International Land Coalition
ILC's Page on Women's Access to Land
The International Land Coalition is a global alliance of inter governmental agencies social movements, research organizations, and national and international civil society organizations. It has 84 members, and the Secretariat is based at IFAD in Rome. The ILC was created at a large conference in 1995 to counteract causes of poverty. Therefore, ILC is more concerned with the cause of poverty then its effects. We changed our name in 2003 to the International Land Coalition. We have always been based at IFAD, since the coalition was created. We then moved from 33 members to the current 84.
The structure of the coalition is a constituency. This was one of the first products of globalization. The idea was to have a coalition formed of different kinds of members. From classical NGO to farmer's organizations to research-oriented groups. We have many productive groups in agriculture as well.
The other aspect of the constituency is that it is among inter governmental agencies. We are not a monolithic group - we're more like the IFAD, FAO, European Coalition and so on. We have always kept a focus on land issues as poverty is rooted in land issues.
Our Vision (of the coalition)
Secure and equitable access to and control over land reduces, poverty, and contributes positively to identity, dignity, and inclusion.
Land is not only an economic asset, but contributes to human identity and inclusion. The worst kind of poverty is related to the loss of identity and dignity. Land is part of this complex concept. We are trying to reconcile all these ideas.
Why is land so important?
Multi-dimensionality of land:
- Economic dimension.
- Social dimension.
- Political dimension.
Increasing pressure on land:
- Population growth.
- Globalization.
- Climate change, etc.
Once people lose land, they lose a sense of respect from other people. In a village, people are not listened to if they lack land, such as in Botswana. This is why land is important to development in many ways. Land is a commodity and is finite. Bu the demands on land are expanding due to population growth, which is associated with globalization. There is, further, an increasing commercial demand for land. Climate change is also changing the way land can be used. Some land may be unusable for agriculture. Therefore land useful for people is DECREASING, while the numbers of people who want the land are INCREASING.
This creates competition for land. But it is not a competition among equals, as some are stronger then others.
Why are women's land rights so important?
We work with many kinds of organizations and one of the things we want to do is answer this question: WHO is most vulnerable to losing land? This is a targeting process, a process of identifying the population groups that may be more marginal or vulnerable to poverty then others. Women are probably the biggest group included in this, but we would also look at pastoralist, indigenous people, and so on.
Rural Women
There are 1.6 billion rural women. Women produce more then half of all food in the world, up to 80% in some countries. Twice as many rural women live in poverty today than in 1970.
Some country by country examples:
Cameroon: Women undertake more then 75% of agricultural work but own less then 10% of the land.
Brazil: 11% of land is owned by women.
Peru: 13% of land is owned by women.
Why women's access?
Human rights entail equal rights to land and related (natural and productive) resources. Poverty reduction and rural development matter. Specific obstacles for women must be addressed to achieve poverty reduction. Often women feed households by themselves, when men have migrated or died of HIV/AIDS. Therefore most people living in the original location are the women, the old people, and the very young. In many cases the men leave to do work in other places. Women are in many areas holding up rural economies. Their access to land doesn't reflect the important role they play, leaving them vulnerable.
When we talk about these problems and about trying to solve them, we need a targeted approach. Why are women's land rights not as strong as men's? What is contributing to that?
The State of Women's Access
Women lack control over land in practice. Highly inequitable land rights are the norm today. Land rights are gendered.
Pluralistic norms governing land rights.
Social,gender, and institutional obstacles exist for women attempting to gain land rights. Women often gain access to land through male relations. There are often elaborate or customary ways for people to acquire land in developing nations, but no single piece of paper stating "I'm Bob, I own this land," as might occur in the first world.
Gendered implications of socio-cultural, political economic, and natural environment changes.
Take an Islamic country: you have the formal legal system, the religious system, and the customary system all working together in regards to land rights. All of these rights work in tandem, and at times against one another. They might overlap in some ways and be different in others. Different sets of rights may be more or less discriminatory.
