Time for agrarian reforms in line with UN land tenure guidelines
FIAN International joins more than 100 organizations of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, workers, urban communities and civil society, calling on states and the United Nations to enact agrarian reforms and realize the right to land.
The statement We Belong to the Land marks the tenth anniversary of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security. The adoption of the guidelines by the UN in 2012 saw the formal grounding of natural resource governance in human rights and the international recognition of the right to land. Grassroots organizations have used the guidelines to advance their struggles for social, environmental, gender and intergenerational justice.
However, ten years on, communities around the world still face land grabbing, exclusion and violence. The concentration of control over land and other natural resources in the hands of corporations, financial investors and other powerful actors has reached alarming rates. Increasing financialization, corporate-driven digitalization and market-based mechanisms to address climate change are exacerbating dispossession and injustice. Measures taken by governments during the COVID pandemic have disproportionately benefited corporations, financial firms and wealthy individuals.
The statement released today calls for a radical shift towards sustainable, healthy and just social and economic models. This requires addressing the structural drivers of exclusion, dispossession, conflicts and inequality. Realizing the right to land needs to be at the core of measures addressing the interconnected food, economic, ecological, health, social and political crises the world is facing. Ensuring a more sustainable and just distribution of wealth through redistributive agrarian reforms as well as the protection of collective tenure systems are paramount to this.
For more information contact Philip Seufert: Seufert@fian.org
