Global Food for Thought

Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report today that says the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.

The report, titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, from Working Group II of the IPCC, details the impacts of climate change to date, the future risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to reduce risks.

Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability from IPCC WG2 on Vimeo.

Roger Thurow - Outrage and Inspire - Standing Tall in History

Norman Borlaug now stands in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol, a man still at work. He stands in a stylized field of wheat, hat on his head, sleeves rolled up, notebook in his hand, a researcher for the ages.

“The Father of the Green Revolution,” says the engraving on the pedestal of the great crop breeder and humanitarian, etched by sculptor Benjamin Victor.

Norman Borlaug now stands beside Rosa Parks—two great emancipators side by side. Rosa Parks helped to free millions from racial discrimination. Norman Borlaug freed a billion from hunger.

He took his place among the nation’s icons on March 25, the 100th anniversary of his birth. It was also National Agriculture Day in America.

It is all so fitting. And especially this: his statue will reanimate his work. How many millions of people in coming years will look at his statue and learn of his accomplishments in eliminating famine from wide swaths of the earth and hear about his vision to eliminate hunger everywhere? How many children will see the statue and wonder “Who’s Norman Borlaug?” and then turn to their parents or their teachers or Google for answers.

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Photo Credit: Riccardo Gangale

Commentary Series: Forest Tenure Security for Long Term Security against Deforestation

By Omaira Bolaños

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights.

According to the UN, 17 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions are due to deforestation. Of that total, Latin America contributes 46 percent – which alone, accounts for roughly 8 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. For a region that is home to the largest basin of tropical forest in the world, effectively managing these forests is no small task. But for the 40 million local and indigenous people who call these areas home, effective forest management and land conservation is just something they’re good at.

In Mesoamerica, where Indigenous Peoples and local communities control over 50 million hectares of forest land, research shows that their conservation of these forests greatly outperforms areas not under their control.[1] Similarly, in Brazil, where Indigenous Peoples and local communities control and manage the largest aggregate of forest lands globally, the same was also found to be true. These communities were more effective in inhibiting deforestation and forest fires than government-managed and protected areas. But why?

Indigenous Peoples and local communities have vested interests in protecting these forests. The forest provides not only food and shelter, but it serves as the very basis of their livelihoods, and the social landscape from which many define their identity and culture.

Yet despite their proven delivery on sustainable development goals and their unique relationship to the forest, when it comes to creating effective climate change mitigation strategies, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are too often overlooked. Their rights to these lands and resources are often infringed upon by governments and institutions in favor of costly, suboptimal conservation schemes and large scale land projects that harm forests, accelerate global warming, and dispossess forest communities from their lands.

Commentary Series: Satellite Technology and Innovation Can be Used to Secure Land and Property Rights

By Dr. Kumar Navulur
This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights.

Recent years have seen advances in satellite remote sensing technology that can be used to address land and property rights globally. Some key innovations include the ability of these remote sensing systems to collect large areas at very high pixel resolutions, sped up information delivery, and unprecedented accuracy. These innovations, coupled with the ability of the satellite systems to collect information frequently, have opened up new opportunities for efficient and economical ways to create, maintain, and update land and property databases.

Recent advantages in spectral technology, which enables capturing information in both the visible and invisible parts of the sun’s light, allows automated extraction of various information about man-made surfaces and agricultural crops, at very high accuracies. This spectral advantage of the satellites permits the creation of a consistent process for land and property management systems globally.

Satellite technology has been successfully employed in various developed nations to create and maintain urban parcel databases that are used for land administration. Satellite images can be used to delineate property boundaries, and recent studies have shown the utility of satellite imagery for nationwide agriculture cadaster map development, which can be a key part of securing land rights for people in developing countries.

Commentary Series: The Case for Land Rights

By Tim Hanstad

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights.

More than one billion of the world’s poorest people share three traits: they live in rural areas, rely on the land to survive, and they lack secure legal rights to the land on which they depend.

Most either toil in other people’s fields for pennies a day or struggle on land which they temporarily control, but insecurely — with the constant threat of displacement.

The coins they earn can never stretch far enough to allow them to buy their own plot, and they have little long-term incentive to improve the plot they currently farm. Often, they can’t send their children to school or obtain other government services, like agricultural credit or inputs, because they are not landowners. As a result, they lack opportunity and are vulnerable to displacement, exploitation, and calls to extremism.  Without a fundamental change, their children and grandchildren face a similar future.

Creating a better and safer future for us all depends upon giving these modern-day serfs the opportunity for better life.

Land is at the center of both the problem and the solution.

Where land ownership is limited to the privileged few, poverty and instability are much more likely to exist. But broadly providing secure land rights pays dividends. It allows desperately poor agricultural laborers to grow the food to feed themselves and their families and it facilitates economic growth, improves the status of women, improves environmental conservation, and prevents unrest and conflict.

Consider Shakti’s tiny field of dreams in a small village in the Chitoor district of India’s Andra Pradesh. As a landless farm laborer, Shakti earned less than $1 a day. She and her children lived a life of hunger and vulnerability. Then, with the help of a government subsidy, she was able to buy a tiny plot of land to live on and farm. Now, her plot provides her and her family with fruit, vegetables and a small income that has allowed her to take her children out of the fields and put them into the classroom.

Commentary Series: Securing Land Rights Amidst a Rising Demand for Land in Africa

By Jennifer Duncan

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights. 

While the vast majority of Africans rely on land-based livelihoods to survive and cite land as their most important resource, rights to this land are often unclear and insecure. Ninety percent of Africa’s rural land is undocumented and many countries lack basic legal protections for customary rights to land.