Who are the Hungry?
- World Development Report 2008
When we thinking through and understanding women as a segment of society and having the ability to access resources, what are the other axises of development in human society?
One billion people are hungry today. This figure has gone up from last year. It has been growing by a hundred million a year over the past three years. Half of those one billion are smallholders on family farms, producing largely for themselves. Another 20% are landless people or sharecroppers, and might be living off the land but working on other people's land. 10% of these people are pastoralists, forest dwellers, and fisherfolk. This is about 3% of the world's actual population who is vulnerable in disproportionate numbers to poverty. 20% of the hungry are urban poor.
A lot of poor people rely on land or would if they could. When you overlay the gender dimension, the effect is even more dramatic. Women make up 60 to 80% of production, and hold only 2% of land titles.
Keeping those figures in mind, we must consider two key concepts.
Situational Poverty
This is poverty resulting from changing events in people's lives - something you can move in and out of. Crises occur. You lose your job, you can't afford food, but you might get your job again. Food prices go up, but they may go down again.
Structural Poverty:
Poverty resulting from deeper social, economic, political, and institutional relationships in society. Structural poverty often is a result of eeply ingrained barriers in society, preventing an individual from reaching financial solvency.
Often, the move from situational poverty to structural poverty is a question of losing access to land. You slide into worse poverty when you have no access to a basic productive resource.
The Food Crisis
Reuters - CRB Energy and FAO Food Price Indices 1998-2000-=100
Food prices dropped off, spiked, then plummetted down again at the end of 2008. This produced lots of discussion about what the figures meant. This lead to a summit in Rome, and riots in many countries. The Haitian president was recently disposed as a result of rising food prices.
FAO Food Price Index (Graph on FAO website)
The graph on the left shows price changes in major agricultural commodities. They are usually stable and quite low. In 2007, you get a massive rise in prices, and in 2008, prices are still rising at beginning of the year. They flatten a bit, then drop again. Looking at 2009, food prices are beginning to go up again. Not a surprise. People have been saying that over the long term, food prices are going to go up despite fluctuation. By 2050, the FAO estimates that world demand for food will double as a result of population growth and consumption changes, and as a result of agricultural land being used for non-food purposes.
Compare the Kenya, Nairobi, Wholesale, USA dollar per tonne regarding Maize (from Oxfam)
This graph ndicates how much maize costs in Nairobi. You can see the recent price spike is not reflected - there is the RISE but not the DROP. This happens in many cases: the people at the end of the line who need food to survive, are not paying less money but are instead paying consistently higher prices. For them, the fluctuations down are not so eviden. As a result, for these people, there is a very real danger of decreasing food security.
How Does This Relate to Land Issues?
The Last Great Global Land-Grab
The frontier of land use is often characterized by non-intensive land use and poorly defined tenure arrangements. Many of the bottom billion of the world live in marginal areas, where there is a persistent concentration of poverty. Suddenly you have all these people wanting land for non-food uses. where will they get it? What they are doing is going into areas that have previously been used for agricultural purposes. These uses can also be related to forest issues: deforestation rates are going up exponentially, such as in the Amazon basin. The other concern is moving into areas that have not been used previously for agriculture, but rather have been used by pastoralists, grazers, etcetera. What's happening is you're getting an extending agricultural frontier for large producers. One thing to remember: There Is No Empty Land.
In any country where people live, there is no empty land. In Botswana, the population density is less then 2 people per square kilometer, with less then half the population of Rome residing in the entire nation. Even if a patch of land in Botswana looks empty, you can bet someone goes there once a year to collect firewood, medicine, run their cattle, whatever. These people are losers, because in land competitions, they simply have no "dog in the fight".
The bottom billion are the poorest people in the world, with the most food insecurity.
