Rayagada province. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Jun 12 2017 (IPS)

In Meghalaya, India’s northeastern biodiversity hotspot, all three major tribes are matrilineal. Children take the mother’s family name, while daughters inherit the family lands.

Because women own land and have always decided what is grown on it and what is conserved, the state not only has a strong climate-resistant food system but also some of the rarest edible and medicinal plants, researchers said.The importance of protecting the full spectrum of women’s property rights becomes even more urgent as the number of women-led households in rural areas around the world continues to grow.

While their ancient culture empowers Meghalaya’s indigenous women with land ownership that vastly improves their resilience to the food shocks climate change springs on them, for an overwhelming majority of women in developing countries, culture does not allow them even a voice in family or community land management.  Nor do national laws support their rights to own the very land they sow and harvest to feed their families.

Legal protections for indigenous and rural women to own and manage property are inadequate or missing in 30 low- and middle-income countries, according to a new report from Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

This finding, now quantified, means that much of the recent progress that indigenous and local communities have gained in acquiring legal recognition of their commonly held territory could be built on shaky ground.

“Generally speaking, international legal protections for indigenous and rural women’s tenure rights have yet to be reflected in the national laws that regulate women’s daily interactions with community forests,” Stephanie Keene, Tenure Analyst for the RRI, a global coalition working for forest land and resources rights of indigenous and local communities, told IPS via an email interview.

Together these 30 countries contain three-quarters of the developing world’s forests, which remain critical to mitigate global warming and natural disasters, including droughts and land degradation.

In South Asia, distress migration owing to climate events and particularly droughts is high, as over three-quarters of the population is dependent on agriculture, out of which more than half are subsistence farmers depending on rains for irrigation.

“For many indigenous people, it is the women who are the food producers and who manage their customary lands and forests. Safeguarding their rights will cement the rights of their communities to collectively own the lands and forests they have protected and depended on for generations.” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“Indigenous and local communities in the ten analyzed Asian countries provide the most consistent recognition of women’s community-level inheritance rights. However, this regional observation is not seen in India and Nepal, where inadequate laws concerning inheritance and community-level dispute resolution cause women’s forest rights to be particularly vulnerable,” Keene told IPS of the RRI study.

“None of the 5 legal frameworks analyzed in Nepal address community-level inheritance or dispute resolution. Although India’s Forest Rights Act does recognize the inheritability of Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ land, the specific rights of women to community-level inheritance and dispute resolution are not explicitly acknowledged. Inheritance in India may be regulated by civil, religious or personal laws, some of which fail to explicitly guarantee equal inheritance rights for wives and daughters,” Keene added.

Desertification, the silent, invisible crisis, threatens one-third of global land area. This photo taken in 2013 records efforts to green portions of the Kubuqi Desert, the seventh largest in China. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Pointing out challenges behind the huge gaps in women’s land rights under international laws and rights recognized by South Asian governments, Madhu Sarin, who was involved in drafting of India’s Forest Rights Act and now pushes for its implementation, told IPS, “Where governments have ratified international conventions, they do in principle agree to make national laws compatible with them. However, there remains a huge gap between such commitments and their translation into practice. Firstly, most governments don’t have mechanisms or binding requirements in place for ensuring such compatibility.”

“Further, the intended beneficiaries of gender-just laws remain unorganised and unaware about them,” she added.

Women’s land rights, recurring droughts and creeping desertification

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), one way to address droughts that cause more deaths and displaces more people than any other natural disaster, and to halt desertification – the silent, invisible crisis that threatens one-third of global land area – is to bring about pressing legal reforms to establish gender parity in farm and forest land ownership and  its management.

“Poor rural women in developing countries are critical to the survival of their families. Fertile land is their lifeline. But the number of people negatively affected by land degradation is growing rapidly. Crop failures, water scarcity and the migration of traditional crops are damaging rural livelihoods. Action to halt the loss of more fertile land must focus on households. At this level, land use is based on the roles assigned to men and women. This is where the tide can begin to turn,” says Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, in its 2017 study.

Closing the gender gap in agriculture alone would increase yields on women’s farms by 20 to 30 percent and total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent, the study quotes the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as saying.

An Indian tribal woman holds up her land tenure document secure in the knowledge that now she can plan long term for her two sons. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Why the gender gap must close in farm and forest rights

The reality on the ground is, however, not even close to approaching this gender parity so essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 5 which connect directly with land rights.

Climate change is ushering in new population dynamics. As men’s out-migration from indigenous and local communities continues to rise due to fall in land productivity, population growth and increasing outside opportunities for wage-labor, more women are left behind as de facto land managers, assuming even greater responsibilities in communities and households.

The importance of protecting the full spectrum of women’s property rights becomes even more urgent as the number of women-led households in rural areas around the world continues to grow. The percentage of female-led households is increasing in half of the world’s 15 largest countries by population, including India and Pakistan.

Although there is no updated data on the growth of women-led households, the policy research group International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in its 2014 study found that from 2000 to 2010, slightly less than half of the world’s urban population growth could be ascribed to migration. The contribution of migration is considerably higher in Asia, it found, where urbanisation is almost 60 percent and is expected to continue growing, although at a declining rate.”

“Unless women have equal standing in all laws governing indigenous lands, their communities stand on fragile ground,” cautioned Tauli-Corpuz.

Without legal protections for women, community lands are vulnerable to theft and exploitation that threatens the world’s tropical forests that form a critical bulwark against climate change, as well as efforts to eradicate poverty among rural communities.

With the increasing onslaught of large industries on community lands worldwide, tenure rights of women are fundamental to their continued cultural identity and natural resource governance, according to the RRI study.

“When women’s rights to access, use, and control community forests and resources are insecure, and especially when women’s right to meaningfully participate in community-level governance decisions is not respected, their ability to fulfill substantial economic and cultural responsibilities are compromised, causing entire families and communities to suffer,” said Keene.

Moreover, several studies have established that women are differently and disproportionately affected by community-level shocks such as climate change, natural disasters, conflict and large-scale land acquisitions, further underscoring  the fortification of women’s land rights an urgent priority.

With growing feminization of farming as men out-migrate, and the rise in women’s education, gender-inequitable tenure practices cannot be sustained over time, the RRI study concludes. But achieving gender equity in land rights will call for tremendous political will and societal change, particularly in patriarchal South Asia, researchers said.

Having land has made all the difference to Zar Bibi, a 60-year-old widow in Pakistan (centre). Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Excerpt:

Representatives of indigenous peoples in Brazil, who gather every year in April at the Free Land Camp on the Esplanade of the Ministries in Brasilia, in a protest against the legislators who undermine their rights to land, health and education. The National Congress is seen in the background. Credit: José Cruz/Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 31 2017 (IPS)

The attack with guns and machetes that left at least 10 Gamela indigenous people wounded, in the northeastern state of Maranhão, highlighted the growing threats against the resurgence and survival of native people in Brazil.

On Apr. 30, dozens of armed men attacked indigenous people who were occupying an estate in the municipality of Viana, which they claim as their ancestral land. Two of the injured suffered deep cuts on their hands.
The uneven battle was reminiscent of the massacres that decimated Brazil’s native population over the course of five centuries. But it was merely the most brutal part of an offensive unleashed on multiple fronts by large landowners, who consider the amount of land granted to indigenous people excessive.

“This is the worst moment in terms of government indigenous policy since the (1964-1985) military dictatorship,” said Marcio Santilli, a founding member of the non-governmental Social-Environmental Institute (ISA) and former president (1995-1996) of the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the government indigenous rights agency.
The government of President Michel Temer, in office since May 2016, is behind “an unprecedented setback in the entire system of protection of the environment, native peoples and farm workers,” the ISA and 59 other non-governmental organisations complained in an “open letter” released on May 9.

The offensive has included a 55 per cent cut in FUNAI’s budget this year, the appointment of an army general, Franklimberg de Freitas, as head of the agency, and legislative measures that seek to revoke the indigenous right to the lands where they have traditionally lived, recognised in Brazil’s constitution.

A constitutional amendment, under discussion since 2000, aims to transfer from the executive to the legislative branches the authority to make the final decision regarding the demarcation of indigenous lands.

Approval of the amendment would block the process of demarcation of native land promoted by the 1988 constitution, since Congress is traditionally conservative and is currently dominated by the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (APF), vehemently opposed to assigning more land to indigenous people.

The multi-party block, also known as the rural caucus, is comprised of 257 lawmakers – half of the lower chamber – and 16 senators – one-fifth of the Senate – according to the Inter-union Department of Parliamentary Advisory.

“President Temer, who is very unpopular, is hostage to the Congress and vulnerable to the pressures of the parliamentarians,” Santilli told IPS, to explain his concern with respect to the initiatives set forth by the current administration, whose term ends the first day of 2019.

Justice Minister Osmar Serraglio was legal coordinator of the APF until February, when he was appointed to head the ministry that is currently responsible for indigenous policy, as FUNAI answers to the Justice Ministry.
The president of the APF, lawmaker Nilson Leitão, as rapporteur for the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on FUNAI and Land Reform, is calling for the prosecution of dozens of leaders of non-government organisations (NGO), anthropologists, public prosecutors and government officials for alleged fraud in the demarcation of indigenous lands.

“It is a paradox that he intends to criminalise those who want to comply with the constitution” by ensuring indigenous access to lands that were traditionally theirs, Santilli remarked.

“We are all defending the constitution, from different

A Guaraní family who live precariously on lands not yet demarcated, under the constant threat of expulsion, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, near the border with Paraguay. The largest indigenous population in Brazil is concentrated in this area, where large landowners have taken possession of native lands, leading to the highest number of murders and suicides of indigenous people. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

viewpoints,” said Leitão, explaining that the parliamentary commission examined several cases and concluded in a 3,385-page report that there are proven illegalities that must be prosecuted.

“There was an improper use of public resources,” the legislator told IPS. “Some NGOs even bought firearms for indigenous people, and in some demarcations the indigenous people did not even want the entire area that was allocated to them.”

His report attacks several NGOs that “received huge sums of money from abroad” and encouraged “invasions of rural properties” claimed as indigenous lands, ignoring the legal property claims of the owners.

“The method of demarcation has defects, everything that has been done lately is being questioned by the justice system,” Leitão said. Also, in his opinion, FUNAI was weakened when it was “taken over by officials with a biased ideology.”

But his main criticism is that the land is “the only focus of FUNAI and indigenous people,” while they ignore issues such as “taking care of the health and education” of native peoples.

As a consequence, the rural bloc lawmaker said that “in the last 10 years the death rate among indigenous people rose 168 percent, not due to war or violent conflicts, but because of diseases,” and 40 per cent of the deaths were of children under five.

It has nothing to do with a shortage of land, he argued, pointing out that there were 817,963 indigenous people – 0.4 per cent of the total population – in Brazil according to the 2010 census, occupying 117 million hectares, or 13.7 per cent of the national territory. In 2010 the population was just over 190 million people, compared to today’s 211 million, according to current projections.

Minimising the importance of the land issue is in the interest of the rural bloc, in permanent conflict with the contenders for land, whether indigenous people or peasant farmers demanding to be settled on land under the government’s land reform programme.

But all experts consider land the key factor for the survival of native peoples.

The current rural bloc offensive, which is favoured by their majority in Congress, threatens to put an end to the indigenous resurgence promoted by Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 and the constitution approved three years later.

The indigenous population stood at just 294,131 in 1991, when the first official census to incorporate that ethnic identification was carried out. By 2000 the number had more than doubled, to 734,127, and in 2010 it had reached 817,963.

This increase responded to the demarcation of over 80 per cent of the 480 areas already recognised as belonging to indigenous people in Brazil since 1988. There are still 224 areas to be officially demarcated, half of them already identified and the rest still in process.

“The population growth will continue to be reflected in the 2020 census, despite the escalation of violence,” predicted Cleber Buzatto, executive secretary of the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic Church organisation.

Many native groups are involved in a revival of their identities and are trying to recover their ancestral lands. This is the case of the Gamela people, who occupied estates seeking to demarcate their territory themselves, in the face of the slow pace of the government’s action, as part of an initiative that triggered the violent reaction by large local landowners, said Buzatto.

The indigenous population, despite the adversities, continue to mobilise for their constitutional rights.

Currently there are 252 native peoples, speaking 150 different languages, of the 1,200 that were spoken when the Portuguese colonialists arrived in 1500, according to ISA. The largest groups are the Guaraní, Tikuna, Terena and Yanomami.

The Free Land Camp, an annual demonstration held in Brasilia, drew nearly 4,000 indigenous people Apr. 24-28, to protest against “violence, setbacks and threats by the Brazilian state,” and defend their rights guaranteed by the constitution and international treaties.

“There is a series of ongoing threats and actions that are related to, and that reinforce, each other,” with a rural bloc representative in the Justice Ministry, and attempts to modify the constitution to invade indigenous lands, disqualify the demarcation system and ensure impunity for the aggressors, said Buzatto.

These actions also affect the environment and human rights, fomenting resistance movements.

Criticism of the positions taken by the Brazilian government, particularly with respect to indigenous questions, were expressed in the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it subjected the country to the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva on May 5. “That is something that gives us hope,” said the secretary of CIMI.

A street in Hornos, a low-income neighbourhood on the west side of Greater Buenos Aires, where local residents are waiting to receive the deeds to their property, as the key to access to other rights and public services that will provide them with a dignified urban life. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MORENO, Argentina, Jul 28 2016 (IPS)

Now that the wind no longer blows her roof off and her house belongs to her, Cristina López feels safe in the shantytown where she lives on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. But she and her neighbours still need to win respect for many more rights they have been denied.

She is not complaining because her situation was much more difficult before she and her teenage son moved four years ago to Hornos, a newly emerging neighbourhood in the municipality of Moreno, to the west of Buenos Aires.

She paid rent until the municipal authorities granted her a plot of land where she built a makeshift home. “Since I built it by myself it wasn´t stable, and a storm tore the roof off,” López told IPS. After that, she and her son stayed at the homes of various friends and neighbours.

Her new house was built with the help of Techo (Roof), a non-governmental organisation that promotes decent housing in urban slums and shantytowns throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, with a collaborative effort by local residents and volunteers.“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good.” - Juan Pablo Duhalde

In Hornos, home to 200 families, and the adjacent neighbourhood of Los Cedros, where 1,200 families live, Techo Argentina has built 225 small one-family units. Simple and low-cost, they are put together in just two days, with the aim of resolving housing emergencies.

But for the 59-year-old López, who does odd jobs to support herself and her 15-year-old son, the little prefab house has meant the difference between indigence and a dignified life.

“It was a total change. Nothing compares to this. You realise that when you have a house, you start to change your way of life, because you know it’s your own, and although I don’t have the ‘papers’ for this land yet, the house is mine. No one will take it from me,” she said.

The papers she mentioned are the property deed that she is to be issued by the municipal authorities who granted her the plot of land; not having received them yet makes her nervous.

“There´s always some shrewd person who will show up and claim the land is theirs. Until the municipality says ‘this belongs to you’, we won´t feel completely secure,” she said.

López added that in order to stop being a “second-class citizen”, she also needs utilities: running water, sewerage and electricity with a meter “so it isn’t cut off all the time.”

Furthermore, Hornos, 42 km from the capital and over 20 from the county seat, means she is far away from everything. “We have no school or health clinic nearby, no paved roads, and ambulances won´t come here – we need everything,” she said.

Land and inequality

“It is acknowledged that rights are violated in many areas, and slums are the main expression of inequality and the violation of rights,” Techo Argentina regions director, Francisco Susmel, told IPS.

“Without secure ownership they have no guarantee that they won’t be evicted, and that they can go ahead and improve their homes and their surroundings,” he said, adding that it also undermines their right to access to public services.

Among the issues found by a 2013 survey carried out by Techo Argentina in 1,834 slums home to a total of 432,800 families in the biggest cities in the country was the right to land – a problem common to shantytowns around Latin America.

The report says that 64 percent of land in these informal settlements is prone to flooding, 41 percent is located less than 10 metres away from a river or canal, and 25 percent is less than 10 metres away from a garbage dump.

“Land is a factor that conditions inequality because today it is in the hands of a select group of people and isn´t available to the rest of the population,” sociologist Juan Pablo Duhalde, director of Techo International´s social research centre, told IPS.

According to Paola Bagnera, author of the book “The right to the city in the production of urban land”, published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), land is one of the key factors of inequality in the exercise of the right to the city.

“When we´re talking about urban land, we are referring to the basic foundation of the city…where the streets and blocks are laid out, and which requires the presence of grids (water, power and sewage, etc),” Bagnera, an architect who is an expert in urban planning and urban poverty at Argentina’s National University of the Litoral, told IPS.

“The value of land is directly related to location (near or far), provision (or absence) of services and infrastructure, and environmental characteristics (which lead to varying levels of exposure to risk),” she added.

For example, the construction of developments like gated communities in suburban areas in Argentina in the 1990s drove up prices of land on the outskirts of cities that until then was inhabited by the poor and was worth very little.

This has become one of the decisive elements in the habitat of low-income segments of the population in large cities, as they are pushed farther and farther to the outskirts or packed more and more densely into existing slums in the cities themselves, Bagnera said.

She pointed, for example, to slums that grow “upwards” in large cities like Buenos Aires, and to soaring property sale and rental prices in those areas.

“With regard to Latin America, to conditions in the slums, when the market makes decisions about the distribution of land, we are governing ourselves in an inefficient manner with no proper view to the future,” said Duhalde.

The expert said the right to access to urban land should be one of the central issues of debate at the third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), to be held in the capital of Ecuador in October, which is to give rise to a New Urban Agenda.

“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good,” said Duhalde.

“A variety of institutions are needed, in the government, the social sector, academia, different interest groups, to be part of the equitable distribution of resources, in this case land, which we must remember has a social function. It is not merchandise.”

Bagnera proposes increasing the value of urban land through the incorporation of infrastructure and improvements.

“That means the generation of community organisation processes through housing cooperatives, groups or social organisations that undertake their own processes of urbanisation and provision of infrastructure on collectively-acquired areas of land,” she said.

“And fundamentally with the participation of the state, promoting inclusive policies of access to services, and contributing to the generation of public-private urban planning arrangements,” she said.

