Right to Land and Livelihoods:

1. Right to Land and Livelihoods: Ruchi Tripathi Head Right to Food ActionAid International

2. ActionAid’s work on food, land and livelihoods • ActionAid works through partners on the ground – CBOs, farmers organisations, landless peoples movement, indigenous peoples organisations and movements, women’s groups , people living with disabilities, forest dwelling communities, tribal groups • Many of them are focused on land struggles and issues around access to landon a daily basis • ActionAid’s committed engagement with local communities through local rights programmes helps with the long-term nature of struggles around access and control over land • ActionAid’s main organisation wide campaign: HungerFREE has a focus on women’s right to land and investing in women smallholders. The campaign in Europe, US, Brazil and parts of Africa (e.g. Senegal, Ghana) has a focus on biofuels which have an impact on food price volatility and land grabs

3. Different ways of supporting work on land rights • Partnerships with local and national landless movements; and working in solidarity (India, Brazil) • Sending out urgent appeals for urgent campaign action (PSO, France) • Technical and practical tools to access land: eg. Land accountability project in Tanzania that is developing a toolkit jointly with the Tanzania land alliance. It is also working on land matrix project tracking land grabbing. http://www.tanzanialandportal.org/ • Helping communities get access to land and stopping land grabs (Bangladesh, Mozambique, Senegal, India, Brazil, Pakistan….)

4. Different ways of supporting work on land rights • Engagement in policy fora such as: • International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD); AU Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa; Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests • Support for mobilisation • including through Launch of HungerFREE Women Charters • Implementing multi-country projects on women’s right to land • Co-organising Pan African Women’s Land Rights Conference; Partnerships with OXFAM and ACORD at continental level- Africa • Co-organising dialogues on land grabs in Africa with regional farmers’ organisations and the International Land Coalition (ILC)

5. Key issues for ActionAid • Women’s right to land and access to natural resources • Land policy and agrarian reform • Support struggles against land grabs • Food production based on right to food and food sovereignty • Support agroecological principles through local rights programmes and wider mobilisation • Stopping Biofuels targets and subsidies/land conversion • No to soil carbon capture • Human rights based approach: empowerment, solidarity and campaigns for change • Land and natural resources will remain central in the next strategy period 2013-17

6. Women’s rights to land – key issues • Women rarely have ownership and control over land • Women rarely sit in the governance institutions (traditional or formal) that make decisions on land. • Land held in trust for rural populations or pubic land, upon which women depend is most susceptible to land grabs. • Patriarchal practices subjugate women within families and communities. In all forms of land tenure systems, women’s rights to land is often limited to access, which is often subject to maintaining a good relationship with male relatives. • Many national constitutions and laws treat matters of land ownership, inheritance and transfer, property sharing in marriage and divorce under personal law that perpetuate discrimination on the basis of culture. • There are real and potential violent backlash when women assert their rights to control land. • There is an increased dispossession of land from widows and orphans due to HIV/AIDs

7. Framing the issue is key • From a right to food perspective access to and control over land is critical for food and livelihood security; • Rights of rural women, and access and control of natural resources is a key issue but • Land is also a resource that women must/can own in their own right – property • Land as source of power & dignity (and identity) as its about Rights • Rights are inter-dependent− right to land enables women to exercise other rights and vice-versa • Meeting women’s strategic gender needs and balancing unequal gender relations is crucial • Women’s rights to land enables them to assert other non material rights (e.g. political participation)