Small scale land users are increasingly finding themselves in direct competition for land with local, national, and global elites and investors. An estimated 20 million hectares of land was under consideration by investors since 2006. (http://www.landcoalition.org/cpl-blog/ )
This is a hard situation to address since there are such big differences in economic and political power. Many journalists have been calling us at the ICL about the "land grab". Daiwoo is currently trying to grab 1.3 million hectares in Madagascar, or half of the countries arable land, where half of the nation's people rely on agriculture. Many deals are going on quietly like this.
One of our members estimates that since 2006, 20 million hectares are under consideration in these kinds of transnational investment deals. It is hard to estimate exact figures, since these deals are happening in an un-transparent matter. These are the big multi-nationals looking for land, but at the same there are 10, a hundred, a thousand more people just at the local level out there as well. A rich guy from town goes to a rural area and decides he wants 20 or 30 hectares here or there, squeezing out the very poor.
Here's a process lots of our members are concerned about: how do you think all this is affecting women's access to land? Consider tat women are already marginal in terms of their ability to gain access to land.
Have communities blocked or contested these land deals?
There were serious riots in Madagascar over the Daiwoo case, resulting in the toppling of the nation's government. When the new president came in to Madagascar, one of the first things he did was announce that the Daiwoo case was scrapped. In Peru, 30 people were killed last week for the same reason. There is some diversity between what is happening in Africa and Latin America. In Africa, we see the privatization of commerce, of state's buying the land of other states, when food security became an imperative. For countries who know it will be impossible to improve their productivity of agriculture - such as Japan or Arabic countries - they need a way to be sure their security and access to food will be certain, to avoid social conflict. Since the 2008 increase of food prices, there have been 50 different social conflicts in the street due to food. This can be a serious problem for states, especially in the developing world.
Peru is related to destructive industry - even if Peru is showing both cases, in the selva where this happened, we encounter the same idea of industries accessing commons. The increase of re-concentration of land in Peru is high. The re-concentration process is huge, really huge.
Our prime concern at ICL is the impact on people who use the land. In the case of a shelf in the ocean, no one is living there. We don't have as many activities in the Asian regions where there is a real problem with water rights. There is not a huge demand yet for working for ocean shelf rights.
Questions: Who is speculating on food prices aside from biggies like Monsanto and Sargento, so on?
n some settings in Latin America, an increase in food prices is linked to the rise in gas prices. There is a chain there - how is energy related to food? Speculation is becoming, more and more, in a way important as well. it's all related to the market. That would be interesting - we are speaking mostly of land governance, which is not so far from food governance - but it would also be interesting to understand what the institutionality of it is. We want the best institutions to ensure fair food governance, which aids the eradication of poverty. Not the most urgent challenge we face right now, but in a way...
WTO's take on agriculture?
A lot of people have given up on the WTO. I think that they tried very hard and didn't manage. The WTO'S Corporate Measures to Address the Human Rights Challenge does touch on what could be put in place to reduce the likelihood of speculation. It is acknowledged, at least, that speculation is a problem.
There is increasing commercial pressure on land and the position of women. How would commercial pressure affect women more then men?
Men already have the rights, and women are working to get them. Matrilineal systems are often not recognized in the formal system, affecting their ability to own land even if their family has for years. The idea of plural tenure systems is important here - in other words, a legal system not formally recognizing the informal or customary system. As soon as the land increases in value, things get worse for those who do not own the land "officially." A well established process: as value increases, those with a tenuous hold on the resource to begin with lose.
FAO put out a publication on Biofuel, Demand for Land and Women with some interesting thoughts on the situation. The huge increase in demand for land will affect all poor people, some more then others.
ILC on Women's Access:
For more information on women's access to land and documents and descriptions, check out this website:
http://www.landcoalition.org/program/wrap.htm
The Speed of land grabbing
In Colombia and Argentina, corporations and other groups are moving through trees faster then any law. The legal system of the country is following the economic driver in a schizophrenic way, and things are therefore occurring with no control. Many changes have been proposed in recent legislation. Colombia wants to remove protections to make transactions easier to do.