These policies “tend to reduce the costs of infrastructure, providing public land, or based on the production of urban land by the state itself,” she added.

By Matthias Yeanay and Roland Harris
MONROVIA, Oct 22 2015 (IPS)

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recently affirmed her commitment to the land rights of Liberia’s local communities, who rely on the forests for their livelihoods and have cared for them for generations.

“Any successful paradigm shift for forest management in Liberia must have local communities at its centre,” Edward McClain, Minster of State for Presidential Affairs, said in a speech delivered on the President’s behalf. A draft Land Rights Act would make this possible, but the current session of Parliament ended without the Act’s adoption.

The land by Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County, Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

Such developments benefit large corporations but fail to deliver on the promise of shared economic development. Over half of Liberia’s territory has been sold to logging companies by the government, threatening the life-line of the communities that rightfully own Liberia’s forests.

These conflicts are not unique to Liberia. Around the world, contested lands fuel violence and threaten the commitments made by governments and companies. New research shows that out of eight fragile states in Africa, the governments of six claim ownership of nearly 100 per cent of the land in each country. Weak community rights also contribute to mass deforestation, as communities are generally better equipped than governments to care for their forests.

Despite growing attention around the world to these issues, the gap between how much land governments recognize as belonging to communities and the amount of land that communities govern in practice remains substantial.

As Ebola recedes, unsustainable demand for timber has returned to Liberia’s forests, but President Sirleaf’s comments give us hope that the government will side with local communities moving forward.

The President signed an agreement with Norway, which has promised up to $150 million over six years to help Liberia keep its forests standing. This agreement could provide much-needed funds for Liberia to provide basic services to its people, and stem the tide of mass deforestation.

Liberia’s leaders are turning towards conserving the forests rather than selling them off, and they recognize that the key to successful forest management is putting local communities in charge of their own forests. It only makes sense that the people who have managed the lands and forests all their lives, and whose communities have managed them for generations, are best-equipped to care for them. Research shows that when Indigenous Peoples and local communities have secure land rights, forest are more likely to stay standing.

The draft Land Rights Act would operationalise many of the commitments Liberia’s government has made. It would recognize Liberia’s local communities as the rightful owners of the country’s forests without requiring them to present an official deed, a significant development given that these communities inhabit a large percentage of Liberia’s land.

By extension, the legislation would protect the forests that communities have been the guardians of for generations. President Sirleaf has expressed her strong support for it, and it is now up to Parliament to take action. We expect them to take this important step towards securing Liberia a future of peace and prosperity.

But recognizing land rights is not enough. Communities already have legal title to over 30 per cent of Liberia’s land area, one of the highest percentages of community ownership in West and Central Africa, but a lack of technical capacity, government coordination and due process has led to legally titled communities losing their land to make way for concessions or conservation areas. Most were never compensated for their losses.

The reality is that local communities want to be the architects of their own development and manage their own forests, but they need more logistical and technical support to ensure that they will not be trampled by big business.

Negotiation of community forest management agreements should be done by the communities themselves with technical support from Liberia’s Forest Development Authority, civil society and other institutions with interest in the forestry sector. This will enable the communities to adequately harness benefits, including sustainable management of the forest as well as economic, social and infrastructure development at the local level.

We hope the new law will make it easier for communities to make fair agreements with corporations. They want the power to require companies operating on their lands to employ community members in key decision-making roles, and to ask companies that violate their wishes for them to leave. But faced with the prospect of negotiating commercial contracts on their land, many communities find themselves on the losing end.

Liberia is poised to clarify land rights at the local level, a move that could make history and make the country a leader in land reform in Africa. For this move to be successful, the government’s policies must not forget the vital role played by the local communities. It is the rightful owners who have kept Liberia’s forests standing.

This new vision for Liberia’s forests may be threatened from many sides, but with the power of the people and the power of President Ellen Sirleaf, how can it fail?

(End)

Excerpt:

By Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 2015 (IPS)

U.N. member states are meeting throughout the year to finalize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will set the global development agenda for the next 15 years. The goals are supposed to be universal and aspire to “leave no one behind.”

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

But Indigenous Peoples, who are among the poorest and most marginalised people on earth, are all but invisible in the latest draft of the SDGs. As an indigenous woman and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, I am deeply concerned that almost all references to Indigenous Peoples have been deleted, as we have learned from experience that unless we are explicitly included, we are likely to be excluded.

Indigenous Peoples face systemic discrimination and exclusion in almost every country they live in. Without specific targets and indicators to measure and report on the realisation of their rights, this inequality is likely to continue in the 15-year implementation of the SDGs.

The Millennium Development Goals, which were also supposed to be universal, failed to address Indigenous Peoples’ poverty: Indigenous Peoples still make up just five percent of the global population but account for 15 percent of the world’s poorest people. If the SDGs aim to do any better, and achieve their aspiration to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere,” they must also address the unique development needs and challenges of Indigenous Peoples.Indigenous Peoples have been all but erased from the development agenda. Include us, so that we can protect our traditions and territories for our children and protect the planet’s biodiversity for all the world’s children.

Chief among these is that many Indigenous Peoples do not have legal title to the lands they have lived on for generations. This insecurity has resulted in encroachment by governments and corporations as well as forced evictions of countless communities from their ancestral lands.

Because Indigenous Peoples’ lives, livelihoods, cultures, and identities are intrinsically tied to their territory, this loss often deprives them of their income and self-sufficiency, and threatens their very identity and survival.

Securing legal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights has other benefits too: it decreases poverty, supports food security, and encourages long-term economic and environmental benefits.  But despite progress in some regions, there has been a sharp slowdown in the overall global recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ and communities’ land rights since 2008.

The current SDG draft recognises the land rights of individuals (men and women) but does not take into account the estimated 1.5 billion Indigenous Peoples and forest-dwelling and forest-dependent local people who govern 6.8 billion hectares of land through community tenure arrangements.

Currently governments only recognise about 513 million hectares of these lands. The SDGs should therefore include an indicator to measure recognition of collective land rights, and reinstate a deleted provision requiring that governments obtain the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples before handing over their lands.

This is particularly critical given that “development” for many Indigenous Peoples has been more of a threat than a promise. An analysis of around 73,000 mining, agricultural, and lodging concessions in eight countries revealed that more than 93 percent of these developments involved lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Development projects in countries that lack strong safeguards often rob them of their lands and livelihoods—but rarely do they deliver on the promise of shared economic development.

In Indonesia, for example, palm oil corporations have engulfed over 59 percent of community forests in West Kalimantan, yet the industry contributes less than two percent to Indonesia’s GDP and has not increased rural employment. Inequality has risen, and Indigenous Peoples’ land rights have been transferred to corporations on a large scale.

The consequences of insecure land tenure extend beyond indigenous communities: Indonesia is now the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with almost 80 percent of emissions stemming from deforestation, land use change, and the draining and burning of peatland.

On the other hand, deforestation rates are dramatically lower in areas where Indigenous Peoples have legal recognition of their land rights. Despite suffering some of its worst impacts, Indigenous Peoples can actually offer some of the most promising solutions to climate change.

Community forest rights in Nepal, for example, improved the health of the forest to the point where it absorbed 180 million tons of carbon. It is no coincidence that traditional indigenous territories overlap to a large degree with biodiversity hotspots.

Indigenous Peoples’ natural resource management has sustained some of the world’s most intact ecosystems and holds important lessons for a planet that must change if it is to endure. They bring alternative thinking and perspectives to a development paradigm that has repeatedly put sustainability and human rights on the back burner and favored short-term profits.

Because many Indigenous Peoples live in rural areas and are politically and physically distant from the centers of power, it is all too easy for us to become invisible.

We fought for the global recognition of our rights in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We had to fight to be called “Indigenous Peoples,” a term that recognises us as peoples with distinct identities and cultures who have the right to self-determination.

As they stand now, the SDGs are a step backwards from these achievements. Indigenous Peoples have been all but erased from the development agenda. Include us, so that we can protect our traditions and territories for our children and protect the planet’s biodiversity for all the world’s children. Don’t leave us behind.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, addresses the Human Rights Council panel discussion on human rights and climate change on March 6, 2015. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Valentina Ieri
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

Frustrated with decades of marginalisation, and of seeing their rights respected only on paper, Indigenous peoples are calling for major recognition from the international community.

Speaking at U.N. Headquarters on Apr. 27 as part of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues – which started last week and lasts through Friday – the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz expressed disappointment with the scant efforts to enshrine Indigenous People’s rights in the post-2015 development agenda.

“It is very regrettable that out of the 17 (Sustainable Development) Goals, there is no reference to Indigenous People. This does not speak well for the U.N. and its member states,” she said.

Taking Indigenous knowledge and traditional technology into account internationally could contribute to solving many of the world’s major crises in relation to the environment and climate change, and ultimately bring sustainable development, stressed Tauli-Corpuz.

“Data released by the Rights and Resources Initiative, part of the World Resources Institute, show that in Brazil forests maintained by indigenous people are 11 times less deforested than those maintained by the government. In Guatemalan Petén, indigenous forests are 20 times less deforested,” added Tauli-Corpuz.

Indeed, climate change, soil erosion, deforestation and land extraction are negatively affecting many Indigenous communities around the world.

According to the World Bank, there are around 300 million Indigenous people worldwide – about 4.5 percent of the world population, although they account for 10 percent of the world’s poor.

The right to land is a key issue for Indigenous People.

Recently Aboriginal communities in Australia have been forced to move outside their territories because the government decided to use the land for resource extraction activities, such as mining or oil drilling.

The Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition that works for the human and land rights of Indigenous People worldwide, says that, “When communities have rights to their land and natural resources, and rights to benefit from these resources through local enterprises and other activities, they can generate substantial income.”

This is also a relevant point raised at the U.N. briefing by Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Assembly of the First Nations in Canada.

“We need to develop a long-term partnership between the government and Indigenous people, who are vital and strategic in developing and bringing wealth to the land, by protecting it at the same time for future generations,” he said.

A positive example comes from southern Belize, where Indigenous People have reached an agreement with the government after three decades of struggling to secure their land rights.

Christina Coc, director and co-founder of the Julian Cho Society, represented the Maya villagers of Toledo in their negotiations with the government of Belize.

She explained that, “The Maya people have suffered from soil exploitation, land and water seizure from the government in the past years, and so they were determined in getting their rights recognised not only on papers, but in concrete terms.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Participants in the march for recognition of Israel’s Bedouin villages, which began in the unrecognised village of Wadi Al Nam in the Negev desert in southern Israel and ended with delivery of ‘The Alternative Master Plan for Unrecognised Bedouin Villages’ to the Head of State’s office in Jerusalem, March 2015. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

By Silvia Boarini
JERUSALEM, Apr 4 2015 (IPS)

There was a symbolic dimension to a recent four-day march from the periphery of Israel to the corridors of power in Jerusalem to seek recognition for Bedouin villages.

The march, which began in the unrecognised Bedouin village of Wadi Al Nam in the Negev desert in southern Israel, ended on Mar. 29 with delivery of ‘The Alternative Master Plan for Unrecognised Bedouin Villages’ to the Head of State’s office in Jerusalem.

On this occasion, Negev Bedouin community leaders and hundreds of representatives of civil society organisations (CSOs) were joined by Arab and Israeli members of the Knesset from a political society actor, the Joint List, a political alliance of four Arab-dominated parties in Israel – Hadash, the United Arab List, Balad and Ta’al.

The Joint List, headed by Knesset member Ayman Odeh, was born out of Arab civil society’s need for unity and is now very much a player able and willing to gain power and mediate between its constituency and the state.“We are trying to present a different narrative [of Bedouin villages] to the people based on history, on facts, on legal rights and international human rights” – Professor Oren Yiftachel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

A recent European Commission report mapping CSOs in Israel describes their space for dealing with human and civil rights as shrinking and their contribution to governance often misunderstood or perceived as a threat by state authorities.

In this context, although it may not change the state’s perception of CSOs, a strong partnership with a recognised political society actor such as the Joint List might at least mean that the mobilisation achieved by these organizations at the grassroots level can translate into change at legislative level.

“Because the Joint List is stronger now and we have a common goal, we think we can put more efficient pressure on the parliament and on the government to find a just solution for the people in the unrecognised villages,” Fadi Masamra of the Regional Council of Unrecognised Villages (RCUV) told IPS.

RCUV is an elected civil society body that seeks to advance the rights of Bedouins in unrecognised villages,.

The common goal is gaining recognition for some 46 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev which do not exist on any map and do not receive any basic services such as running water or electricity.

In 2011, the Israeli government approved a unilateral plan, known as the Prawer Plan, to “regularise Bedouin settlement” within five years by demolishing these unrecognised villages and forcibly relocating Bedouins to new localities. The plan sparked mass outcry and was eventually shelved in 2013.

Activists take pride in recalling that the Prawer Plan was stopped by people in the streets who demonstrated against it and not by representatives in the Knesset. They say that it this disconnect that both CSOs and the Joint List hope to be able to bridge by working together.

“I am very proud that the Joint List called for this march,” Hanan al Sanah of womens’ empowerment NGO Sidre told IPS as she walked with the marchers. “It shows that their commitment is real and they haven’t forgotten their electoral promise. They are making the issue of recognition more visible and they can build on the mobilisation that has gone on for years within the community.”

CSOs have worked tirelessly in the Negev not only to mobilise Bedouins against the Prawer Plan but also to produce alternative literature, reports and campaigns that challenge the government’s classification of Bedouin presence in the Negev as “illegal”.

By re-framing the issue of recognition around land rights, human rights and equality, they have been able to reach Jewish and international audiences and further shape the public debate.

CSOs have also been using a powerful state tool, that of mapping, to propose a tangible and viable solution in the form of the ‘The Alternative Master Plan for Unrecognised Bedouin Villages’.

The plan was drawn up by a team led by Professor Oren Yiftachel, who teaches political geography, urban planning and public policy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in collaboration with the RCUV and Bimkom, an NGO promoting equality in planning practices.

“We are trying to present a different narrative to the people based on history, on facts, on legal rights and international human rights,” Yiftachel told IPS. “We worked for three years on the Alternative Plan and we have created a different scenario for the future.”

The Alternative Plan draws a different map of the Negev in which unrecognised villages are “legalised” and can access the same development opportunities as their Jewish neighbours.

“This is a very scientific and detailed solution that fits within state planning and comes from the community, it is not imposed on them. It can make the process easier,” explained RCUV’s Masamra.

Although Yiftachel admits that since it was first presented in 2012 the Alternative Plan has largely been ignored by Knesset commissions, he believes attitudes have shifted and CSOs must continue to push for change.

“After all, a solution is overdue since the future of the unrecognised villages, and of the 100,000 Bedouins living in them, remains uncertain,” he said, adding that “it is important to remember that the state is not a homogeneous body. There are people willing to consider recognition.”

For the CSOs and activists working day in day out in the field, mobilisation remains key. “I would say that the real challenge remains mobilising both the Jewish and the Bedouin community,” Michal Rotem of the Negev Coexistence Forum, a Jewish Arab NGO working in unrecognised villages, told IPS.

“Politicians come and go but it is the NGOs’ role to bring more communities and groups into the struggle and to maintain engagement.”

For Aziz Abu Madegham Al Turi, from the unrecognised village of Al Araqib, working closely with CSOs is important to bring new people to the Negev and come together in actions that reverberate beyond the Negev. “The worse it get gets the more united we become,” he told IPS.

“The state tries to break us up but we connect through different organisations and committees and we find new strength. We come together to support each other.”

Amir Abu Kweider, a prominent activist in the campaign against the Prawer Plan, sees the arrival of the Joint List as an occasion to form new alliances. “We need to intensify efforts to safeguard our rights against racist legislation and reach out to new Israeli audiences,” he told IPS.

In this sense, the march can certainly be judged a success. Tamam Nasra, for example, travelled from the north of Israel to join the march. “Arabs in the South are no different from me, their problems are my problems. Their oppression is my oppression. This is why I heeded (Knesset member) Ayman Odeh’s call,” she told IPS.

Omri Evron, a Joint List voter from Tel Aviv, also joined out of a sense of collective responsibility. “It is not possible that in 2015 in Israel there are people who are effectively not recognised by the state,” he told IPS. “This has to change.”

The positive atmosphere was not dampened even by the knowledge that a new Benjamin Netanyahu government will be sworn in shortly.

“It doesn’t matter if the right wing gets stronger,” stressed Masamra. “If you think that it is not worth struggling then nothing will be changed. We have a responsibility towards our people and this is about human rights, not about who is more powerful.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Jacqui Ashby and Jennifer Twyman
PARIS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

We are lucky to live in a country that has long since abandoned the image of the damsel in distress. Even Disney princesses now save themselves and send unsuitable “saviours” packing. But despite the great strides being made in gender equality, we are still failing rural women, particularly women farmers.

We are failing them by using incomplete and inadequate data to describe their situation, and neglecting to empower them to improve it. As a consequence, we are all losing out on the wealth of knowledge this demographic can bring to boosting food supplies in a changing climate, which is a major concern for everyone on this planet.The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

Whilst it is true that women farmers have less access to training, land, and inputs than their male counterparts, we need to debunk a few myths that have long been cited as fact, that are a bad basis for policy decision-making.

New research, drawing on work done by IFPRI and others, presented in Paris this week by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security will start this process – here are four fast facts that can serve food for thought.

1. Rural women have more access to land than we think

For decades the same data has done the rounds, claiming that women own as little as 2 per cent of land. While this may be the case in some regions, these statistics are outdated and are answering the wrong questions. For example, much of this data is derived from comparing land owned by male-headed households with that owned by female-headed households. Yet, even if the man holds the license for the land, the woman may well have access to and use part of this land.

Therefore a better question to ask, and a new set of data now being collected is, how much control does the woman have over how land is used and the resultant income? How much of the land does she have access to? What farming decisions is she making? There is plenty of evidence to support the fact that women play a significant role in agricultural production. This role needs to be recognised so that women receive better access to agricultural resources, inputs and services

2. Rural women are not more vulnerable to climate change because they are women

We need to look beyond gender to determine the root causes of why individuals and communities are more vulnerable to climate change. We have found many other contributing factors, such as gender norms, social class, education, and wealth can leave people at risk.

