Securing affordable farm land in the UK (video)

The Ecological Land Cooperative

The Ecological Land Co-operative (ELC) was set up to address the lack of affordable sites for ecological land based livelihoods in England. This short film introduces you to the ELC staff and the smallholders at their first project site, Greenham Reach, in Devon, UK.

International guidelines on land governance (report)

Strengthening Land Governance: Lessons from implementing the Voluntary Guidelines

The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) are a globally negotiated and agreed framework endorsed in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012.

The VGGT represent agreement on the minimum standards for land governance. While voluntary, they constitute a global consensus on a set of norms. They reflect knowledge and lessons learnt from decades of work on land tenure and governance of natural resources. Now, four years on, what has been done to realise these principles? What are the current debates surrounding implementation of the VGGT? What challenges and obstacles have emerged, and how are they being addressed and resolved?

 

Getting access to growing land in Europe (video)

The Land for our Food 

This documentary movie takes us on the journey of Gavin Bridger, a grower from a Community Supported Agriculture project in England, through various European countries in his quest of accessing land for agroecological farming. All over Europe the difficulty to find suitable and affordable land is posing a great barrier to the development of sustainable and often small-scale agriculture. Gavin meets some of the initiatives from the Access to Land network, and also meets farmers and journalists to better understand the scope and historical roots of access to land issues.

State-facilitated land grabbing in Rwanda (#journal)

‘Control Grabbing’ and small-scale agricultural intensification: emerging patterns of state-facilitated ‘agricultural investment’ in Rwanda

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment. Activities of international development agencies are becoming intertwined with those of the state and foreign capital, so that a variety of actors and objectives are starting to collaboratively change the relations between land and labour. The global ‘land grab’ is only one aspect of broader patterns of reconfiguration of control over land, labour and markets in the Global South. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the state is orienting public resources towards private interests in Rwanda.

Global land grabbing special issue (#journal)

Special Issue: JPS Forum on Global Land Grabbing Part 2: on methods

Seven articles which offer a wide range of perspectives on global land grabbing, including how it is being done, how we can measure it, and how it might be resisted.

Via Campesina rethinks agrarian reform (#journal)

Grassroots Voices: Re-thinking agrarian reform, land and territory in La Via Campesina

This special issue discusses major changes in strategies for agrarian reform, land and territory that have taken place over the last two decades in La Via Campesina, focusing on debates at a workshop in Indonesia in July 2012.