Land use is driven by food and energy. What can you produce yourself? What can you import?
The importance of agriculture is the other side of the food security crisis, in regards to economic issues. Attention should be given to small scale agriculture. One of the debates about the commercial pressure on land generated regards the level of employment. We need activities that engage more people, not just economic activities that do not give people employment opportunities. It is important factor, and should be considered by government. It's not just a food crisis but affects the general market. Land use is complex.
Should women be proud that we are now farmers? Still agricultural is not all rentable. If men are migrating for more lucrative opportunities, and women are producing food for their families, are women really winning?
Recently we had an assembly in Nepal and it was interesting - at the border with India. I was meeting a group of women, who were organizing cooperatives to support the male part of the land movement. I was impressed by the fact that if I, as a woman, was born there, I would be given by my family to a man at the age of 7, under the idea of domestic service. I have two children, n so I was quite impressed by these women's stories. The situation is changing. With the security of one piece of land, you can keep your children without sending them off to work, and maybe send them to school. This made me realize why land is so important. Land is a safety net, an assurance of quality of life, an opportunity.
So that's to give you a more concrete sense of why it is important that there are more and more women, due to migration and the rentability of agriculture, are taking on a role in agriculture as a farmer. What is impressive is the fact that they are speaking about and changing their economic role, not just a social or familiar role.
If land is a challenge in rural development, it's even more complicated and challenging for women. The gap Mike referred to is between what is law and what is the reality of the women in their daily lives. It's important to understand. Due to the complexity of these customary, statutory, and regulatory things, it is hard to understand what is possible for women to achieve in a given place, in regards to what is given by law and social or religious contexts.
ILC has been focusing on land issues and women's access to land since we were created. It's a complementary approach: we began with a program called the Women's Resource Access Program. We supported this program, and now support programs in Asia and Africa, in an effort to have the voices of women be heard and understood by project designers and policy makers. We organized a workshop to get people to express their concern on this topic. Now we are moving to a structural research approach, what we are implementing in Africa and Latin America. We have to understand the gap between statutory law and customary law, as well as women's contribution to food security, agriculture, and so on. What are the challenges women face in this new global context?
Another important activity we do is monitor the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). This is a conventional legally binding instrument. Once a country adopts the CEDAW, it is legally obliged to adopt this convention. The 14th, 15th, and 16th articles regard women and land. This is the only international institution recognizing rural women as such. This allows women to access all services given to men, such as the access to credit, access to financial institution,and so on. Countries are thus obliged to provide services in a fair way, and ILC looks at what is given to women and men, and work out some equality in the sense of an opportunity given at the same time and in the same WAY.
The legal part of access to land is important. We are in a a way obliging states to legalize what is the land ownership in the name of women. The 16h Article is more related to the access to irrigated land.
At an international level, the importance of women's land access has been confirmed. At the governmental level, too - more and more governments are including equal opportunity in their legislation. These issues need to be recognized.
So I will bring you to the other level of activity ILC does . It's the promotion of real events, related to the resource in a sense. Even if a government recognizes equal rights for men and women, there is often a gap in implementation. What we are doing is supporting women's groups and their advocacy activity. ILC supports activities at field levels, and a local organization, as a land concerned society, is taking an active role. This creates political sustainability , due to its locality.
In Nicaragua, what we understood is that it is important to get organized. Despite the fact that a law recognizes your rights as a woman, you still have no decision making powers. You still have to get your husband's permission for a loan, or you can't be on the board of a cooperative. There are obstacles that must be addressed. What we understood is that there are a lot of contributions to the economic sphere of the family that must be supported. Once the economic achievement occurs, men will recognize it, and hopefully decrease domestic violence.