Are more women falling into this trap because they don’t have control over important resources and can’t make advantageous choices when they farm? If so, how can we change that? We must tackle these bigger problems that hinder both men and women in different ways, and not simply blame unequal vulnerability to climate risks and shocks on gender.

3. Rural women do not automatically make better stewards of natural resources

Yes, rural women are largely responsible for collecting water and firewood, as well as a great deal of farm work. But the idea that this immediately makes them better stewards of natural resources is false. In fact, the evidence is conflicting. One study showed that out of 13 empirical studies, women were less likely to adopt climate-smart technologies in eight of them.

Yet in East Africa, research has shown women were more likely than, or just as likely as men to adopt climate-smart practices. Why is this? Because women do not have a single, unified interest. Decisions to adopt practices that will preserve natural resources depend a lot on social class, and the incentives given, whether they are made by women or men. So we need more precise targeting based on gender and social class.

4. Gender sensitive programming and policymaking is not just about helping women succeed

We all have a lot to gain from making food security, climate change innovation and gender-sensitive policies. The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

A key to successful innovation is understanding the user’s perspective. In Malawi, for example, rural women have been involved in designing a range of labour saving agri-processing tools. As they will be the primary users of such technologies, having their input is vital to ensure a viable end product.

In Nicaragua, women have been found to have completely different concerns from men when it comes to adapting to climate change, as they manage household food production, rather than growing cash crops like male farmers. Hearing these concerns and responding to them will result in more secure livelihoods, food availability and nutrition.

We hope that researchers will be encouraged to undertake the challenge of collecting better data about rural women and learning about their perspectives. By getting a clearer picture of their situation, we can equip them with what they need to farm successfully under climate change, not just for themselves, and their families, but to benefit us all.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

The countdown has begun to September’s Summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with world leaders discussing the 17 goals and 169 targets proposed by the United Nations Open Working Group.

The post-2015 development agenda will focus primarily on strengthening opportunities to reduce poverty and marginalisation in ways that are sustainable from an economic, social and environmental standpoint.

Courtesy of Paloma Duran/UNDP

How shall the world set the measure for all subsequent work?

The SDG Fund, created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with an initial contribution from the government of Spain, has been designed to smoothen the transition from the Millennium Development Goals phase into the future Sustainable Development Goals.

The rationale of the joint programme initiative is to enhance the development impact of technical assistance by combining inputs from various U.N. entities, each contributing according to its specific expertise and bringing their respective national partners on board.

To illustrate, we are currently implementing joint programmes in 18 countries addressing challenges of inclusive economic growth for poverty eradication, food security and nutrition as well as water and sanitation.

The majority of our budget is invested in sustainable development on the ground and is directly improving the lives of more than one million people in various regions of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Arab States and Africa.The main objective of the SDG fund is to bring together U.N. agencies, national governments, academia, civil society and businesses to find ways in which we can reduce poverty, improve nutrition and provide access to affordable water and sanitation.

National and international partners provide approximately 56 percent of these resources in the form of matching funds.

Each programme was originally chosen through a selection process including the review by thematic and development independent experts.

In addition, we ensure that local counterparts engage in the decision-making processes from programme design to implementation and evaluation. More than 1,500 people were directly involved in designing the various programmes.

The main objective of the SDG fund is to bring together U.N. agencies, national governments, academia, civil society and businesses to find ways in which we can reduce poverty, improve nutrition and provide access to affordable water and sanitation.

Drawing from extensive experience of development practice as well as the former Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund, we are continually seeking better ways in which to deal with challenges that present themselves.

Gender equality, women’s empowerment, public-private partnerships and sustainability are cross-cutting priorities in all areas of our work.

It is noteworthy to point out that we are focusing our efforts on forging partnerships with the private sector as we recognise the importance of actively engaging with businesses and ensuring their full participation in the development process.

It is in this vein that a Private Sector Advisory Group will be established this spring, consisting of representatives from various industries worldwide with the aim to collaborate and discuss practical solutions pertaining to the common challenges of contemporary sustainable development.

Together we will work diligently to identify areas of common interest and promote sustainability of global public goods.

As an example of how we work on the ground, we are setting into motion programme activities that relate to alleviating child hunger and under-nutrition as well as projects that promote sustainable and resilient livelihoods for vulnerable households, especially in the context of adapting to climate change.

To illustrate, in Peru we are contributing towards establishing an inclusive value chain in the production of quinoa and other Andean grains, so that the increase of demand in the international market can convert into economic and social improvements on the ground.

In addition, we are supporting programme activities that promote the integration of women in the labour market as it is key to equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. We are conscious of the fact that gender equality and the full realisation of human rights for women and girls have a transformative effect on development and is a driver of economic growth.

To illustrate, the SDG Fund is currently financing five joint programmes in Africa that address some of the most pressing issues in the region, and seek to achieve sustainable development through inclusive economic growth.

In Ethiopia, rural women lag behind in access to land property, economic opportunities, justice system and financial assets. Female farmers perform up to 75 per cent of farm labour and yet hold only 18.7 per cent of agricultural land in the country.

We are taking a multifaceted approach to generate gender-sensitive agricultural extension services, support the creation of cooperatives, promote the expansion of women-owned agribusiness and increase rural women’s participation in rural producer associations, financial cooperatives and unions.

To conclude, we are looking forward to making a significant impact in the coming years with the hope to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Mary Wanjiru is a farmer from Nyeri County in central Kenya. Granting land rights to women can raise farm production by 20-30 per cent in developing countries. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Monique Barbut
BONN, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

Women are not only the world’s primary food producers. They are hardworking and innovative and, they invest far more of their earnings in their families than men. But most lack the single most important asset for accessing investment resources – land rights.

Women’s resourcefulness is astonishing, but they are no fools. They invest their income where they are most likely to see returns, but not in the land they have no rights to. Land tenure is the powerful political tool that governments use to give or deny these rights. We are paying a high price for the failure to grant land rights to the women who play a vital role in agriculture.

Courtesy of UNCCD

Women produce up to 80 per cent of the total food and make up 43 per cent of the labour force in developing countries. Yet 95 per cent of agricultural education programmes exclude them. In Yazd, the ‘desert capital’ of Iran, for example, women have invented a method to produce food in underground tunnels.

In Asia and Africa, a woman’s weekly work is up to 13 hours longer than a man’s. Furthermore, women spend nearly all their earnings on their families, whereas men divert a quarter of their income to other expenses. But most have no rights to the land they till.

Land rights level the playing field by giving both men and women the same access to vital agricultural resources. The knock-on effect is striking. Granting land rights to women can raise farm production by 20-30 per cent in developing countries, and increase a country’s total agricultural production by up to 4 per cent.

This is critical at a time when we are losing 12 million hectares of fertile land each year, but need to raise our food production by up to 70 per cent by 2050 due to population growth and consumption trends – not to mention climate change.

But what is land tenure exactly? Land tenure works like a big bundle of sticks, with each stick representing a particular right. There are five important sticks in the bundle; the sticks to access, to use, to manage land independently, to exclude and to alienate other users. The more sticks a land user has in the bundle, the more motivated they are to nourish and support the land.Women are grimly aware that without land rights, they could lose their land to powerful individuals at any moment. Where, then, is the incentive to invest in the land; especially if you’re hungry now?

The failure to grant these rights, not just to poor, rural land users, but to women as well, means fertile land is exploited to barrenness. With rising competition over what little is available, conflicts are inevitable.

In rural Latin America, only 25 per cent of the land holdings are owned by women. This drops to 15 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and to less than 5 per cent in western Asia and northern Africa. These are shocking figures, and yet they may be even more optimistic than the reality.

A recent study in Uganda, for instance, shows that even when men and women nominally jointly own land, the woman’s name may not appear in any of the documentation. If a husband dies, divorces or decides to sell the land, his wife has no recourse to asserting her land rights.

Women are grimly aware that without land rights, they could lose their land to powerful individuals at any moment. Where, then, is the incentive to invest in the land; especially if you’re hungry now? Instead, those without rights take what they can from the land before they move to greener pastures. This adds to the unfortunate, yet preventable, spiral of land degradation.

At least 500 million hectares of previously fertile agricultural land is abandoned. And with less than 30 per cent of the land in developing world under secure tenure, there is little hope that these trends will change. The lack of secure land tenure remains a vital challenge for curbing land degradation in developing countries.

Among the rural poor, men are often the main beneficiaries. But granting land rights to both men and women will narrow inequalities and benefit us all.

In Nepal, women with strong property rights tend to be food secure, and their children are less likely to be underweight. In Tanzania, women with property rights are earning up to three times more income. In India, women who own land are eight times less likely to experience domestic violence. The social gains from secure land tenure are vast.

For years, women have dealt with land degradation and fed the world without the support they need. Imagine how granting them land rights could power our future. Let’s mark this year’s International Women’s Day by shouting the loudest for the land rights of rural women.

Edited By Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Bamboo nursery in Africa. There is debate over whether commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent. Credit: EcoPlanet Bamboo

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 28 2015 (IPS)

Deforestation is haunting the African continent as industrial growth paves over public commons and puts more hectares into private hands.

According to the Environmental News Network, a web-based resource, Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland every year, or approximately 41 000 square kilometres.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is also on record as saying the African continent loses over four million hectares (9.9 million acres) of natural forest annually, which is twice the world’s average deforestation rate. And deforestation, according to UNEP, accounts for at least one-fifth of all carbon emissions globally.

The dangerous pace of deforestation has triggered a market-based solution using bamboo, a fast-growing woody grass that grows chiefly in the tropics.“If grown in the right way, and under the right sustainable management system, in certain areas, bamboo can play a role in reversing ecosystem degradation” – Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean human rights activist

EcoPlanet Bamboo, a multinational company, has been expanding its operations in Africa while it promotes the industrialisation of bamboo as an environmentally attractive alternative fibre for timber manufacturing industries that currently rely on the harvesting of natural forests for their raw resource. The company’s operations extend to South Africa, Ghana and Nicaragua.

For EcoPlanet and some African environmentalists, commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent.

“If grown in the right way on land that has little value for other uses, and if managed under the right sustainable management system, bamboo can play a role in restoring highly degraded ecosystems and connecting remnant forest patches, while reducing pressure on remaining natural forests,” Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo, told IPS.

Happison Chikova, a Zimbabwean independent environmentalist who holds a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Geography and Environmental Studies from the Midlands State University here, agreed.

“Bamboo plants help fight climate change because of their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and act as carbon sinks while the plants can also be used as a source for wood energy, thereby reducing the cutting down of indigenous trees, and also the fact that bamboo can be used to build shelter, reduces deforestation in the communal areas where there is high demand of indigenous trees for building purposes,” Chikova told IPS.

But land rights activists are sceptical about their claims.

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean human rights activist, told IPS.

Mutsvanga’s fears of small sustainable farms losing out to foreign-owned export-driven plantations were echoed by Nnimmo Bassey, a renowned African environmentalist and head of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, an ecological think-tank and advocacy organisation.

“No one can seriously present a bamboo plantation as a cure for deforestation,” Bassey, who is based in Nigeria, told IPS, “and unfortunately the United Nations system sees plantations as forests and this fundamentally faulty premise gives plantation owners the latitude to see their forest-gobbling actions as something positive.”

“If we agree that forests are places with rich biodiversity, it is clear that a plantation cannot be the same as a forest,” added Bassey.

Currently, bamboo is widely grown in Africa by small farmers for multiple uses. The Mount Selinda Women’s Bamboo Association, an environmental lobby group in Chipinge, Zimbabwe’s eastern border town, for example, received funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) through the Livelihood and Economic Development Programme in order to create sustainable rural livelihoods and enterprises by using bamboo resources.

Citing its many benefits, IFAD calls bamboo the “poor man’s timber.”

Further, notes IFAD, bamboo contributes to rural poverty reduction, empowers women and can be processed into boats, kitchen utensils, incense sticks, charcoal and footwear. It also provides food and nutrition security as food and animal feed.

Currently, EcoPlanet Bamboo’s footprint in Africa includes 5,000 acres in Ghana in a public-private partnership to develop commercial bamboo plantations. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, certification is under way to convert out of production pineapple plantations to bamboo plantations for the production of activated carbon and bio-charcoal to be sold to local and export markets.

Environmentalist Bassey worries whether all these acres were unutilised, as the company claims. “Commercial bamboo, which will replace natural wood forests and may require hundreds of hectares of land space, may not be so good for peasant farmers in Africa,” Bassey said.

EcoPlanet Bamboo, however, insists it does not convert or plant on any land that could compete with food security.

“(We) convert degraded land into certified bamboo plantations into diverse, thriving ecosystems, that can provide fibre on an annual basis, and yet maintain their ecological integrity,” said Wiseman.

Wiseman’s claim, however, did not move long-time activist Bassey and one-time winner of the Right Livelihood Prize, an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize, who questioned foreign ownership of Africa’s resources as not always to Africa’s benefit.

“Plantations are not owned by the weak in society,” said Bassey. “They are owned by corporations or rich individuals with strong economic and sometimes political connections. This could mean displacement of vulnerable farmers, loss of territories and means of livelihoods.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/ Phil Harris   

The land by Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County, Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

By Carin Smaller
GENEVA, Dec 5 2014 (IPS)

When the Korean company Daewoo attempted to acquire half the arable land of Madagascar for free, it unleashed a tsunami of investor interest in agricultural land, popularised as the ‘land grab’.

In the last 10 years there have been more than 1,000 large-scale foreign investments in agricultural land, covering almost 38 million hectares of landequivalent to eight times the size of Britain. Investor interest in farmland was triggered, in 2008, by a confluence of the biofuels boom, global food crisis, a sharp spike in oil prices and the financial crisis.There are over 800 million people in the world who do not have enough food to eat. Seventy five per cent of those people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Many of these farmland investments have created untold problems, particularly related to land rights, social unrest, and in some cases political instability. Many projects have failed or investors have simply given up, either for lack of finance, inexperience, difficult environmental conditions, or unrealistic assumptions about the crops and locations they chose.

And yet many developing countries desperately need investment in agriculture. There are over 800 million people in the world who do not have enough food to eat. Seventy five per cent of those people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Without increased investment in agriculture they will not be able to improve food security nor reduce poverty.

Improving the legal and policy environment in developing countries would do much to improve the situation. The most important step to ensuring positive impacts of foreign investment is the ongoing development of domestic laws and regulations. However, many states do not have all the necessary domestic laws in place and end up negotiating contracts.

Given this reality, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has recently created a practical guide to help governments in developing countries negotiate contracts with investors to reduce the harmful effects and maximise the benefits of farmland investments.

It is the first attempt to create a model contract for developing countries to attract investment for agricultural production, while at the same time promoting the needs of the poor and protecting the environment. It is based on a three-year investigation of 80 farmland contracts and is unique in that it was drafted by a team of lawyers, social scientists and environmentalists.

This model contract does not create a blueprint. Each contract will necessarily be different, depending on the size of the project, the domestic legal systems, and the country’s needs and realities. Deciding what to include in each contract is the job of the parties both before and during the negotiations.

Nonetheless, we believe there are three factors that are critical for success.

First is the process of preparing for negotiations. This involves identifying suitable and available land (both from an environmental and a land rights perspective). It requires meaningful consultations with and consent by communities living on and around the proposed project site. It is important for investors to assess the feasibility of the project to ensure it is commercially viable.

This assessment should be presented to the governments with a business plan. In this preparatory phase, investors also need to examine the potential social and environmental impacts and prepare a plan for how to manage and mitigate those impacts.

Second is turning investor promises into binding commitments. A major complaint from governments and communities is that investors make big promises to create jobs, to build factories, and to bring new technology; and that these promises rarely materialise.

Promises can be incorporated into the contract to make them legally binding. But they must remain realistic and achievable to avoid setting up the project for failure from the outset.

The third step is turning the contract into reality after it has been signed. A contract is not an endpoint: it is only the start of a long-term relationship between the investor, government and communities.

Implementing and enforcing the contract is a much tougher challenge. It requires regular reporting by the investors on how they are implementing their promises and managing the social and environmental impacts. It requires monitoring and evaluation by governments.

And finally, all steps taken around a potential investment should be open and transparent to minimise the risk of corruption and ensure greater acceptance.

Improving the legal and policy frameworks for investment will help governments maximise the benefits and minimise the risks associated with investment in farmland and water. They will support efforts to strengthen food security and achieve sustainable rural development.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The Forest Declaration Assessment Partners calls for reform of the international financial system to halt deforestation and protect biodiversity. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO/BALI, Oct 30 2014 (IPS)

Disregarding the rights of indigenous people to their traditional lands is costing companies millions of dollars each year, and costing communities themselves their lives.

A new paper by the Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) released on Oct. 30 found that a significant portion of forests and reserves in emerging markets is being allocated to commercial operations through concessions, ignoring indigenous communities who have lived on them for generations.

“The granting of concessions without the knowledge or approval of people directly affected by them is obviously a human rights issue of grave concern. But it may also have a real financial impact, and this impact concerns more than just those companies with ground-level operations,” the paper said.

“Most of the time [indigenous communities] are working without any kind of protection and taking on groups with lots of money and state support." -- Aleta Baun, 2013 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize
It noted that indigenous communities inhabit over 99 percent of lands used by commercial entities through concessions. In some instances, large portions of national land are being divested through concessions.

The figure was 40 percent of all land extent in Peru and 30 percent in Indonesia. With Indonesia’s total land extent covering some 1.8 million square km, the portion of land under concession works out to around 500,000 sq km.

“In most cases governments feel that it is easier and simpler to work when they don’t get the indigenous communities involved,” Bryson Ogden, private sector analyst at RRI, told IPS.

But while companies and governments enter into agreements on lands as if they were not inhabited, when work begins on commercial projects it invariably collides head-on with communities who call the same land their traditional home.

The financial damage resulting from such confrontations can run into millions. A recent paper by the U.S. National Academy of Science noted that one company reported a loss of 100 million dollars during a single year, due to stoppages forced by company-community conflict. The company was not named in the report.

“An economy wide valuation of ‘environmental, social and governance risks’ across the Australian Stock Market in 2012 by Credit Suisse identified 21.4 billion Australian dollars in negative share-price valuation impact,” the paper, entitled ‘Conflict Translates Environmental and Social Risk into Business Costs’, claimed.