There is growing recognition, however, that weak land-related laws, policies, and institutions have hobbled Africa’s development. What’s more, the recent trends of rising food prices and increasing demand for “flex crops” (those that can be used alternatively for food, fodder and as bio-fuels) have spurred global demand for cheap “underutilized” land.  This global demand dovetails with a rising local demand for land that can be farmed by growing rural populations. In many areas of Africa, fertile land is already in very short supply. Quickly rising demand,  when combined with outdated legal tenure frameworks,  is now understood as  a great threat to rural African food security, livelihoods, sustainable resource management, and even peace and stability.

These recent trends have renewed calls from communities across the continent to have their land rights protected and documented. Rural communities are demanding greater protections for their rights, which can be achieved through improved land laws, policies and institutions.  Creating this tenure security framework is a threshold step that allows families to safely make the sort of long-term investments and improvements to the land that reduce conflict and boost food production and food security. In rural Africa, securing rights to the land for small–hold farmers—and particularly women farmers—is essential to lifting individuals, families, and communities out of poverty.

Commentary Series: Context is Crucial for Impacting Land Rights

By Dr. Jolyne Sanjak

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights. 

When people like me speak about land rights and access or when we write project descriptions for advocacy and research pieces, we typically will assert that strengthening the security of land rights through measures like land titling is important to achieving rural development goals such as increased yields, investment, environmental conservation, and access to credit. While there is clear evidence, in my view, to support this story line, I'm also convinced that, in both theory and practice, the type and magnitude of impact is context-specific.

The particular issues that need attention, the particular solution tools, and the particular expected results vary a lot by context. Sometimes, there might not even be a need to intervene to improve land rights and sometimes results of an intervention may be different or smaller than expected, or even negative.

That reforms to strengthen land rights and improve land access patterns matter -- economically, socially, and politically -- to the agenda of sustainable rural development is not hard to believe if one stops to think about one’s own life and things going on around the globe. Yet, this topic is multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary, and messy. It is not only hard to simplify; simplifying too much can be unhelpful.

In opening a paper I authored recently for USAID, “USAID Issue Brief: Land Titling and Credit Access,” I say that: “People often look for the proverbial ‘silver bullet’ to take down a roadblock on the path out of poverty. All too often, land titling is seen as this kind of solution to credit access and a means to rural poverty reduction. Unfortunately, silver bullets of this sort aren’t found often in reality. While land titling can help to expand access to credit in some circumstances and can be an important part of a poverty reduction strategy, in most developing world environments, the ability to leverage a title for credit is limited for a variety of reasons.”

Commentary Series: The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure and Large-Scale, Land-Based Agricultural Investment

By David Bledsoe

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently withthe World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights. 

In 2012, the FAO developed and proposed the Voluntary Guidelines (VGs) in an effort to boost food security, reduce hunger, provide protection of legitimate rights in land and other resources, and prevent the ills created by the global trend towards large-scale, land-based investments (LSLBIs) in the developing world.

The Voluntary Guidelines contain good or best practices for governance of land.    The VGs include many of the land-related governance best practices endorsed over the past 25 years for implementation within developing countries – rights recognition and formalization, dispute resolution, transfers and transactions, modern land administration, principled compulsory acquisition, legal frameworks, rule of law, due process, FPIC, and others.  There is really no question that a land access and tenure milieu that largely matched up with the VG tenets would provide an accessible, principled, and equitable playing field for all who use and benefit from the land.

The Voluntary Guidelines is a terrific playbook for land governance, but the main players in the land game–the governments—are often under-staffed and under-resourced. Begging the question: who will implement the VGs?

The VGs themselves say that implementation is the responsibility of states.  Civil society and the private sector are called upon to collaborate with government when possible.  Indeed, most of the systems, processes, and procedures needed to make the VGs a national reality in any developing country can only be delivered by government. While the size and complexity of the tasks are simply too big to expect civil society, private sector actors, or affected communities to take them on by themselves, governments are likewise ill-equipped to deal with this challenge.

Commentary Series - Property Rights for Every Woman and Man

By Dr. Gregory Myers

This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights. 

In the course of our work at USAID, we have observed that over the last several years, large capital inflows from the private sector to emerging markets—some projections estimate that $30 billion in private capital will be invested in farmland by 2015—have created challenges and opportunities for global agricultural systems and markets. Some, but not all, of these investments involve large-scale acquisitions of land (known more popularly, although not necessarily accurately, in the media as “land grabs”). There have been significant discussions in the media and in global forums about the effects—both positive and negative—of these investments on economic growth, food security, gender equality, and sustainable development. Proponents argue that large-scale investments are needed to accelerate economic growth, reduce poverty, increase agricultural productivity, and meet the world’s rising demand for food. At the same time, many have expressed concerns over the transparency, fairness, and potential negative impacts of these investments, including the risk of physical or economic displacement of the poorest of the poor.

This debate has led to several welcome developments in the international community. Recently, an increasing number of private companies, most notably The Coca-Cola Company, have committed to adopting new internal guidelines or have refined existing practices in an attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of selected agricultural investments—or the investments of their suppliers—especially those involving large-scale land transactions. In 2012, after a broad and inclusive consultation process involving civil society, the private sector, and governments, the UN Committee for World Food Security adopted the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security. These guidelines aim to establish rules for property rights and land and resource governance in developing countries as a strategy for improving food security, promoting sustainable development, limiting conflict, and reducing extreme poverty. The same UN body is presently working to develop Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) that will provide a framework to guide national regulations, global corporate social responsibility initiatives, and individual investment contracts covering all types of investment in agriculture.

All of these developments recognize and promote an emerging global consensus that secure property rights benefit both local communities and investors and are an essential component of sustainable development and global prosperity. The trick, of course, is how these different developments—the Voluntary Guidelines, the RAI, and the evolving private sector practices—come together and work on the ground.