GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Our support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of our work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

A global coalition of 14 Partners and over 120 international, regional and community organizations advancing forest tenure, policy, and market reforms.....

Core Beliefs:

"Based on our experience, we find that empowerment of rural people and asset-based development are part of a process that is dependent on a set of enabling conditions, including security of tenure to access and use natural resources. As a coalition of diverse and varied organizations, RRI is guided by a set of core beliefs...

Rights of Poor Communities Must Be Recognized and Strengthened:

ABSTRACT: Burma (Myanmar) is currently emerging from almost half a century of severe military dictatorship. In a country comprising over 50% forested landscapes, the status of forest governance and forest rights are central to the democratisation process.

What rural dwellers in the Global South experience as land grabbing, tends to be seen in the Global North as ‘agricultural investment’. The World Bank has been at the forefront of a drive to legitimate these investments, convening to win support for a code of conduct based on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles. Many key civil society groups reject the proposal for a code of conduct, objecting to the top-down process by which it was formulated and arguing that it was more likely to legitimate than prevent land grabbing.

... Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory. Tracing the relationship of military–state formation, land control

Securing land rights for the world’s poorest people"...
MISSION:

"Landesa works to secure land rights for the world’s poorest people– those 2.47 billion* chiefly rural people who live on less than two dollars a day. Landesa partners with developing country governments to design and implement laws, policies, and programs concerning land that provide opportunity, further economic growth, and promote social justice...
VISION:

A video recording of a whole-day conference held on 18 June 2015. The page begins with text presentations. For the video recordings of the event, scroll down to Webcasts....."Co-Organized by RRI and IUCN, in partnership with the Embassy of France in Washington, DC...

This step-by-step guide aims to help community-based organizations and advocates working to help communities protect their customary claims and rights to land and natural resources. It provides tools to:

● Prepare communities for negotiations with investors

● Strengthen community governance of land and natural resources

● Monitor, evaluate and assess the implementation of projects.

A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission...

Abstracts accessible. Full texts by (expensive) subscription. Some texts free..."The Journal of Peasant Studies is one of the leading journals in the field of rural development. It was founded on the initiative of Terence J. Byres and its first editors were Byres, Charles Curwen and Teodor Shanin. It provokes and promotes critical thinking about social structures, institutions, actors and processes of change in and in relation to the rural world.

Organised by the Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI) in collaboration with the Journal of Peasant Studies and hosted by the Future Agricultures Consortium at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex...Rich site with full texts of more than 170 papers and presentations from the Conference

High-quality speakers and panels. From 2009. Some of the meetings have recorded webcasts available online.