RRI’s Ogden said that despite such losses, the global trend still was to sideline indigenous communities when entering into concession agreements. “They remain invisible in most of these contracts.”

Such invisibility on paper can be deadly on the ground. In South Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, serious violence erupted between police and activists during a protest that took place a fortnight ago, Mina Setra, deputy secretary general of Indonesia’s Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), told IPS.

Such violent altercations are not rare. Earlier this year research by Global Witness, an organisation working on environmental rights, found that between 2002 and 2013 at least 903 citizens engaged in environmental protection work were killed.

During the period under review, according to the report, 41 people were killed in the Philippines because of opposition to mining interests. And in 2012 alone, 68 percent of all land-related murders in Brazil were connected to disputes over deforestation in the Amazon.

The report said that activists facing prosecution lacked local as well as international networks that were tailor-made to assist them.

“The problem we are facing is that there is still no recognition for indigenous peoples’ rights,” AMAN’s Setra said.

For almost four years AMAN and other environmental organisations lobbied the Indonesian parliament to adapt a law that would recognise the rights of indigenous communities. It was to be passed this month, when the government changed, bringing fresh officials into power.

“Now we are back to zero,” Setra said.

RRI’s Ogden said there were signs that some global companies were taking note of the rights of indigenous communities to their land, but AMAN’s Setra said that till there was legal recognition of such rights, commercial agreements were unlikely to include them.

“The companies keep asking us under what terms such communities can be recognized and we have no effective answer until there is a law,” Setra said.

For activists, working in that gray area could turn deadly.

Take the case of Aleta Baun, the Indonesian activist from West Timor, the Indonesia portion of the island of Timor, who in 2000 launched a campaign to stop mining operations that were affecting the lives of her Molo tribe members. She has been waylaid, stabbed and threatened with death and rape.

“Most of the time you are working without any kind of protection and taking on groups with lots of money and state support,” said the 2013 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

In the Paracatu municipality of Brazil, the country’s largest gold mining operation run by a company called Kinross with a total investment of over 570 million dollars has been repeatedly interrupted since 2008 due to conflicts with traditional communities.

The parties signed a new agreement in 2010 that allowed operations to resume in 2011.

In Peru, two dam projects on the Ene-Tambo River have been abandoned after prolonged protests and legal action by the indigenous Ashaninka community, who claim that the projects could displace between 8,000 and 10,000 people.

In 2008 the Tata group pulled out a 350-million-dollar investment from the Indian state of West Bengal, where it intended to produce its signature Nano car, after protests by local communities.

The RRI report said that community rights to forests and other natural reserves were increasingly becoming a factor for commercial operations.

“As we have examined this problem, we have come to think of local populations as a kind of ‘unrecognized counterparty’ to concession agreements. We found that communities often used legal mechanisms to resolve their grievances with concessionaires. This suggests that local communities’ rights over an area have appreciable legal weight, even if government bodies and concessionaires haven’t attributed them much import in the terms of their agreements.”

Ogden said that more data was needed to clearly establish community rights over natural reserves.

Until then, indigenous peoples are left facing gigantic commercial entities in a David-and-Goliath scenario that shows no sign of improving in their favour.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Paraguayan Indians fight to enforce collective ownership of their land at the Inter-American Court. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

Starting next year, a new grant-making initiative will aim to fill what organisers say has been a longstanding gap in international coordination and funding around the recognition of community land rights.

The project could provide major financial and technical support to indigenous groups and forest communities struggling to solidify their claims to traditional lands. Proponents say substantive action around land tenure would reduce growing levels of conflict around extractives projects and land development, and provide a potent new tool in the fight against global climate change.“Yes, the forests and other non-industrialised land hold value. But we must also value the rights of those who inhabit these areas and are stewards of the natural resources they contain." -- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

The new body, the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, is being spearheaded by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington-based coalition, though the fund will be an independent institution. The Swedish government is expected to formally announce the project’s initial funding, some 15 million dollars, at next week’s U.N. climate summit in New York.

“The lack of clear rights to own and use land affects the livelihoods of millions of forest-dwellers and has also encouraged widespread illegal logging and forest loss,” Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, the director general of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, said Wednesday.

“Establishing clear and secure community land rights will enable sustainable economic development, lessen the impacts of climate change and is a prerequisite for much needed sustainable investments.”

As Gornitzka indicates, recent research has found that lands under strong community oversight experience far lower rates of deforestation than those controlled by either government or private sector entities. In turn, intact forests can have a huge dampening effect on spiking emissions of carbon dioxide.

This is a potential that supporters think they can now use to foster broader action on longstanding concerns around land tenure.

Governments claim three-quarters

National governments and international agencies and mechanisms have paid some important attention to tenure-related concerns. But not only have these slowed in recent years, development groups say such efforts have not been adequately comprehensive.

“There is today an unprecedented convergence of demand and support for this issue, from governments, private investors and local people. But there remains no dedicated instrument for supporting community land rights,” Andy White, RRI’s coordinator, told IPS.

“The World Bank, the United Nations and others dabble in this issue, yet there has been no central focus to mobilise, coordinate or facilitate the sharing of lessons. And, importantly, there’s been no entity to dedicate project financing in a strategic manner.”

According to a study released Wednesday by RRI and Tebtebba, an indigenous rights group based in the Philippines, initiatives around land tenure by donors and multilaterals have generally been too narrowly tailored. While the World Bank has been a primary multilateral actor on the issue, for instance, over the past decade the bank’s land tenure programmes have devoted just six percent of funding to establishing community forest rights.

“Much of the historical and existing donor support for securing tenure has focused on individual rights, urban areas, and agricultural lands, and is inadequate to meet the current demand from multiple stakeholders for secure community tenure,” the report states.

“[T]he amount of capital invested in implementing community tenure reform initiatives must be increased, and more targeted and strategic instruments established.”

As of last year, indigenous and local communities had some kind of control over around 513 million hectares of forests. Yet governments continue to administer or claim ownership over nearly three-quarters of the world’s forests, particularly in poor and middle-income countries.

From 2002 to 2013, 24 new legal provisions were put in place to strengthen some form of community control over forests, according to RRI. Yet just six of these have been passed since 2008, and those put in place recently have been relatively weaker.

Advocates say recent global trends, coupled with a lack of major action from international players, have simply been too much for many developing countries to resist moving aggressively to exploit available natural resources.

“Yes, the forests and other non-industrialised land hold value,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on indigenous peoples and a member of the advisory group for the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, said in a statement.

“But we must also value the rights of those who inhabit these areas and are stewards of the natural resources they contain. Failure to do so has resulted in much of the local conflict plaguing economic development today.”

Unmapped and contested

Experts say the majority of the world’s rural lands remain both unmapped and contested. Thus, the formalisation of land tenure requires not only political will but also significant funding.

While new technologies have made the painstaking process of mapping community lands cheaper and more accessible, clarifying indigenous rights in India and Indonesia could cost upwards of 500 million dollars each, according to new data.

Until it is fully up and running by the end of 2015, the new International Land and Forest Tenure Facility will operate on the Swedish grant, with funding from other governments in the works. That will allow the group to start up a half-dozen pilot projects, likely in Indonesia, Cameroon, Peru and Colombia, to begin early next year.

Each of these countries is facing major threats to its forests. Peru, for instance, has leased out nearly two-thirds of its Amazonian forests for oil and gas exploration – concessions that overlap with at least 70 percent of the country’s indigenous communities.

“If we don’t address this issue we’ll continue to bump into conflicts every time we want to extract resources or develop land,” RRI’s White says.

“This has been a problem simmering on the back burner for decades, but now it’s reached the point that the penetration of global capital into remote rural areas to secure the commodities we all need has reached a point where conflict is breaking out all over.”

The private sector will also play an important role in the International land and Forest Tenure Facility, with key multinational companies sitting on its advisory board. But at the outset, corporate money will not be funding the operation.

Rather, White says, companies will help in the shaping of new business models.

“The private sector is driving much of this damage today, but these companies are also facing tremendous reputational and financial risks if they invest in places with poor land rights,” he says.

“That growing recognition by private investors is one of the most important shifts taking place today. Companies cannot meet their own growth projections as well as their social and environmental pledges if they don’t proactively engage around clarifying local land rights.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Bonda women in the remote Tulagurum Village in the eastern Indian state of Odisha seldom allow themselves to be photographed. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
MALKANGIRI, India, Aug 19 2014 (IPS)

Scattered across 31 remote hilltop villages on a mountain range that towers 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, in the Malkangiri district of India’s eastern Odisha state, the Upper Bonda people are considered one of this country’s most ancient tribes, having barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years.

Resistant to contact with the outside world and fiercely skeptical of modern development, this community of under 7,000 people is struggling to maintain its way of life and provide for a younger generation that is growing increasingly frustrated with poverty – 90 percent of Bonda people live on less than a dollar a day – and inter-communal violence.

“The abundant funds pouring in for the Bonda people's development need to be transparently utilised so that the various inputs work in synergy and show results." -- Dambaru Sisa, the first ever Upper Bonda to be elected into the state legislature in 2014
Recent government schemes to improve the Bonda people’s access to land titles is bringing change to the community, and opening doors to high-school education, which was hitherto difficult or impossible for many to access.

But with these changes come questions about the future of the tribe, whose overall population growth rate between 2001 and 2010 was just 7.65 percent according to two surveys conducted by the Odisha government’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute (SCSTRTI).

First land rights, then education

In a windowless mud hut in the Bonda Ghati, a steep-sloping mountainous region in southwest Odisha, Saniya Kirsani talks loudly and drunkenly about his plans for the acre of land that he recently acquired the title to.

The 50-year-old Bonda man has illusions of setting up a mango orchard in his native Tulagurum village, which will enable him to produce the fruity liquor that keeps him in a state of intoxication.

His wife, Hadi Kirsani, harbours far more realistic plans. For her, the land deeds mean first and foremost that their 14-year-old son, Buda Kirsani, can finally go back to school.

He dropped out after completing fifth grade in early 2013, bereft of hopes for further education because the nearest public high school in Mudulipada was unaffordable to his family.

Admission to the local tribal resident school, also located in Mudulipada, required a land ownership document that would certify the family’s tribal status, which they did not possess.

The Kirsani family had been left out of a wave of reforms in 2010 under the Forest Rights Act, which granted 1,248 Upper Bonda families land titles but left 532 households landless.

Last October, with the help of Landesa, a global non-profit organisation working on land rights for the poor, Buda’s family finally extracted the deed to their land from the Odisha government.

Carefully placing Buda’s only two sets of worn clothes into a bag, Hadi struggles to hold back the tears welling up in her eyes as she tells IPS that her son is now one of 31 children from the 44-household village who, for the first time ever, has the ability to study beyond primarily school.

She is not alone in her desire to educate her child. Literacy among Upper Bonda men is a miserable 12 percent, while female literacy is only six percent, according to a 2010 SCSTRTI baseline survey, compared to India’s national male literacy rate of 74 percent and female literacy of 65 percent.

For centuries, the ability to read and write was not a skill the Bonda people sought. Their ancient Remo language has no accompanying script and is passed down orally.

As hunters and foragers, the community has subsisted for many generations entirely off the surrounding forests, bartering goods like millet, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, yams, fruits, berries and wild spinach in local markets.

Up until very recently, most Upper Bondas wove and bartered their own cloth made from a plant called ‘kereng’, in addition to producing their own brooms from wild grass. Thus they had little need to enter mainstream society.

But a wave of deforestation has degraded their land and the streams on which they depend for irrigation. Erratic rainfall over the last decade has affected crop yields, and the forest department’s refusal to allow them to practice their traditional ‘slash and burn’ cultivation has made it difficult for the community to feed itself as it has done for hundreds of years.

Mainstreaming: helping or hurting the community?

Since 1976, with the establishment of the Bonda Development Agency, efforts have been made to bring the Upper Bonda people into the mainstream, providing education, better sanitation and drinking water facilities, and land rights.

“Land ownership enables them to stand on their own feet for the purpose of livelihood, and empowers them, as their economy is predominantly limited to the land and forests,” states India’s National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), a key policy advisory body.

Efforts to mainstream the Bonda people suffered a setback in the late 1990s, when left-wing extremists deepened the community’s exclusion and poverty by turning the Bonda mountain range into an important operating base along India’s so-called ‘Red Corridor’, which stretches across nine states in the country’s central and eastern regions and is allegedly rife with Maoist rebels.

Still, Odisha’s tribal development minister Lal Bihari Himirika is confident that new schemes to uplift the community will bear fruit.

“Upon completion, the ‘5000-hostel scheme’ will provide half a million tribal boys and girls education and mainstreaming,” he told IPS on the sidelines of the launch of Plan International’s ‘Because I Am A Girl’ campaign in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, last year.

The state’s 9.6 million tribal people constitute almost a fourth of its total population. Of these tribal groups, the Upper Bonda people are a key concern for the government and have been named a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PTG) as a result of their low literacy rates, declining population and practice of pre-agricultural farming.

Social activists like 34-year-old Dambaru Sisa, the first ever Upper Bonda to be elected into the state legislature in 2014, believe mainstreaming the Bonda community is crucial for the entire group’s survival.

Orphaned as a child and educated at a Christian missionary school in Malkangiri, Sisa now holds a double Masters’ degree in mathematics and law, and is concerned about his people’s future.

“Our cultural identity, especially our unique Remo dialect, must be preserved,” he told IPS. “At the same time, with increased awareness, [the] customs and superstitions harming our people will slowly be eradicated.”

He cited the Upper Bonda people’s customary marriages – with women generally marrying boys who are roughly ten years younger – as one of the practices harming his community.

In customary marriages, Bonda women marry boys who are seven to 10 years their junior. Typically, a 22-year-old woman will be wed to a 15-year-old boy. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Women traditionally manage the household, while men and boys are responsible for hunting and gathering food. To do so, they are trained in archery but possession of weapons often leads to brawls within the community itself as a result of Bonda men’s quick tempers, their penchant for alcohol and fierce protection of their wives.

A decade ago, an average of four men were killed by their own sons or nephews, usually in fights over their wives, according to Manoranjan Mahakul, a government official with the Odisha Tribal Empowerment & Livelihood Programme (OTELP), who has worked here for over 20 years.

Even now, several Bonda men are in prison for murder, Mahakul told IPS, though lenient laws allow for their early release after three years.

“High infant mortality, alcoholism and unsanitary living conditions, in close proximity to pigs and poultry, combined with a lack of nutritional food, superstitions about diseases and lack of medical facilities are taking their toll,” Sukra Kirsani, Landesa’s community resource person in Tulagurum village, told IPS.

The tribe’s drinking water is sourced from streams originating in the hills. All families practice open defecation, usually close to the streams, which results in diarrhoea epidemics during the monsoon seasons.

Despite a glaring need for change, experts say it will not come easy.

“Getting Bonda children to high school is half the battle won,” Sisa stated. “However, there are question marks on the quality of education in residential schools. While the list of enrolled students is long, in actuality many are not in the hostels. Some run away to work in roadside eateries or are back home,” he added.

The problem, Sisa says, is that instead of being taught in their mother tongue, students are forced to study in the Odia language or a more mainstream local tribal dialect, which none of them understand.

The government has responded to this by showing a willingness to lower the required qualifications for teachers in order to attract Bondas teachers to the classrooms.

Still, more will have to be done to ensure the even development of this dwindling tribe.

“The abundant funds pouring in for Bondas’ development need to be transparently utilised so that the various inputs work in synergy and show results,” Sisa concluded.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Anuradha Mittal
OAKLAND, United States, Aug 4 2014 (IPS)

The first years of the twenty-first century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale.

An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, was reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights.

When the price of food spiked in 2008, pushing the number of hungry people in the world to over one billion, it spiked the interest of investors as well, and within a year foreign land deals in the developing world rose by a staggering 200 percent.

Anuradha Mittal

Today, enthusiasm for agriculture borders on speculative mania. Driven by everything from rising food prices to growing demand for biofuel, the financial sector is taking an interest in farmland as never before.

The Oakland Institute has reported since 2011 how a new generation of institutional investors – including hedge funds, private equity, pension funds, and university endowments – is eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.

But the thing most consistently missed about this global land rush is that it is precisely that – global. Although media coverage tends to focus on land grabs in low-income countries, the opposite side of the same coin is a new rush for U.S. farmland, manifesting itself in rising interest from investors and surging land prices, as giants like the pension fund TIAA-CREF commit billions to buy agricultural land.

One industry leader estimates that 10 billion dollars in institutional capital is looking for access to U.S. farmland, but that figure could easily rise as investors seek to ride out uncertain financial times by placing their money in the perceived safety of agriculture.

In the next 20 years, as the U.S. experiences an unprecedented crisis of retiring farmers, there will be ample opportunity for these actors to expand their holdings as an estimated 400 million acres changes generational hands. And yet, the domestic face of this still unfolding land rush remains largely unseen.

For all their size and ambition, virtually nothing is known about these new investors and their business practices. Who do they buy land from? What do they grow? How do they manage their properties? In an industry not known for its transparency, none of these questions have a satisfactory answer.

For more than six years the Oakland Institute has been at the forefront of exposing the murky nature of land deals in the developing world. The challenge today is to begin a more holistic discussion that places transfer of land in both the developed and developing worlds along the same continuous spectrum.

Driven by the same structural factors and perpetrated by many of the same investors, the corporate consolidation of agriculture is being felt just as strongly in Iowa and California as it is in the Philippines and Mozambique.

Down on the Farm, a new report from the Oakland Institute, aims to increase awareness of the overlapping global and national factors enabling the new American land rush, while at the same time introduces the motives and practices of some of the most powerful players involved in it: UBS Agrivest, a subsidiary of the biggest bank in Switzerland; the Hancock Agricultural Investment Group (HAIG), a subsidiary of the biggest insurance company in Canada; and the Teacher Annuity Insurance Association College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), one of the largest pension funds in the world.

Only by studying the motives and practices of these actors today does it become possible to begin building policies and institutions that help ensure farmers, and not absentee investors, are the future of our food system.

Nothing is more crucial than beginning this discussion today. The issue may seem small for a variety of reasons – because institutional investors only own an apparently tiny one percent of all U.S. farmland, or because farmers are still the biggest buyers of farmland across the country.

