Women and Land Grabbing

1. Women and Land Grabbing Pan Africa Parliament 21-22 July 2011 Johannesburg south Africa Gaynor Paradza Senior Researcher PP

2. What is land grabbing ? Large-scale acquisitions of land by foreign and domestic investors in developing countries by 2009, 45 billion hectares of land had been transferred in land grabs, 70% of this was in Africa (World bank by 2009)

3. The drivers of Land Grabbing • Market pressures • Urbanization • globalization • Pension funds • Increasing demand for food • Increasing demand for biofuels • Mineral excavation

4. (some ) outcomes of land grabbing • Increased competition for land, labour • Displacement and resettlement • Mono cropping • Irreversible tenure regime change • Non food crop cultivation • More intensive land use

5. What is known about gender and land grabbing • Market reforms rarely improve women’s access to land • Current LAND GRAB practices ignore gender impacts • Land grab impacts on men and women differently • Women treated as an invisible component of homogenous communities • Impact on women context specific informed by resource, dynamics, culture • Research linking gender, land and globalisation limited to post implementation evaluation • Micro level impacts more revealing of processes and gendered impacts • Land grab exerting pressure on customary tenure relatively, the most accessible land for women in Sub-Saharan Africa

6. Why gender in Land Grab • Displacement and reallocation increase pressure on already weaker land rights that women have • Undermine women’s capacity to meet their primary subsistence food production role • Marginalized in decision-making, in forums that affect their lives and livelihoods • limited access to income • gender based violence “Impacts depend on men and women’s prior rights and responsibilities and how land grab implementation distorts or improves the men and women’s positions Respectively ” (Julia Behrman, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Agnes R. Quisumbing 2011)

7. Situation Prior to acquisition • Women with weaker land rights relative to men more likely to lose tenure • Common lands that women depend on for forging and firewood most likely to be given away for foreign investment ( photo: www.farmafrica.org.uk)

8. Contract • Marginalized in contract signing which renders their experiences and concerns invisible in the negotiations • Men and women not likely to be equally represented • Limited capacity to negotiate • Lack adequate information to make informed decisions (photo:www.diambuja.wordpress.com)

9. Benefits • Privilege title and primary right holders who are men and marginalise increasing female headed households • Food prices increase limiting benefits from such investments • Men assume control of benefits of commercialisation • Men better placed to benefit as more skilled • Women marginalised as casual unskilled labour with less secure land rights (photo:www.fao.org)

10. Gendered Costs • Women are more involved in agriculture than men and therefore have heavier burdens of adjusting in land grabs • Drawn away from food production if labour intensive • Substituting food and sourcing subsistence • Adjusting to loss of biodiversity • Renegotiating resource access • More demands on labour increase pressure on domestic responsibilities and income generation which leads to women giving up (photo:www.newskenya-wordpress.com)

11. What has been done • int Research by the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs and the South African Sugar Association Experiment Station (SASEX) since 1996 shows how inter-cropping of sugarcane enables cane growers to produce food, or cash crops between cane rows http://newkiskeya.wordpress.com

12. Investment in women’s education Increasing the number years of schooling for unskilled female workers was found to enhance the gains in economic growth from biofuels, while also allowing greater participation of the poor in skill-intensive biofuels production (Channing A, Rui B,Thurlow J 2010)

13. Mozambique Forum deMulher • campaigning for a percentage of the land transferred in land deals to be set aside for subsistence farming • Campaigning for 10 percent of government budget be set aside to support women in Agriculture

14. What is still to be done • Pan African structure to monitor, challenge and mediate pressure from large scale land development proposals a role which until now been left to NGOs…...who by the way have no mandate • Invest in research to close gap in knowledge on the impact of land grabs on women foster the development of African Women led enforceable guidelines to govern land transactions • Articulate Women’s tenure issues explicitly in land use negotiation, apportionment of costs and benefits • African led checks and balances in dealing with public land and /or community land • Provide institutions that can hold the state, community leaders accountable for their decisions and actions over land governance involving public , state and community lands • Facilitate stakeholder dialogues between policy makers, investors and communities