Enterprises involved in agricultural supply chains can create employment, raise labour standards and bring the technology to increase agricultural production or reduce pollution. But their activities can also contribute to food insecurity by leading to the eviction of local communities from their lands. Child labour and abuses of migrant workers and women are regularly reported. The production of some agricultural commodities leads to soil degradation, water resource depletion and deforestation.

This Guide aims to inform companies that hold land or purchase land directly from companies that hold land. It provides operational guidance for companies confronting “legacy land issues” and clarifies a company’s roles and responsibilities in dealing with legacy land issues in their existing holdings, while also providing direction on where to look for more detailed information and tools.

The objective of this document is to guide the corporates and investors understand how to respect peoples’ ’‘tenure rights to land, fisheries and forest”,and ensure that communities have access to remedies ‘acceptable to both parties’ when such rights are impinged or such potential is recognized.

The “Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security” (VGGT), endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012, set out principles and internationally accepted standards for responsible practices and is the first comprehensive intergovernmental global instrument on tenure and its administration.

The Tenure Guidelines aim to serve as a reference, providing guidance to improve the governance of land, fisheries and forests so that it can contribute effectively to securing the right to adequate food. The Guidelines thus constitute an internationally agreed upon normative standard that assesses the actions and omissions of states, UN agencies as well as international organisations with respect to the way they regulate land, fisheries and forests in specific situations. See box 1 below.

ActionAid International has been working over the last few years with women and rural communities to challenge commercialization of land, which leads to loss of their rights to land.

Guide to determine if monitoring is actually a viable activity that can be undertaken by their organisation. Choosing to undertake monitoring is dependent on considerations such as evaluating the sufficiency of resources, capacity to design a sound monitoring system, and availability of political windows to effect change, amongst others.

This paper introduces a Legal Assessment Tool (LAT) for gender‐equitable land tenure that was developed by the Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for the purpose of providing prompt, targeted and effective policy and regulatory advice to countries working towards gender‐equitable land tenure. The LAT aims to provide a contribution to the global efforts to achieve responsible governance of land tenure by focusing on the legal issues surrounding land policy and reform processes.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) are an international framework based on human rights obligations and standards for the governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests. Adopted in 2012 by Committee on World Food Security (CFS) member countries, and following an inclusive negotiation process, they recognise the importance of land to a country’s development, and that good land governance and broad access to land enable food security for all people.1

We must agree as a nation, that several mistakes have been made in our land deals in recent years. We were stampeding in the wrong direction without adequately consulting beneficiaries i.e. those who are directly affected, those individuals and groups who suffer if anything goes wrong. They are also seen but not heard i.e. the voiceless and marginalized living in the rural areas. 

FAO is pleased to announce the e-learning course on “Sustainable Land Management and Land Restoration”, which has been developed in collaboration with CIHEAM-Bari, WOCAT, ELD and University of Leeds.

Land is a vital resource that sustains livelihoods across Sub-Saharan Africa, but also one that is heavily prone to corruption. Every second citizen in Africa has been affected by land corruption in recent years, according to a study by Transparency International.