But to take either of these views is to become dangerously blind to the long-term trends threatening our agricultural heritage.

Consider the fact that investors believe that there is roughly 1.8 trillion dollars’ worth of farmland across the United States. Of this, between 300 and 500 billion dollars is considered to be of “institutional quality,” a combination of factors relating to size, water access, soil quality, and location that determine the investment appeal of a property.

This makes domestic farmland a huge and largely untapped asset class. Some of the biggest actors in the financial sector have already sought to exploit this opportunity by making equity investments in farmland. Frequently, these buyers enter the market with so much capital that their funds are practically limitless compared with the resources of most farmers.

Although they have made an impressive foothold, this is the beginning, not the end, of a land rush that could literally change who owns the country and our food and agricultural systems. Not only is there space in the market for institutional investors to expand, but there are also major financial incentives for them to do so.

If action is not taken, then a perfect storm of global and national trends could converge to permanently shift farm ownership from family businesses to institutional investors and other consolidated corporate operations. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

Salvadorans Elsy Álvarez and María Menjivar – with her young daughter – planning plantain seedlings in a clearing in the forest. Credit: Claudia Ávalos/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2014 (IPS)

The international community is failing to take advantage of a potent opportunity to counter climate change by strengthening local land tenure rights and laws worldwide, new data suggests.

In what researchers say is the most detailed study on the issue to date, new analysis suggests that in areas formally overseen by local communities, deforestation rates are dozens to hundreds of times lower than in areas overseen by governments or private entities. Anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to deforestation each year."This model of government-owned and -managed forests usually doesn’t work. Instead, it often creates an open-access free-for-all.” -- Caleb Stevens

The findings were released Thursday by the World Resources Institute, a think tank here, and the Rights and Resources Initiative, a global network that focuses on forest tenure.

“This approach to mitigating climate change has long been undervalued,” a report detailing the analysis states. “[G]overnments, donors, and other climate change stakeholders tend to ignore or marginalize the enormous contribution to mitigating climate change that expanding and strengthening communities’ forest rights can make.”

Researchers were able to comb through high-definition satellite imagery and correlate findings on deforestation rates with data on differing tenure approaches in 14 developing countries considered heavily forested. Those areas with significant forest rights vested in local communities were found to be far more successful at slowing forest clearing, including the incursion of settlers and mining companies.

In Guatemala and Brazil, strong local tenure resulted in deforestation rates 11 to 20 times lower than outside of formally recognised community forests. In parts of the Mexican Yucatan the findings were even starker – 350 times lower.

Meanwhile, the climate implications of these forests are significant. Standing, mature forests not only hold massive amounts of carbon, but they also continually suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“We know that at least 500 million hectares of forest in developing countries are already in the hands of local communities, translating to a bit less than 40 billion tonnes of carbon,” Andy White, the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI)’s coordinator, told IPS.

“That’s a huge amount – 30 times the amount of total emissions from all passenger vehicles around the world. But much of the rights to protect those forests are weak, so there’s a real risk that we could lose those forests and that carbon.”

White notes that there’s been a “massive slowdown” in the recognition of indigenous and other community rights over the past half-decade, despite earlier global headway on the issue. But he now sees significant potential to link land rights with momentum on climate change in the minds of policymakers and the donor community.

“In developing country forests, you have this history of governments promoting deforestation for agriculture but also opening up forests through roads and the promotion of colonisation and mining,” White says.

“At the same time, these same governments are now trying to talk about climate change, saying they’re concerned about reducing emission. To date, these two hands haven’t been talking to each other.”

Lima link

The new findings come just ahead of two major global climate summits. In September, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will host international leaders in New York to discuss the issue, and in December the next round of global climate negotiations will take place in Peru, ahead of intended agreement next year.

The Lima talks are being referred to as the “forest” round. Some observers have suggested that forestry could offer the most significant potential for global emissions cuts, but few have directly connected this potential with local tenure.

“The international community hasn’t taken this link nearly as far as it can go, and it’s important that policymakers are made aware of this connection,” Caleb Stevens, a proper rights specialist at the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the new report’s principle author, told IPS.

“Developed country governments can commit to development assistance agencies to strengthen forest tenure as part of bilateral agreements. They can also commit to strengthen these rights through finance mechanisms like the new Green Climate Fund.”

Currently the most well-known, if contentious, international mechanism aimed at reducing deforestation is the U.N.’s REDD+ initiative, which since 2008 has dispersed nearly 200 million dollars to safeguard forest in developing countries. Yet critics say the programme has never fully embraced the potential of community forest management.

“REDD+ was established because it is well known that deforestation is a significant part of the climate change problem,” Tony LaVina, the lead forest and climate negotiator for the Philippines, said in a statement.

“What is not as widely understood is how effective forest communities are at protecting their forest from deforestation and increasing forest health. This is why REDD+ must be accompanied by community safeguards.”

Two-thirds remaining

Meanwhile, WRI’s Stevens says that current national-level prioritisation of local tenure is a “mixed bag”, varying significantly from country to country.

He points to progressive progress being made in Liberia and Kenya, where laws have started to be reformed to recognise community rights, as well as in Bolivia and Nepal, where some 40 percent of forests are legally under community control. Following a 2013 court ruling, Indonesia could now be on a similar path.

“Many governments are still quite reluctant to stop their attempts access minerals and other resources,” Stevens says. “But some governments realise the limitations of their capacity – that this model of government-owned and -managed forests usually doesn’t work. Instead, it often creates an open-access free-for-all.”

Not only are local communities often more effective at managing such resources than governments or private entities, but they can also become significant economic beneficiaries of those forests, eventually even contributing to national coffers through tax revenues.

Certainly there is scope for such an expansion. RRI estimates that the 500 million hectares currently under community control constitute just a third of what communities around the world are actively – and, the group says, legitimately – claiming.

“The world should rapidly scale up recognition of local forest rights even if they only care about the climate – even if they don’t care about the people, about water, women, biodiversity,” RRI’s White says.

“Actually, of course, people do care about all of these other issues. That’s why a strategy of strengthening local forest rights is so important and a no-brainer – it will deliver for the climate as well as reduce poverty.”

Hundreds of thousands of harvesters flock to high-altitude pastures in Nepal to gather a fungus known as ‘Himalayan Viagra’. Credit: Uttam Babu Shrestha

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Jun 27 2014 (IPS)

Intense competition during harvest season for a fungus dubbed ‘Himalayan Viagra’ – coveted for its legendary aphrodisiac qualities – has sparked violence in Nepal’s remote western mountains, causing concern among security officials here about the safety of more than 100,000 harvesters.

“The violence has already begun even at the initial stage of the harvest, and we can expect more,” Nepal Police Divisional Inspector General Kesh Bahadur Shahi, head of the Midwestern Development Region headquarters in Surkhet District, 600 km west of the capital Kathmandu, told IPS.

Earlier this month a harvester named Phurwa Tshering (30) was killed in a violent tussle in the Dolpa District, northeast of Surkhet, where tens of thousands of harvesters gather each year.

A second harvester, Thundup Lama, died some days later in a Kathmandu hospital from injuries sustained in the scuffle, amid allegations of police misconduct.

Known among the scientific community as ophiocordyceps sinensis – though harvesters refer to it simply as ‘caterpillar fungus’, and Tibetan traders use the name ‘yartsa gunbu’ (meaning, literally, ‘winter worm, summer grass’) – the fungus germinates underground inside living larvae, mummifies them during the winter, and then emerges through the head of the dead caterpillar, pushing up through the soil in the form of a stalk-like mushroom.

For over 2,000 years people across the Asiatic region have sought this fungus for its healing properties, including its fabled ability to treat diseases of the kidney and lungs, as well as cure erectile dysfunction.

A harvester holds up a single piece of ‘Yartsa Gunbu’, otherwise known as ‘winter worm, summer grass.’ Credit: Uttam Babu Shrestha

Since 2001, when the Nepali government legalised harvesting of the fungus, the mountains have become the site of a veritable battle royal.

Lured by the promise of high profits harvesters flock to the Himalayas every June to participate in the two-month hunt for the prized fungus, setting up camp on the northern alpine grasslands of Nepal, Bhutan, India and the Tibetan Plateau, at altitudes of between 3,000 and 5,000 metres above sea-level.

Though each stalk measures no more than four centimeters in length, a single gram of yartsa gunbu can sell for up to 80 dollars (mostly in China), making the dangerous, high-altitude hunt more than worth it for thousands of impoverished farmers.

But because the substance is so rare and so valuable, the collection period often turns deadly. So far, no one has been held accountable for the deaths, and Nepal’s police force has denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Unsatisfied with officials’ assurances, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recently deployed an investigation team to the Dolpa district, which borders Tibet.

“Our team has headed for field investigations to the site where the incident occurred and we will also speak to the Nepal police to uncover the truth,” Bed Prasad Adhikari, secretary of the NHRC, told IPS.

“We need to wait until the investigation is concluded, and only then will NHRC reveal the truth to the public,” he added.

In 2011 a local court sentenced six men to life in prison for the murder of seven of their harvest rivals.

While Nepali security officials scramble to patrol some of the world’s roughest terrain, ecology experts warn of over-harvesting and the need for sustainable practices that could support local economies and end the cycle of violence.

Stepping up security

“There is an urgent need for sustainable harvesting practices and an equitable benefit-sharing mechanism with the local people." -- Yam Bahadur Thapa, director general of the Department of Plant Resources (DoPR) at Nepal’s ministry of forests and soil conservation
The police are expecting more violence as the season enters its third week, and have already dispatched 160 personnel attached to the Armed Police Force (APF) – a paramilitary set up during Nepal’s decade-long civil war – to patrol harvesting sites, including the northern Mugu and Dolpa districts.

“We have asked for more personnel from the Nepal police to support our security operation,” Shahi said.

Speaking to IPS in Kathmandu, Police Spokesperson and Senior Superintendent of Police Ganesh KC told IPS this is the first time armed personnel have been deployed to oversee the harvest, and they are facing challenges due to the huge radius of the harvesting zone, and the extremely difficult terrain.

The Dolpa District alone – home to 24 pastures rich in the caterpillar fungus – spans nearly 8,000 square km.

To make matters worse, commercial traders and so-called ‘cartels’ have now joined the fray.

“There is a mafia of traders from Kathmandu and other adjoining Nepali districts near the Chinese border who are involved in the scheme, and they come with huge stacks of cash and will not return empty-handed,” Shahi said. “Some traders even bring helicopters to buy as much as they can.”

From policing to long-term policies

Various studies suggest that China’s booming economy, which has fueled demand for the ‘winter worm, summer grass’, has created a global market for the fungus that touches 11 billion dollars a year.

Nepal currently meets two percent of the global demand for the precious fungus, making it the world’s second largest supplier.

But as demand outpaces supply, and a valuable natural resource is plundered away annually, tensions over access rights have been mounting.

“There is loss of social integrity among local people; there are cases of robbery and deaths as a result [of this harvest],” Yam Bahadur Thapa, director general of the Department of Plant Resources (DoPR) at Nepal’s ministry of forests and soil conservation, told IPS.

“There is an urgent need for sustainable harvesting practices and an equitable benefit-sharing mechanism with the local people,” he noted, adding that the presence of outsiders often exacerbates tensions.

Thapa said the number of harvesters has doubled since 2001, while the number of units collected per person has declined drastically, from 260 pieces of fungus per person in 2006 to less than 125 now.

In addition, he asserted, “The price difference between the local and international market is huge, leading to an inequitable share of income among the primary collectors.”

For instance, a kilogram of fungus sold for 25,000 dollars by a middleman in Nepal could sell for up to 70,000 dollars once it is shipped abroad, he said.

A DoPR draft policy for caterpillar fungus harvest management submitted in April to the prime minister’s cabinet is still awaiting approval. The policy proposes regulating trade to increase government revenue, investing in scientific research, strengthening local institutions and raising awareness among the locals.

“There is no single inch of habitat left untouched…at the end of the harvesting season,” Uttam Babu Shrestha, a research fellow at the Institute of Agriculture and the Environment at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, told IPS.

His research during the 2011 harvest season in Nepal showed that, “Virtually all harvesters (95.1 percent) believe the availability of the caterpillar fungus in the pastures to be declining, and 67 percent consider current harvesting practices to be unsustainable.”

Shrestha found per capita harvesting to be higher in Nepal than in other countries, which adds to the tension. “Nepal’s harvesters and traders are doing business in a fearful environment,” he said, echoing the concerns of law enforcement officials.

Better central regulation would not only enhance sustainability and security, but would also increase government revenue, experts say.

The official royalty rate of around 10,000 Nepali rupees (about 100 dollars) per kilogram was set when Nepal legalised the harvest in 2001.

Since then, “The market price… has increased up to 2,300 percent and yet the royalty rate is the same,” Shrestha said, describing the stagnant rate as a “missed opportunity.”

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) estimates that the government of Nepal currently earns about 5.1 million rupees from the trade.

Experts say that by paying local harvesters a higher price, the government could witness a substantial increase in revenue flows.

Until the government agrees upon a comprehensive plan, the high-altitude pastures will continue to see fear, violence and destruction in pursuit of the mysterious fungus.

(END)

An indigenous community in the United States has filed a petition against the federal government, alleging that officials have repeatedly broken treaties and that the court system has failed to offer remedy.

The petition was filed by the Onondaga Nation, a Native American tribe and one of more than 650 sovereign peoples recognised by the U.S. government. Onondaga representatives are calling on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the human rights arm of the pan-regional Organisation of American States (OAS), to intervene.“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS, but I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.” -- Onondaga leader Sid Hill

In 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a case against New York State, stating the state government had repeatedly violated treaties signed with the Onondaga, resulting in lost land and severe environmental pollution. Yet advocates for the trips say antiquated legal precedents with racist roots have allowed the courts to consistently dismiss the Onondaga’s case.

They are now looking to the IACHR for justice.

“New York State broke the law and now the U.S. government has failed to protect our lands, which they promised to us in treaties,” Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or spiritual leader, of the Onondaga people, told IPS.

Hill and others from the Onondaga Nation gathered outside the White House, located near the IACHR’s Washington headquarters, on Tuesday. Hill brought an heirloom belt commissioned for the Onondaga Nation by George Washington, the first U.S. president, to ratify the Treaty of Canandaigua, affirming land rights for the Onondaga and other tribes.

In their petition to the IACHR, the Onondaga quote sections from the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790. Signed by George Washington, this law assured the Onondaga that their lands would be safe, and if threatened, that the federal courts would protect their rights.

Yet since then, tribal advocates say, their 2.5 million acres of land has shrunk to just 6,900 acres. And rather than helping the Onondaga, the courts have ignored their case.

“We filed the original case in 2005,” Joe Heath, the attorney for the Onondaga Nation, told IPS.

“We did not sue, did not demand any return for original land. It was more aimed at protecting sacred sites and environmental issues … Our case was dismissed in 2010, so we appealed to the Second Circuit.”

The Second Circuit, and finally the Supreme Court, dismissed the case.

Landmark law

Since 2005, the U.S. courts have designed a new set of rules, called “equitable defence”. This now arms New York with a two-part defence in the Onondaga case. First, officials are able to argue that too much time has passed since the 1794 treaty was signed to when the case was filed, in 2005.

Second, equitable defence also states that the court is able to determine on its own whether the Onondaga people have been disturbed on their land.

“The legal ground on which [the Onondaga] claims rest has undergone profound change since the Nation initiated its action,” the District Court concluded. “The law today forecloses this Court from permitting these claims to proceed.”

The Onondaga Nation and other Native American nations are now fighting to change Native American land laws.

Current legal precedents go back to the 1400s, when Pope Alexander VI issued a papal decree that gave European monarchs sovereignty over “lands occupied by non-Christian ‘barbarous nations’”. In a case in 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court applied this principle to uphold the possession of indigenous lands in favour of colonial or post-colonial governments.

The Supreme Court again revived this doctrine as recent as 2005, when another New York tribe, the Oneida Nation, refused to pay taxes to the United States, citing its status as a sovereign nation.

“Under the Doctrine of Discovery … fee title to the land occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the 2005 decision.

This doctrine still underpins Indian land law and the dismissal of the Onondaga Nation’s case.

“This is the Plessy v. Ferguson of Indian law,” Heath told IPS, referring to a notorious landmark judicial decision that, for a time, upheld racial segregation in the United States.

Most polluted lake

Heath and others say the goal in “correcting” the U.S. legal system would be to provide the Onondaga Nation and other tribes more say in environmental decisions. Front and centre in this argument is the travesty they say has been visited on Onondaga Lake.

“Onondaga Lake, a sacred lake, has been turned into the most polluted lake in the country,” Heath says. “Allied Corp. dumped mercury in the lake every day from 1946 to 1970.”

In 1999, Allied Corp., a major chemicals company, purchased Honeywell, a company popularly associated with thermostats, and adopted its name, to try and shed its association with pollution. However, this merger has made it more difficult for the Onondaga Nation to get the company to clean up the lake.

“Before the Europeans got here, we had a very healthy lifestyle,” Heath said.

“All the water was clean and drinkable … With the loss of land, pollution of water, and loss of access to water, health has been impacted negatively.”

Another problem is salt mining.

“Only one body of water flows through the territory, Onondaga Creek, and this creek is now severely polluted as a result of salt mining upstream,” Heath says. “The salt mining was done over a century, and so recklessly that it severely damaged the hydrogeology in the valley.”

Heath says elder members of the Onondaga community can remember clear waters that supported trout fishing.

“Now you can’t see two inches into the water, it looks like yesterday’s coffee,” he says.

The Onondaga Nation is now waiting to see whether IACHR will hear the case.

This normally takes several years, however. And even if the court hears the case, it has no formal enforcement mechanisms, but can only make recommendations to the United States.

“We understand that the U.S. does not adhere to the OAS,” Onondaga leader Hill said. “But I don’t know where we go. We’ve exhausted our avenues.”

The open wounds of the Amazon. Credit:Rolly Valdivia/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

Indigenous leaders are warning of increased violence in the fight to save their dwindling forests and ecosystems from extractive companies.

Indigenous representatives and environmental activists from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas met over the weekend here to commemorate those leading community fights against extractive industries. The conference, called Chico Vive, honoured Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber-tapper killed in 1988 for fighting to save the Amazon.“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry." -- Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in BC, Canada

The gathering also recognised leaders who are continuing that legacy today.

