UN Focuses on Secure Access to Land and Resources
New York, Oct 27 2009 11:10AM
The United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization http://www.fao.org has
begun consultations on the first-ever international
guidelines on governance of tenure to land and other natural
resources such as water supplies, fisheries and forests.
The consultations are expected to take over a year to
complete and involve governments, the private sector, poor
farmers, indigenous groups, local authorities, academia and
independent experts.
“Secure access to land is seen
as a key condition to improving food security of some of the
world’s poorest people,” said Paul Munro-Faure, the
Chief of the Land Tenure and Management Unit of FAO.
“FAO is taking the lead in this exercise because
secure land access is the best safety-net for the poor, and
because good governance of land is a necessary condition for
secure land access and land tenure rights,” he
added.
The agency said that although most FAO member
nations have rules to protect people from being thrown off
their land or having their land seized, laws are often
ignored or poorly enforced.
Alexander Müller,
Assistant Director General of FAO’s Natural Resources
Department, noted that competition for land and other
natural resources is on the rise owing to population and
economic growth, and demands for biofuels, among other
things.
“Without responsible governance,” he
said, “growing demands for land threatens to foster social
exclusion as the rich and powerful are able to acquire land
and other natural resources at the expense of the poor and
vulnerable.”
According to FAO, women, the disabled,
the illiterate and the elderly are particularly vulnerable
to having the land they farm arbitrarily seized as they
often lack legal and social rights, or where those rights do
exist are powerless to enforce them.
Mr. Müller
pointed out that weak governance is a cause of many
tenure-related problems and hinders economic growth. “It
also affects the sustainable use of natural resources,
causing environmental degradation and condemning people to a
life of hunger and in the worst scenarios can cause conflict
and war,” he said.
ENDS