Women in Nicaragua are now leasing and buying land, a real change in their status. This gives them economic opportunity and a lot of support. The case of Bolivia is an important one - it is recognized in the equal rights for women as related to land. I remember a male Bolivian farmer who told me "I could give my life for Eva Morales but since he told me women can access land...that's too much!"
Now I understand better, and I know why men were telling me that. In the Bolivian case, there were important things emerging. In the customary structure of the people of Bolivia, there is a system giving you rights and obligations as a couple. You only acquire an identity as a human being if you are married. Rights to resources are only given to couples, and higher then individual rights as well. It is hard to separate men and women through this custom. There is fertile land and infertile land, and in the Amara culture, it's quite evident.
Also in Bolivia, even if the law gives the right - there is an increase in land entitled to women. But the men challenge them in decision making processes - the level of representation at decision making boards in their own social structure. The role of women matters on the economic side. They may have money or transportation, but who is making the final decision? That must be changed.
In the Southern part of Bolivia, there is a completely different situation. In the low-land, there is a high level of informality and in fact - an organization member of ILC in Bolivia, active on land issues - did marriage in groups for native people. There is no formalization of marriage rights. The ILC also released identity cards to local people. If you have no recognition of your civil rights, you can't recognize other rights. You must formalize marriages in these regions, and in the process, grant rights to women.
As viewed through cases in South Africa, there are many similarities on the customary side across the world. When you want to better understand how you can work on gap between customary and statuary law, we have to look for a link between therecognition of land rights for women and a decrease in domestic violence. The attitude of human beings is often in common.
What are we doing in terms of supporting local organization? It is important to understand local dynamics.
The third part is supporting legal employment. This woman in Nicaragua told me, "If you don't know your rights, you cannot defend them." Any unknown right is therefore a lost one. Land literacy is education to land rights. We believe it is important on the part of the legal system. Because we have been supporting these things in the past, we took some time to review activities, and hope to build something more coherent by the end of this year.
What are some answers to the biofuel demand?
Our role in the ILC Secretariat is to facilitate an informed discussion on these. We bring together strong research, with organizations who represent people who are directly affected by this. These include farmer's organizations, and policy makers. Next month we are organizing a conference in Utrecht with a number of Northern governments, including the Dutch and the ministry for biofuels, and people from places like India, Indonesia, and Bolivia, to come and discuss this. We try to create this space for dialogue - in something like biofuels, so much is driven by policy. If the US or European policies on biofuels changed tomorrow, things would be very different.
The Dutch have developed the Cramer Criteria, which is an effort to define for the public sector what exactly is sustainable biofuel production. This is very controversial - how would you license it? Land that palm oil is grown on in Indonesia was acquired illegally or chopped down. Part of the process of changing the status quo is generating consumer sentiment about these issues. Big Swedish companies acquiring land in Tanzania and Mozambique often sold themselves as socially responsible biofuel organizations. Awareness of these land grabs has caused many investors to pull out. It's market driven, and sometime if the people buying these products do become aware of these issues and their impact on land use and rights, it can have a big impact.
I think all our members would say biofuels - such as jatropha - are very good at a small level, such as people growing it in their backyards. Milling Jatropha is really easy. We see people making their own lighting fuel, cooking fuel, and so on. Two years ago biofuels were marketed as this new green energy, but people are realizing now that biofuel not nearly as green as we thought. Think of Richard Branson flying his plane from London to Paris on 2% biofuels (100,000 coconuts?)
For example, through IFAD we've had links with the US congress. A congress guy from Wisconsin wants to put a bill on biofuels and large scale acquisitions to the US Senate. This kind of thing is what we at ILC care about. On one hand, we have members in the South (of the world) feeling this, and we have members like IFAD with access to Western decision making. They have asked us to comment on the bill they want to propose. These are issues in the South but they are driven by policy in the North (of the world). What we are trying to do in this conference next month is bring together Northerners, Southerners (government people), investors, palm oil producers, and so on.
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