“His struggle, to which he gave his life, did not end with his death – on the contrary,” John Knox, the United Nations independent expert on human rights and the environment, said at the conference. “But it continues to claim the lives of others who fight for human rights and environmental protection.”

A 2012 report by Global Witness, a watchdog and activist group, estimates that over 711 people – activists, journalists and community members – had been killed defending their land-based rights over the previous decade.

Those gathered at this weekend’s conference discussed not only those have been killed, injured or jailed. They also shared some success stories.

“In 2002, there was an Argentinean oil company trying to drill in our area. Some of our people opposed this, and they were thrown in jail,” Franco Viteri, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, told IPS.

“However, we fought their imprisonment and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in our favour. Thus, our town was able to reclaim the land and keep the oil company out.”

Motivated by oil exploration-related devastation in the north, Ecuadorian communities in the south are continuing to fight to defend their territory. Viteri says some communities have now been successful in doing so for a quarter-century.

But he cautions that this fight is not over, particularly as the Ecuadorian government flip-flops on its own policy stance.

“The discourse of [President Rafael] Correa is very environmentalist, but in a practical way it is totally false,” he says. “The government is taking the oil because they receive money from China, which needs oil.”

China has significantly increased its focus on Latin America in recent years. According to a briefing paper by Amazon Watch, a nonprofit that works to protect the rainforest and rights of its indigenous inhabitants, “in 2013 China bought nearly 90% of Ecuador’s oil and provided an estimated 61% of its external financing.”

The little dance

Many others at the conference had likewise already seen negative impacts due to extractives exploration and development in their community.

“We have oil and gas, mines, we have forestry, we have agriculture, and we have hydroelectric dams,” Chief Liz Logan of the Fort Nelson First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, told IPS.

“Right now in our territory we can’t drink the water because it’s so contaminated from the hydrocarbons from the oil and gas industry … The rates of cancer in our community are skyrocketing and we wonder why. But no one wants to look at this, because it might mean that what [extractives companies] are doing is affecting us and the animals.”

Logan described the work of protecting the community as a “little dance”: first they bring the government to court when they do not implement previous agreements, then they have to ensure that the government actually implements what the court orders.

Others discussed possible solutions to stop the destruction of ecosystems, and what is at stake for the communities living in them. The link between local land conflicts and global climate change consistently reappeared throughout many of the discussions.

“My community is made up of small-scale farmers and pastoralists who depend on cattle to live. For them, a cow is everything and to have the land to graze is everything,” said Godfrey Massay, an activist leader from the Land Rights Institute in Tanzania.

“These people are constantly threatened by large-scale investors who try to take away their land. But they are far more threatened by climate change, which is also affecting their livelihood.”

Andrew Miller of Amazon Watch described the case of the contentious Belo Monte dam in Brazil, which is currently under construction. Local communities oppose the dam because those upstream would be flooded and those downstream would suddenly find their river’s waters severely reduced.

“People are fighting battles on local levels, but they are also emblematic of global trends and they are also related to a lot of the climate things going on,” Miller told IPS. “[Hydroelectric] dams, for example, are sold as clean energy, but they generate a lot of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.”

According to Miller, one value of large gatherings such as this weekend’s conference is allowing participants to see the similarities between experiences and struggles around the world, despite often different cultural, political and environmental contexts.

“In each case there are things that are very specific to them,” Miller said. “But I think we are also going to see some trends in terms of governments and other actors cracking down and trying to limit the political space, the ability for these folks to be effective in their work and to have a broader impact on policy.”

Yet activists like Viteri, from Ecuador, remain determined to protect their land.

“We care for the forest as a living thing because it gives us everything – life, shade, food, water, agriculture,” Viteri said. “It also makes us rich, even if it is a different kind of richness. This is why we fight.”

Sugar cane being sold at a market on the edge of Phnom Penh. The global soft drinks market alone is thought to use some 176 million tonnes of sugar each year. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2014 (IPS)

PepsiCo, the world’s second largest food and beverage manufacturer, has agreed to overhaul its longstanding policies around land rights, instituting a series of new safeguards and transparency pledges throughout its global supply chains.

Anti-poverty and development advocates are lauding the announcement, made Tuesday at the company’s New York headquarters."These companies are very competitive, and it turns out that a simple index, aimed at encouraging a ‘race to the top’, is an effective tool." -- Chris Jochnick

Coming on the heels of a similar pledge made late last year by Coca-Cola, the move appears to strengthen a new trend in corporate recognition of land rights, while also offering clear recognition of the growing power of consumer demand.

PepsiCo’s new pledge includes a “zero tolerance” policy for agriculture-related “land-grabbing”, or large-scale land acquisitions, among all of its commodity suppliers, only the second such company to do so.

In addition to its namesake sugared soft drink, PepsiCo owns a vast empire of well-known consumer brands, including Gatorade, Tropicana, Quaker and Frito-Lay.

“Agriculture is an integral part of PepsiCo’s supply chain,” Paul Boykas, vice president for public policy at PepsiCo, said Tuesday.

“Regardless of the source of the commodity – whether from suppliers, directly or indirectly, a farm or processor – this land policy defines our intentions and the actions we as a company will take to recognise land rights throughout our supply chain.”

With annual sales of some 65 billion dollars, PepsiCo is the world’s second-largest producer of soft drinks, producing global brands including Mountain Dew, Miranda and others. The global soft drinks market alone is thought to use some 176 million tonnes of sugar each year, while PepsiCo’s commodity usage spans hundreds of ingredients.

In its new land policy, PepsiCo notes that it sources its raw materials from a “wide range” of land tenure set-ups, both formal and informal. As an initial step, the company says it will “comprehensively map”, and then implement a “presumption of transparency” throughout, its supply chains.

It has also pledged to implement free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) principles when either the company or its suppliers are acquiring land, with the aim of ensuring a substantive conversation and negotiating process with local communities.

Further, when the company or its suppliers are operating in a country that does not have “adequate land rights protections”, PepsiCo says it will lobby the national government of that country to put in place and implement specific FPIC principles.

This land in Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. PepsiCo’s new pledge includes a “zero tolerance” policy for agriculture-related “land-grabbing”, or large-scale land acquisitions, among all of its commodity suppliers. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

This unusual step is part of a broader commitment to be public and vocal about its new land policies, an agreement reportedly won through discussions with the anti-poverty group Oxfam International.

“This commitment to be a public advocate – towards others in the industry, towards governments and suppliers – is new terrain, both for campaigners and certainly for the companies themselves,” Chris Jochnick, the director of the private sector department at Oxfam America, told IPS.

“It’s very helpful to have major companies advocating on these issues at both the global and national level, among their industry peers and vis-à-vis the direct suppliers. For local communities and NGOs, it’s also useful to be able to point to these major companies and say that they’re insisting on FPIC standards.”

Race to the top

Both the recent Coca-Cola and now the PepsiCo pledges came about in part due to negotiations with and public pressure organised over the past year by Oxfam, and Jochnick says the new commitments are significant. He particularly points to the zero tolerance for land grabbing as “very ambitious”.

A year ago, Oxfam began a new initiative aimed at highlighting the land policies adopted by 10 of the world’s largest consumer brands, including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. In November, Oxfam and others filed a shareholder resolution calling on PepsiCo to file an annual report “focused on the issue of land rights along the company’s supply chains”.

“PepsiCo’s sources of sugar include suppliers that have been linked to land grabs, which poses risk to the company and shareholder value,” the resolution stated. “PepsiCo must urgently recognize this problem and take steps to ensure that land rights violations are not part of its supply chain.”

In November, Coca-Cola announced that it would institute a “zero tolerance” policy for land-grabbing. Since then, almost 275,000 people have signed petitions calling on PepsiCo to follow suit.

“We’ve been surprised ourselves with how much pressure consumers have been able to exert, and how sensitive the brands are to that kind of engagement,” Jochnick says.

“These companies are very competitive, and it turns out that a simple index, aimed at encouraging a ‘race to the top’, is an effective tool. These companies would choose to be a leader rather than be perceived as a laggard.”

A year ago, just two of the companies on Oxfam’s list of 10 had even begun talking about land rights. According to an updated scorecard released last month, seven companies are now making specific commitments on the issue (the scores don’t include the new pledges by PepsiCo).

“We feel there’s real momentum around land rights right now,” Jochnick says. “So the next step will be to use that action to push the suppliers – Cargill, Bunge – to focus more broadly on land.”

Weak standards

As part of its new commitments on Tuesday, PepsiCo noted its ongoing participation in at least two multi-stakeholder groupings, aimed at creating voluntary social and environmental standards around the production of palm oil and sugarcane. Global demand for these products is currently surging, constituting the majority of the recent increase in land-grabbing.

Yet activists have increasingly panned these industry-led certification initiatives, including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and Bonsucro, which focuses on the global sugar supply. Nonetheless, for the moment PepsiCo says it will continue its participation in both groupings.

“PepsiCo’s new land policy is a positive step. But instead of taking responsibility for eliminating land grabbing from its palm oil supply chain, PepsiCo is relying solely on the inadequate standards of the RSPO,” Gemma Tillack, a senior forest campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a watchdog group, told IPS.

“The RSPO continues to certify companies that destroy rainforests and cause massive climate pollution and human rights violations. To fully address these serious problems, PepsiCo must join other leading consumer companies and adopt a truly responsible palm oil sourcing policy.”

Last week, RAN and other advocacy groups formally opened to applications a new standards initiative, the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), which aims to “build on” the RSPO process. In a joint statement released last week, POIG’s membership said it will “prove that palm oil production does not need to be linked to forest destruction, social conflict or worsen climate change.”

Indigenous children hold signs supporting a land rights struggle in Cherãn. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2014 (IPS)

Global trends towards a strengthening of legal rights over land for local and indigenous communities appear to have slowed significantly in recent years, leading some analysts to warn that the fight for local control over forests has reached an inflection point with a new danger of backtracking on previous progress.

The past five years have seen less than 20 percent of global forestland put under community control compared to the previous half-dozen years, according to new research released Wednesday by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington-based coalition of 140 international organisations. Further, the group says that far fewer legal safeguards were put in place during this latter period, while those laws that have been passed have been weaker.“If private companies and governments from the developed countries don’t weigh in, all of this progress could be lost – this could be it.” -- Andy White

“If private companies and governments from the developed countries don’t weigh in, all of this progress could be lost – this could be it,” Andy White, RRI’s coordinator, told IPS.

“Even though there’s a lot of talk on this issue right now, no one is really investing – not the donors, not the big companies, not the developed country governments. No one is putting money behind the words to help developing countries to do the mapping, the registries, the consultations that will be required to get this done.”

The slowdown comes despite a significant uptick in the public discussion over land and indigenous rights, with multinational corporations, national courts and Western donors increasingly acknowledging the issue’s importance and pledging to strengthen safeguards for forest tenure. Development workers say this disconnect between words and actions highlights both a lack of prioritisation on land rights and, given the rising rhetoric, an opportunity for future action.

“[T]he overriding picture in 2013 remained one of continuing resource grabs by local elites and corporations, aided by governments eager to give away land to investors on almost any terms,” RRI states in its flagship annual report, released Wednesday at a London conference.

“This has to change, and it can. If domestic political pressure within developing countries aligns with new government commitments and enlightened forward-thinking companies, the prospects for clarifying and respecting land rights can be transformed in 2014.”

For now, however, RRI says recent global progress on land rights has been “dismal”.

60 percent government-owned

As of last year, indigenous and local communities had some kind of control over around 513 million hectares of forests. Yet particularly in lower- and middle-income countries, governments continue to administer or claim ownership over roughly 60 percent of that land.

While this figure has come down by around 10 percent since 2002, these gains are massively skewed towards certain regions and even just a handful of countries. In Latin America, for instance, communities now control around 39 percent of forests, compared to just six percent in sub-Saharan Africa – and less than one percent in the Congo Basin.

RRI says that from 2002 to 2013, 24 new legal provisions were put in place to strengthen some form of community control over forests. Yet just six of these have been passed since 2008, and those that have been put in place recently have been relatively weaker, with none considered strong enough to recognise ownership rights.

Advocates say recent global trends, coupled with a lack of substantive action from international players, have simply been too much for many developing countries to resist moving aggressively to exploit available natural resources.

“It is no coincidence the global slowdown in reform happened at the exact time that the financial value of land, water, and carbon skyrocketed,” Raul Silva Telles do Valle, policy and rights programme coordinator for Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian NGO, said Wednesday.

“As a result, ‘land grabbing’ has spiked and impoverished countries desperate for an economic boost see forests as a commodity, not as their citizens’ home. These governments need to see the forest as more than just land for exploitation and a collection of trees.”

In recent years, multinational companies (such as Nestle and Unilever) and multilateral institutions have made a series of important new commitments to honour and strengthen community and indigenous land rights. But these pledges don’t appear to have made much of a difference – at least not yet.

Indeed, the new data suggests that one of the most significant multilateral anti-deforestation programmes, the World Bank-run REDD+, has yet to impact significantly on this pattern, despite stated aims.

While these commitments have been in line with a rising international understanding on the importance of land tenure to a broad spectrum of development concerns, in 2007 food and land prices suddenly jumped. Analysts say this appears to have cut off a process towards land reforms that had been well underway.

“Latin America in 2002 was continuing to go through a series of democratic reforms that included the recognition of indigenous rights as human rights, but the tragedy is that this democratic bolt has not happened in Africa or Southeast Asia,” RRI’s White says.

“In a truly unfortunate coincidence, right when these regions were beginning to make pledges about reforms, that’s when land prices went through the roof. A number of governments that had been putting in place plans to advance reforms suddenly reconsidered, including Laos, Liberia, Cameroon.”

Tension vs investment

A half-decade later, the new data should worry development and anti-poverty experts. RRI now looks at the current situation surrounding land rights as being at a global tipping point, under strain between the strengthening global understanding of the importance of community tenure on the one hand and the stalled progress on legally and fully enshrining these rights on the other.

Yet undertaking the work to secure land tenure isn’t overly expensive, particularly compared to the costs of the violence that has been seen growing around land disputes in recent years. Indeed, this climbing tension could offer a potent point of economic motivation for governments in developing countries to re-prioritise reforms in favour of local control of forestlands.

“There’s a clear chance here to increase foreign investment and to strengthen incomes and poverty alleviation,” White says.

“We all know the investors with a conscience do not go into countries where land disputes are a problem, and we know there’s trillions of dollars sloshing around the world looking for a place to go, particularly with global demand for food expected to double by 2050. This conflict is starting us in the face and it’s not going to diminish, but you can attract good capital and good business models if you advance these reforms.”

A protest by the residents of Rio dos Macacos against the occupation of their land and violations of their rights by the Aratu naval base. Credit: Coha.org

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 14 2014 (IPS)

Residents of the small community of Rio dos Macacos, made up of descendants of slaves in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, reported to United Nations bodies that they were attacked by military personnel from the Aratu naval base, which occupies part of their land.

Ednei dos Santos, one of the leaders of the quilombo – the term given to remote communities in Brazil originally founded by runaway or freed slaves – and his sister Rosimeire say they were beaten by members of the navy on Jan. 6, in front of her daughters, before they were detained.

Human rights organisations secured their release four hours later.

Ednei dos Santos, 28, told IPS that the incident was just the latest of the frequent threats and intimidation against the 70 families living in the quilombo.

On Friday, Jan. 10, human rights groups presented the case to the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and three U.N. special rapporteurs. They are also preparing to file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The families of Rio dos Macacos have been struggling for five decades to gain legal title to their land, which is located on the São Tomé de Paripe peninsula on the fringes of the municipalities of Simões Filho and Salvador, the capital of Bahia.

There is evidence that the quilombo has existed for 150 years, and indications that slaves took refuge on the land there as early as 238 years ago.

In Brazil, slavery was not abolished until 1888, decades after the country’s independence from Portugal, in 1822.

The 300-hectare area has been at the centre of a legal dispute since the 1960s, when the navy built a base there as well as a village for the families of navy personnel, during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

Two years ago, the courts ruled in favour of the community’s claim to the land, but the state appealed the sentence.

In the meantime, the quilombolas – as the residents of quilombos are known – have to walk or drive through the navy village to reach their community.

“The violence is constant; they stop us from coming and going – even ambulances are frequently kept from reaching the community to provide medical assistance,” Ednei dos Santos said.

He and his 35-year-old sister said they were hit, punched and threatened with firearms by navy personnel. She said she was also the victim of sexual assault.

The incident began when they were accosted by military personnel from the navy village as they drove back from a nearby town, where they had registered Rosimeire’s two daughters, aged six and 17, for the coming school year.

“A sergeant, who had already threatened us before, and five other armed men, smashed open the door to my car and started to hit me,” Ednei said. “They also hit my sister, until leaving her partly undressed. The girls were terrified.”

Ednei and Rosimeire dos Santos were detained, and were only allowed to leave when officials from the government’s Special Secretariat for Policies on Promotion of Racial Equality and lawyers from Afro-Brazilian movements showed up.

The Aratu naval base happens to be a favourite vacation spot for Brazilian presidents to spend the year-end holidays. President Dilma Rousseff was there until Jan. 5, the day before the incident reported by the dos Santos.

“We don’t trust the government anymore,” Rosimeire dos Santos, who was hospitalised after the attack, told IPS. “People don’t understand that in today’s Brazil, torture is still occurring, just like in times of slavery. We are still fighting for our freedom.

“I don’t go out with my daughters anymore because I’m afraid that they’ll kill me in front of them. They told us that when they were out of uniform, they were going to burst open our heads with bullets.

“Two men got on top of me, one of them put my head between his legs, with my pants down and my breasts uncovered. It was total humiliation; holding a gun to my head they spit on my face,” said an anguished Rosimeire.

She warned that people could get killed in Rio dos Macacos if the routine violence the residents face isn’t brought to a halt.

“Our territory is not for sale, we’re not going to swap it and it’s not up for negotiation. I was born and raised here, and this is where my mother has our family buried,” she said, with emotion.

A report completed in August 2012 by the National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform confirmed that residents of the community were descendants of slaves from plantations that produced sugar for the Aratu mill in colonial times.

But despite the fact that the Brazilian constitution specifies that quilombos are entitled to collective ownership of the land they have historically occupied, the community of Rio dos Macacos has not yet been issued title to their 300 hectares.

In October 2012, a federal court ruled that the navy must pull out of the area. But the ruling has been appealed by the state.

Meanwhile, the public defender’s office demanded on Jan. 8 that the navy urgently clarify the incident involving the dos Santos.

The next day, a group of social movements issued a statement deploring the attacks on the community and defending legal recognition of the quilombo and the local residents’ right to their land

It also demanded that a road be built so residents could go in and out of the quilombo without having to pass through the navy village, to avoid the aggressive military control over access to the community.

On Jan. 10, three of the organisations filed complaints about the incident to three U.N. special rapporteurs – in the Field of Cultural Rights, on the Right to Adequate Housing, and on the situation of Human Rights Defenders – as well as to the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which visited Brazil in December.

“In the community you can’t tell that the military dictatorship is over,” Marisa Viegas, a lawyer with Justiça Global, one of the human rights groups that brought the complaints, told IPS. “The military continue to use repression against the local residents, who are unable to achieve minimal living conditions.”

Her organisation has been assisting the Rio dos Macacos community for the past decade.

According to Viegas, two activists who defend the human rights of the quilombolas were attacked.

She said cultural and housing rights and freedom are under attack in the community, and the quilombolas are not allowed to freely move about, receive visitors or build decent housing.

Pointing out that the constitution guarantees the quilombolas’ right to their land, the activist said that “in practice the contrary is happening, with people being pressured to leave.”

Viegas said the state has failed to live up to international commitments to not violate, and to not tolerate violations of, the rights of residents of communities like the quilombos.

“In this case it is the state itself committing the violations, which is doubly serious,” she said.

A communiqué issued by the navy stated that an investigation of the complaint filed about the incident involving the dos Santos was being carried out with support from the public prosecution service, “to determine what happened, and the circumstances and responsibilities.”

The institution also stated that the inquiry would be conducted “with transparency and in an impartial manner.” It added that the military personnel accused of attacking the dos Santos had been temporarily suspended.

It remains unclear how much Kenya is worth in mineral deposits. However, 68 percent of Kenyan’s 41.6 million people are squatters and many live on mineral-rich land. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

Zeinab Mohamed is a 70-year-old squatter in Kwale County, in Kenya’s Coast Province. Like many other Coast Province residents, for decades, Mohamed has lived in what squatters call “floating houses”.

“We own the houses, but not the land. We have no land title deeds.”

Her husband died a squatter, at 86 years of age.

“For 40 years, we [tried to get] a title deed for this land. I am old, I could die any day, and I worried that I would leave my children and grandchildren with no land,” Mohamed tells IPS.

According to local NGO Kenya Lands Alliance, 68 percent of Kenyan’s 41.6 million people are squatters, with the Coast Province having the largest number of undocumented land owners. However, there are no comprehensive statistics about the number of people who do not own land.

But in a few days, Mohamed’s tenancy in the “floating house” will come to an end. She is among thousands of Coast Province residents who will be issued with a land title deed by President Uhuru Kenyatta, giving them ownership of their land.

Kenyatta started issuing title deeds on Aug. 30, in an ongoing exercise that will in this first phase benefit 60,000 households from Coast Province. Over the next five years, the Ministry of Lands intends to issue three million land title deeds across this East African nation, changing lives significantly. These title deeds can be used to secure loans and improve livelihoods.

In Kwale County, where Mohamed lives, 14,381 title deeds will be issued to residents. But land ownership is a complex matter here as the area is rich in minerals. An existing titanium mining project is set to begin in the county this month. And in July, minerals explorer Cortec Corporation announced that they had found deposits of niobium, a ductile grey metal, estimated to be worth 62.4 billion dollars.

The discovery of niobium in the Mrima Hills of Kwale County has made the area among the world’s top five rare earth deposits sites, entering a market that has been dominated by China.

If minerals are discovered on the land of those yet to be issued with title deeds, they will not benefit from the discovery.

“Most residents have been missing out on compensation whenever minerals are discovered since they have no tangible documents to prove that they are the actual land owners,” Njuguna Mutonya, a land expert in the coastal region, tells IPS.

“Since all private land that has minerals belongs to the government, [the] land has to be repossessed by the government. These new title deed holders stand to be compensated before they are moved elsewhere,” he says.

Mutonya says, those without title deeds to prove ownership will be compensated for what is on the land and not the land itself “so if you had built a house and planted some trees, that is what you will be compensated for.”

Experts on land mining, like engineer Kimani Ngunjiri, claim that this explains why though rich in minerals, “Kwale County is among the 10-poorest counties in Kenya. Mining companies are making billions while the immediate communities continue to be poor.”

Ngunjiri tells IPS that issues of land ownership have serious implications on “who has access to the benefits that accrue from the land if it indeed harbors minerals.”

But land experts like Mutonya say that the government’s drive to issue title deeds will improve the prospects of locals and they could benefit from the revenue generated from mining projects in their areas.

But the exercise has sparked a bitter war of words between Kenyatta and his main political opponent Raila Odinga.

The president’s family owns large tracts of land across the country, particularly in the Coast Province, Rift Valley and Central Kenya. This became a major political issue in the run up to the general election.

Odinga has dismissed the exercise as politically motivated in order to win the loyalty of Coast Province residents who overwhelmingly shunned Kenyatta’s Jubilee Coalition in the run up to the Mar. 4 general election.

But for squatters who have faced a series of evictions in various parts of the Coast Province, this is a new dawn.

“Land ownership has been a persistent problem. The entire coastal region is owned by a few rich tycoons. If President Kenyatta is playing politics while improving our lives, let him,” Amina Juma, a squatter in Kilifi, Coast Province, tells IPS.

Mutonya says that people do not believe that Kenyatta could solve the land issue, particularly at the coast.

“The new turn of events has changed the political and socio-economic landscape of the coastal people. Land will gradually cease to become a campaign tool during general elections,” he says.

Ikal Ang’elei, from the Friends of Lake Turkana, a community environmental association, concurs.

“Mining rights, regulations and laws must protect those who have lived on that land, if there are no laws and land ownership documents in favour of the community and individuals who live on mineral rich regions, they stand to lose.”

“In addition to resolving the issue of privately owned land, the government needs to pass the Community Land Act to state clearly how this acquisition of mineral rich land is to take place while at the same time protecting the community,” she tells IPS.

Ang’elei says that the government must also ensure that land and mining laws are consistent to ensure that private land owners are fully protected whenever there is a mineral find.

The native people of Argentina are achieving unprecedented visibility for their demands. However, they are still faced with hurdles to more rapid progress towards their claims.

This week Félix Díaz, leader of the Qom, one of the 160 indigenous communities in the northeastern province of Formosa, was received by Pope Francis at the Vatican where he explained to the pontiff the demands made by his community, composed of 450 families.

The meeting was just one example of the prominence being achieved by native people in this country, where they have traditionally been the object of discrimination. In the past, governments have at best met their demands with paternalism or a handout mentality, but things are changing.

Díaz first came to public notice as a result of a protest carried out by his community in Formosa in 2010. A police clampdown on the protest left one person dead.

Now the demands have a place on the agenda of the national state and the provinces. The Supreme Court receives indigenous leaders to settle land conflicts and the media provide coverage on their historical issues and current problems.

“In 2010, at the bicentennial (of Argentina’s independence), we started to have serious talks with the state. Because 200 years had gone by without an in-depth policy for indigenous peoples and we did not just want a ceremony, we wanted something more significant,” Fidel Colipán, a Mapuche leader, told IPS.

Colipán highlighted the national law enacted in 2006 that suspended evictions of communities from their ancestral homelands. The law laid down a deadline for completing a survey of indigenous lands in order to draw up a detailed map.

But enforcing this law, which has already had to extend the deadline, is turning out to be controversial not only due to the private interests of companies that exploit natural resources in these territories, but also to resistance from the provincial governments.

The most recent census, taken in 2010, indicates that nearly one million people in this country of 41 million consider themselves to be of native descent. The number has increased since the 2004 census, when about 640,000 people claimed indigenous identity.

The latest constitutional reform in 1994 recognised the “pre-existence” of native peoples in the national territory and acknowledged their right to community ownership of land and bilingual education.

In recent years, conflicts have increased in number and visibility. Pushed off their land by the expansion of soy monoculture, mining, fossil fuel exploitation and deforestation, indigenous peoples have raised their voices in protest.

The government’s indigenous affairs institute, INAI, maintains that the 1994 constitution recognised the pre-existence of the indigenous peoples but also gave ownership of natural resources to the provincial authorities, which makes enforcement of territorial policies problematic.

This conspires against conflict resolution, said INAI president Daniel Fernández. However the institute says more progress is being made than ever before on surveying and demarcating indigenous territories.

According to INAI estimates, out of the 12 million hectares claimed as indigenous lands, equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the national territory, 4.5 million hectares have already been recognised and titled.

Conflicts flare up when valuable natural resources are at stake, or when the lands claimed by indigenous groups are in private hands. An estimated 60 percent of the land claimed by native communities is owned by the state and 40 percent by the private sector.

In order to comply with recognition of native peoples’ lands, state authorities in some cases have to expropriate land from private owners.

“In Neuquén, in the south of the country, INAI signed a contract for the survey of indigenous territories and even deposited the funds to pay for it, but the problem is the lack of political will on the part of the provincial government,” said Calipán. “We are very suspicious of those who have always persecuted us.”

In a 2012 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, highlighted that Argentina “has taken important steps” toward the recognition of native people’s rights, but also warned that “greater efforts” were needed.

The report on the situation of indigenous peoples in Argentina says that despite legal advances, “a significant gap remains between the established regulatory framework on indigenous issues and its actual implementation.” Anaya wrote his report after visiting several communities in 2011.

But not all indigenous leaders felt represented by this approach. “Anaya, like many who come here from the global North, proposes spectacular solutions that turn out to be very difficult to apply,” said Colipán.

The greater visibility of the demands of native peoples is also a result of the work of a number of human rights organisations.

Díaz, the leader of the Qom, visited the new pope, who is from Argentina, together with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

Most of the civil society organisations created in Argentina to fight human rights violations perpetrated by the 1976-1983 dictatorship have recently turned to supporting the demands of native minorities and their struggles for access to land.

In an interview with IPS, Paola García Rey, the coordinator of human rights promotion and protection for the Argentine chapter of Amnesty International, said “we cannot be blind to the progress that has been made,” but there are many pending challenges.

“Any assessment of the indigenous scenario today has to be heterogeneous. No province has rigorously fulfilled the law on land surveys, but some have made progress with a good level of participation, for example Jujuy and Salta,” in the northwest of the country, she said.

García Rey said there has been progress in signing contracts between INAI and the provincial governments for carrying out land surveys, “but later they are blocked,” and in some cases evictions of indigenous communities from their ancestral lands have continued.

She said the idiosyncrasies of indigenous demands have to be understood. On the land question, the logic followed by native peoples is not that of private property but of community ownership. But to have that right, the law requires them to register as an association, which is contrary to their customs.

The Plurinational Indigenous Council (CPI), which represents more than 30 native groups in Argentina, expressed concern about a civil code reform under way which would recognise their right to communal land, but based on private property criteria.

In the view of INAI’s Fernández, far from restricting indigenous rights, the new civil code bill seeks to make them operational and compulsory in order to build up case law and precedents.

Zimbabwe’s legislation is silent on the issue of women’s rights to inherit communal land. And upon their husband’s deaths, many widows find themselves evicted from their matrimonial homes. Credit: Michelle Chifamba/IPS

By Michelle Chifamba
HARARE, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

When Maude Taruvinga* votes in Zimbabwe’s elections later this year, she will be voting for her local female politician as she has placed her hopes for a better future on the presence of more women in this southern African nation’s legislature.

In January 2012, Taruvinga became a victim of Zimbabwe’s patriarchal traditions when her in-laws forced her out of her matrimonial home in Marondera, Mashonaland East Province, after her common-law husband passed away intestate.

“I eventually decided to leave my husband’s land because I could not endure the harassment any more. No one could help me. Even the police took the side of my husband’s relatives.“Only a woman in parliament is capable of changing the life of another woman.” -- Member of parliament and chairperson of the Regional Women’s Parliamentary Caucus Beatrice Nyamupinga

“Many widows find themselves thrown out of their homes by greedy relatives and give up because of a lack of knowledge and (because the do not receive) protection from the police,” 45-year-old Taruvinga told IPS.

The Zimbabwe Administration of Estates Act No. 6 of 1997 stipulates that if a spouse dies without a will, the surviving partner inherits their immovable property. Prior to this act, a husband’s estate was dissolved if he died intestate.

However, Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association director Emilia Muchawa told IPS that although 86 percent of the country’s women earn a living farming communal land allocated to their husbands by traditional chiefs, legislation is silent on the issue of women’s rights to inherit this land.

“Customarily chiefs allocate land to male heads of households, but women do not automatically inherit this upon their husband’s death.

“They may be evicted from the land when widowed, regardless of the years they spent married. Many who remain on the land do so at the goodwill of their in-laws or traditional leaders. Childless widows are often evicted, as are young widows who refuse to be physically ‘inherited’ by a male relative of their late husband,” she told IPS.

Currently, Zimbabwe’s new constitution, which was enacted into law in May, provides for equality of both sexes, and activists who spoke to IPS said that there was a need for laws to be revised to reflect this, and to protect widows married under customary law.

Civic groups here believe that if more women were elected to Zimbabwe’s parliament, they would be more vocal in addressing this and other discriminatory practices against women.

Women in Politics Support Unit (WiPSU), a non-governmental organisation that aims to increase the participation of women in policy- and decision-making, launched a “Vote for a Woman Campaign” ahead of the presidential elections.

The campaign is meant to help the country achieve gender equality in accordance with the Southern African Development Community Protocol on Gender Development .

The protocol includes several progressive clauses and 23 set targets, including the target that women will hold 50 percent of decision-making positions in public and private sectors by 2015. Women constitute some 6.7 million of Zimbabwe’s 12.9 million people.

“The ‘Vote for a Woman Campaign’ will accelerate the number of women taking up positions in parliament and local government. It is meant to raise awareness among the general populace to vote for a woman in the hope that women in parliament will improve the lives of women at the grassroots,” WiPSU director Fanny Chirisa told IPS.

Marlene Sigauke, programmes manager at the Center for African Women Advancement, an organisation that works for the development of African women, told IPS that policies and political party manifestos on gender equality must be fully implemented.

“Women in power should be able to develop strong, gender-sensitive policies (that benefit) women at the grassroots,” she said.“Only a woman in parliament is capable of changing the life of another woman.” -- Member of parliament and chairperson of the Regional Women’s Parliamentary Caucus Beatrice Nyamupinga

Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Welfare Monica Mutsvangwa told IPS that it was time to fight for women’s rights.

“The new constitution reserves seats for women and we want to take that opportunity … to improve their welfare,” she said. The constitution allocates 60 total affirmative action seats for women in both the country’s 210-seat parliament and 88-seat senate.

“The constitution now approves an 18 percent quota of women’s participation in politics. We are therefore going to use this constitution to implement policies and turn theory into practice,” Mutsvangwa said.

Member of parliament and chairperson of the Regional Women’s Parliamentary Caucus Beatrice Nyamupinga told IPS that although Zimbabwe was signatory to a number of conventions, the government has failed to implement these policies.

“Many victims (widows not allowed to inherit their husband’s property) are afraid to report their cases for fear of being judged and interrogated by authorities and the police. The new constitution has provisions for gender equality and certain clauses protect the rights of women. If women themselves are not present in parliament to make sure that the laws are implemented, then the provisions will never come to pass,” Nyamupinga said.

“Only a woman in parliament is capable of changing the life of another woman.”

*Name changed to protect identity.

Sochua Mu at a CNRP demonstration in Phnom Penh. Credit: Charlotte Pert/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
PHNOM PENH, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The violence that defined Cambodia during the years of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) may have been relegated to the realm of history, but the actions of the ruling party ahead of the Jul. 28 election smack of the dirty politics that once ruled this Southeast Asian country.

Observers and analysts predict that the ruling coalition of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the FUNCINPEC Party will win, thereby adding another five-year term to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s 28-year reign.

But that has not stopped an ugly face-off between the CPP and its main competitors, the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP), which last year consolidated their power under the umbrella of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) and now hold 27 out of 123 parliamentary seats.

In response, the 12-member permanent committee of the National Assembly, whose members all hail from the ruling CPP, decided on Jun. 5 to strip 29 legislators, 27 of whom belong to the opposition, of their political power, citing a constitutional clause that bans lawmakers from “party hopping” in order to form mergers.

Within days the ruling coalition had also launched a smear campaign against Kem Sokha, current acting president of the CNRP, claiming that he had denied the existence of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison where over 20,000 Cambodians were executed during the Khmer Rouge years.

CPP politicians claim to have a digital recording of Sokha calling the prison, which doubled up as a torture chamber, a hoax cooked up by the Vietnamese.

Local media outlets quickly ran with the story, but the CNRP vehemently denies the allegation.

“Kem Sokha, more than anybody else, knows about the reality of the Khmer Rouge as both his parents were killed by them,” Mu Sochua, president of SRP Women’s Wing and CNRP’s public relations executive, told IPS.

According to Sochua, the recording is a fabrication, designed to frame Sokha and weaken the growing strength of the opposition coalition, which has been drawing scores of supporters to its rallies, including most recently a 2,000-strong demonstration in the capital, Phnom Penh, and a 3,000-strong march in the northwestern city of Battambang.

Initial reactions to the allegation suggested that the attempt to discredit the opposition was working: on Jun. 9 the ruling coalition amassed 6,000 people at a protest in Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park against Sokha’s so-called “denial” of Khmer Rouge rights abuses.

But Tola Moeun, head of the Community Legal Education Centre (CLEC) who witnessed the event first-hand, said he talked to demonstrators who had been offered five dollars each to attend, a small fortune in a country where 49 percent of the population of 14 million people live on two dollars a day or less, and 26 percent lack adequate food and nutrition.

Moeun told IPS that other so-called demonstrators admitted to joining the protest simply because they had been promised a tour of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the capital, and not due to any loyalty towards the CPP.

Election observers say it will take more than a smear campaign to derail the opposition, whose strong human rights platform and support of labour and land struggles parallels burgeoning nationwide grassroots movements.

Land has become a pivotal issue in a county where 80 percent of the population is involved in subsistence farming but 20 percent of agricultural families are landless, due in part to the government’s scheme of leasing millions of hectares of agricultural land to mammoth multinational corporations.

Land rights activism is on the rise: the Cambodian Grassroots People’s Assembly (CGPA) that emerged in response to lack of civil society representation at the 2012 ASEAN Summit has collaborated with the internationally renowned Boeung Kak lake activists to mobilise thousands.

The civil society group Licadho noted that 2012 was a particularly bad year for human rights. Labour violations topped the list after a provincial governor shot three factory workers during a strike in the town of Bavet, all of them members of the growing Free Trade Union.

While activist networks are careful to avoid political affiliations in order not to be seen as “anti-government”, the strength of people’s movements has not been lost on the ruling coalition, whose decision to disempower the opposition came just a few days after a major demonstration by 3,500 workers at a Nike factory in the southeastern province of Kampong Speu.

Besides their obvious popularity among activists, the CNRP has also attracted a growing number of youth, as a quick look at social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter indicates.

According to Thida Khus, executive director of SILAKA and representative of the Cambodia Women’s Caucus, youth now comprise 36 percent of the population, representing a sizeable demographic and a crucial vote bank.

The opposition has also made good use of social media to circumvent a virtual monopoly over the dissemination of information, said Sochua.

According to Freedom House, “All television and most radio stations, the main sources of information for the two-thirds of the population who are functionally illiterate, are owned or controlled by either the CPP or Prime Minister Hun Sen’s family and associates. Opposition outlets are often denied radio and television frequencies.”

But SRP has capitalised on this media blackout: as of Jun. 18, Sam Rainsy, currently in exile due to pending prison charges that human rights groups say are fabricated, was leading the social media race with 80,000 “likes” on Facebook, compared to the premier’s 68,465.

While social media has not previously been seen as a strong indicator of public opinion, Internet penetration has grown tremendously since the last National Assembly election held in 2008, and now represents a reported 2.7 million Cambodians, according to the ministry of posts and telecommunication.

Still, Khus is concerned for the safety of CNRP members, particularly since there are “no international observers for the election,” she told IPS.

Being stripped of their status as members of parliament means the opposition lawmakers have not only lost their salaries but also their parliamentary immunity, which could impact their ability to safely speak to international press against the ruling party.

On Jun. 10, a coalition of 15 civil society groups representing labour and land rights issued a joint statement condemning the ruling party’s actions, just as the U.S. Department of State made a statement calling the move a “threat to democracy.”

The CNRP meanwhile filed a complaint on Jun. 17 with the Constitutional Council that the ruling party’s actions violate Cambodia’s constitution, adding that the CNRP is considering boycotting the election if the matter is not resolved.

Women and children from a Nanti community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Credit: INDEPA

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.

The authorities responsible for them are now attempting to reinforce protection of these vulnerable populations, ignored for years by the state.

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica*.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information-sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The Mapuche community claims ancestral lands in Araucanía. Credit: Fernando Fiedler/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

A string of attacks in the southern Chilean region of Araucanía, where native Mapuche people are struggling for their land rights, puts the spotlight squarely on what analysts call the “supine ignorance” displayed by authorities about the country’s history.

Two persons died in an arson attack on Friday Jan. 4 in one of a series of recent crimes in the so-called “red zone”, the epicentre of the Mapuche conflict, which has often been marred by violence and frequently met with bloody retaliation from security forces. There were more incidents over the weekend, including the torching of lumber trucks, in which no one was injured.

The Mapuche, the country’s largest indigenous group, numbering some 700,000 people, are demanding the return of their ancestral lands.

Wealthy landowner and forestry businessman Werner Luchsinger and his wife Vivianne McKay died on their Lumahue ranch, in the municipality of Vilcún, 640 kilometres south of Santiago, when their home was burned to the ground.

Preliminary police reports indicated that the perpetrators were 20 masked or hooded individuals who set fire to the property belonging to the 75-year-old timber tycoon, who fought the attackers with gunfire until he was overwhelmed.

A man fleeing the scene, suffering from a gunshot wound, was arrested by police. The justice authorities have designated a prosecutor specifically for this investigation.

The government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera announced it would invoke the Anti-Terrorist Law inherited from the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, a move rejected by the National Institute for Human Rights on the grounds that the law “violates the principles of due process.”

Piñera cancelled his official agenda and went immediately to Araucanía, where he announced the creation of a specialist anti-terrorist unit and a controlled zone with a perimeter and roadblocks for checking the identities of vehicles and pedestrians.

He also ordered an increase in police presence in the area, heightening criticisms that there is already excessive “militarisation” in the region.

Piñera categorically stated that his government would continue to work to combat extreme violence and terrorism, and would use all legal instruments in its power.

“We will not hesitate to apply the full weight of the law until we defeat the terrorists and give back to this region the right to live in peace,” he said.

Near the burned down house, carabineros (militarised police) found pamphlets referring to the murder in January 2008 of Matías Catrileo, a Mapuche student leader and one of the 11 indigenous people killed since ancestral land claims activism was renewed in the early 1990s.

Catrileo was murdered on the Santa Margarita estate, owned by Jorge Luchsinger, the cousin of the businessman who died last Friday and one of the most adamant opponents of Mapuche demands.

After the attack, Jorge Luchsinger told Radio Agricultura that violence in the region is at unacceptable levels, that “the rule of law is non-existent” in Chile and that “the guerrillas are winning.”

“This is a paramilitary commando, with paramilitary training, and no matter where they have been trained, what matters is that they are taking action,” he said.

The alleged existence of a trained group for violent action in the context of the Mapuche struggle is a common belief among conservative sectors in Chile. On Dec. 25 Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick said the authorities are facing “a powerful enemy that enjoys political and international support,” although he did not give further details.

However, days later, after receiving harsh criticism for his statements, Chadwick clarified that the “violent elements” are “a small group of violent people who have no connection with the Mapuche people,” a view that Piñera confirmed on Friday.

Domingo Namuncura, former head of the National Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI), told IPS that the conflict in Araucanía could spiral out of control because of nearly two decades of inadequate responses from the state and successive governments to Mapuche demands, the behaviour of the forces of public order and “the climate of repression in different areas” of the region.

In his view, the root of the problem is that “the Indian question has never been regarded as an issue of political rights in the culture of political movements, let alone in conservative sectors.”

For his part, Pedro Cayuqueo, a native Mapuche and the editor of the newspaper Mapuche Times, said this arson attack reflects the “abandonment of the authorities’ political responsibility to handle the conflict, and their insistence on using repressive measures that merely inflame antagonisms and produce this kind of escalation.

“This is a historical and political conflict that requires solutions that involve changes in the model of the state, development, and the vision of how Chile as a country is to build its future,” Cayuqueo told IPS.

He also criticised “the supine ignorance of the authorities when it comes to the history of this country, and especially the history of this region.”

“The worst of the conflict is limited to very specific rural areas,” Cayuqueo said. “Araucanía is not a region in flames or a region at war.” He stressed that ignorance “of the region’s appalling history is what makes the authorities apparently surprised by what is happening here.

“There is absolute unawareness of how the Chilean state took over this region, when the military invasion occurred, the death and desolation involved in that takeover, and also how settlers came from Europe, brought by the national authorities who gave them Mapuche land,” he said.

Cayuqueo said the conflict between local Mapuche communities and the Luchsinger family dated back 90 years, when the latter arrived in Chile as settlers from Switzerland.

Meanwhile, lawyer Alberto Coddou, a researcher with Diego Portales University’s Human Rights Programme, called for “a structural and systematic rethinking of what the Chilean state is doing” in Araucanía.

This implies “taking on board all of the history, and perhaps redefining the state, as they did in Canada, Norway and New Zealand, where they developed a much more systematic state policy toward native peoples,” he concluded.

Brazil’s Guaraní-Kaiowá people are no longer willing to wait quietly for the government to demarcate their land. Credit: Courtesy of CIMI/Cléber Buzatto

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 15 2012 (IPS)

The threat of mass suicide by native Guaraní-Kaiowá people in southwest Brazil brought to light a new formula for worsening conflicts over indigenous territory: the expansion of the cultivation of soy beans and sugar cane, two top export crops.

The situation is the focus of a study, “Em terras alheias – a produção de soja e cana em áreas Guarani no Mato Grosso do Sul” (On other people’s land: Production of soy beans and sugar cane in Guaraní areas of Mato Grosso do Sul), by Repórter Brasil, a local NGO.

Drawing on official data and research in villages of the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the study mapped the cultivation of sugar cane and soy beans in six indigenous areas.

“When international commodity prices go up, it becomes more profitable to grow soy beans or sugar cane, and land values rise,” investigative journalist Verena Glass, one of the authors of the study, told IPS. “With greater demand for land, large landowners arm themselves against the indigenous people, and conflicts surge, as happened last year.”

In Mato Grosso do Sul, which is home to some 44,000 Guaraní-Kaiowá, conflicts broke out this year on cattle ranches. But the same logic is at work: there is “a dispute between commodities and lands claimed by indigenous people,” she said.

When the report was presented on Oct. 24, the conflicts worsened. The study was carried out in July, when occupations by the Kaiowá to recover their territories led to confrontations and violent reactions by large landowners, including armed attacks on native encampments.

But the conflict crossed state borders when some 30 families of the Pyelito Kue Kaiowá community announced their “collective death” if they were driven off their land, which is currently in the process of being demarcated by government authorities as their communally owned territory.

Tired of waiting in encampments along the side of the roads, the native people occupied a small part of their ancestral lands that had been taken over by large landowners. But in October a court ordered their eviction.

When the news, interpreted as a threat to commit mass suicide, circled the globe by means of social networks, the government had the judicial decision revoked, so that the Pyelito Kue people could stay where they were until the demarcation process was complete.

The community was partly satisfied with the decision, Egon Heck, of the Catholic Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), told IPS.

They were happy, he said, because they would not be expelled from their land, but unhappy because they still have to live in overcrowded conditions on just one hectare, without being able to set foot outside it, for who knows how long.

“It’s a situation of aggressive confinement that has been going on for years and was aggravated by the court verdict,” said Heck, whose organisation is linked to the Brazilian Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

He asked how nearly 200 indigenous people, “linked to their territory and natural resources as their way of life, are supposed to manage to survive on one hectare.

“Can it be that the interpretation of the constitution, which guarantees collective land to these people, is being distorted by the interests of private property?” he asked.

Maurício Santoro, a human rights adviser to Amnesty International in Brazil, told IPS that Mato Grosso do Sul has areas densely populated with indigenous people, but that these areas are scattered between soy bean plantations and cattle ranches.

“These lands have not yet been demarcated by the federal government, and the legal vacuum has fuelled conflict,” he said.

Like Pyelito Kue, other communities were forced off their lands and are now living in camps by the side of the road, without medical services and constantly threatened by gunmen hired by local landowners.

“The waiting is killing people anyway,” Tonico, a Kaiowá Indian, told IPS in September. “No one is making decisions. We are going to occupy all our lands, even knowing that there is no security and that we are going to die. The people have decided.”

The rates of malnutrition, suicide and violence are extremely high in these communities, Santoro said.

According to CIMI, suicide has long been present among the Kaiowá and other Guaraní groups, particularly among young people. Between 2003 and 2010 there were 555 suicides.

Since 1991, only eight reserves have been formally approved for the Kaiowá-Guaraní people, who are the second-largest native group in Brazil but live in small territories.

The expansion of agribusiness, which has been heavily promoted by the state government, has exacerbated the situation.

The type of agriculture practised, based on intensive use of pesticides, the destruction of soil microorganisms and the devastation of rivers and forests, has been a “major aggravating factor” in the historic process of expulsion and extinction of the Guaraní-Kaiowá people, said Heck.

Agricultural mechanisation and the use of toxic chemicals have also reduced the employment of indigenous people as workers on large estates or in ethanol plants, where sugar cane is used to produce biofuels.

“Soon they won’t even have this work, which may be in semi-slavery conditions but is practically the only income available, besides government assistance,” since they don’t have access to their own land, Heck said.

Repórter Brasil launched a campaign urging transnational corporations to boycott the produce of estates illegally located on indigenous lands.

“The idea is for big buyers to avoid purchasing products from indigenous lands, as a kind of punishment. That way, the producers are economically weakened, and the value of indigenous land is reduced,” Glass said.

Two ethanol plants in the state, São Fernando and Raízen, have promised not to buy sugar cane from indigenous areas.

But others, like Monte Verde, which belongs to the Bunge company, buy grains from five estates on indigenous lands that are still being demarcated, according to Glass. The company argues that it is not infringing any rules as long as the estate owners are not legally compelled to leave the areas.

The government of President Dilma Rousseff has promised to accelerate the process of demarcation of native reserves. Meanwhile, rural producers are demanding economic compensation for leaving indigenous lands, and complain that one historic error is being paid for “with another historic error,” namely, penalising a productive sector.

Smallholder women farmers around the Yaounde city centre farm on urban wastewater sites. Only two percent of women own land in Cameroon. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

Clarisse Kimbi barely ekes out a living from a tiny parcel of land in Kom village in the North West Region of Cameroon. Today, the mother of six finds it hard to put food on the table for herself and her children. But five years ago she, her husband and children were considered well-off.

In 2007, farming on five hectares of land, Kimbi could comfortably feed her family, and still have enough surplus food to sell. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, her family was counted among the wealthy.

But things changed when her husband died five years ago. Almost everything was taken away from her and her children.

“Just one day after my husband was buried, my in-laws confiscated the five hectares of land my husband and I had farmed for 27 years,” she told IPS. Traditional practices in the area give the right to inherit land exclusively to men.

“Things have become so difficult that I have had to take some of my kids out of school,” she said. 

Two of her children are no longer attending secondary school, and three others are struggling through primary school. President Paul Biya decreed free primary education in Cameroon in 2004, but parents are still required to pay fees to help poorly-equipped schools function.

Kimbi’s problem is not an isolated one. Figures from the National Institute of Statistics for 2010 indicate that women constitute 52 percent of Cameroon’s 20 million people.

And although women produce 80 percent of Cameroon’s food needs according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, they own just two percent of the land, according to 2011 statistics from the Cameroon Gender Equality Network.

“If we are talking about a just and equitable society, then women should be able to control at least 35 percent of the land,” Judith Awondo, the coordinator of the network, a non-governmental organisation that works for women’s empowerment, told IPS.

Although the 1974 Land Tenure Ordinance in Cameroon guarantees equal access to land for all citizens, customary laws and practices that discriminate against women’s land rights prevail over statutory laws. This has taken its toll on the economic wellbeing of women.

“The inability of women to freely access and control productive resources places them in a weaker position in terms of agricultural productivity and economic growth, food security, family income and equal participation in governance,” Fon Nsoh, coordinator of the Cameroon Movement for the Right to Food, a local NGO, told IPS.

According to the 2007 household survey, 52 percent of people living in Cameroon’s poor households are women.

The problems of access to land for women and communities have been worsened by the land grab perpetuated by multinationals and society’s wealthy, according to Nsoh. He particularly cited the case of Herakles Farms in Cameroon’s South West Region as the “hottest and the most contested.”

On Nov. 7, 2011, the High Court of Kupe-Muanenguba Judicial Division in the South West Region ordered that the project be halted. But Nsoh expressed concern that the company was going ahead with the creation of a 73,000-hectare palm oil plantation with a 99-year lease based on “scandalously negotiated conditions”.

The U.S.-based Oakland Institute and Greenpeace, the international environmental watchdog, released a report suggesting that the project, situated in what is described as a biodiversity hotspot between four major conservation zones, could negatively impact up to 45,000 people.

Environmental groups are accusing the New York-based agricultural company Herakles Farms of going forward with plans despite two court injunctions and a lack of government authorisation, and in the face of significant community opposition.

“There are thousands of people there who might lose their farmlands, particularly women who were not part of the negotiations,” Nsoh told IPS.

He is now working together with other NGOs and civil society organisations to effect reforms on the 1974 Land Tenure Ordinance that regulates land issues in Cameroon.

“The 1974 Land Tenure Ordinance is obsolete. It was enacted about 38 years ago and no longer corresponds to modern-day reality,” Nsoh said.

Article 1:2 of the 1974 Land Tenure Ordinance says “the state shall be the guardian of all lands. It may in this capacity intervene to ensure rational use of the land or in the imperative interest, defence or the economic policies of the nation.”

Nsoh contends that such a clause excludes communities from land negotiations, citing several cases where the state has expropriated land for purposes of investment, without consulting with the communities that lived on the land.

Along with other NGOs and civil society organisations, Nsoh’s movement is pushing for more inclusive legislation, advocating that the law should not only specify that communities be involved in land negotiations, but that a very high premium should also be placed on women and vulnerable groups when it comes to negotiations on land issues, so that they can at least “have access and control”.

Since last year, these groups have been working on a draft land rights bill that should help break the barriers to women’s access to land. The proposed legislation seeks to ensure that the law prevails over the discriminatory traditional practices that constrain women’s access.

“Land certificates for matrimonial property should be instituted in the joint names of the husband and wife so as to do away with the patriarchal system of inheritance practiced in most of Cameroon,” Nsoh said. He added that such a requirement would make it difficult for women like Kimbi to be deprived of their land by other family members if a spouse dies.

Besides the call on women to be included in all committees that deal with land issues, civil society organisations in this West Central African nation are also pushing for a simplification of the rather long and cumbersome procedures for acquiring land certificates, and for the cost of acquiring such land titles to be brought down to levels attainable by women, typically impoverished over time by existing policies.

“We need to revise this law and give it a gender twist,” Nsoh said.

He said that although the government has not yet reacted to the demands of civil society, he is hopeful that this will be done eventually. During the 2011 Agro-Pastoral show organised in Ebolowa in Cameroon’s Southern Region, President Biya underscored the need for a revision of the law.

“It may take a long time, but coming from the country’s highest political authority, there is no doubt that it will be done,” Nsoh said. However, he is still frustrated at the slow pace at which events are unfolding, because this means more years of suffering and deprivation for Cameroonian women.