Commercial Pressures on Land

Increasing commercial pressures on land in the face of poverty reduction: threat or opportunity?

Indications from members and partners of ILC are that recent global trends are prompting a massive increase in global commercial interest inLand and vulnerable people land and natural resources. Predicted medium and long term increasing food prices, demand for land to meet an increasing global demand for food and for animal feedstocks as well as to produce feedstock for accelerating agrofuel production, and carbon-trading mechanisms that place a commercial value on standing forests and rangelands are converging factors that are causing steep increases in demand for land and in land values themselves.

The increasing interest in acquiring or leasing large tracts of land by investors based in the North and in the food-importing countries for commercial production or domestic food security objectives, in the context of liberalised trade
and property laws in many countries of the world, are creating unprecedented pressures on land resources, placing new tensions on land tenure systems and increasing inequality in economic and political power between the competitors. Those most vulnerable to losing access to land are small-scale producers (1.5 billion living on less than 2ha) who do not have formal tenure over the land that they use, as well as women, indigenous people, pastoralists, and fisher-folks. Many of these are among the 1-2 billion people globally who are, according to land law, tenants of the state because they live on, and use, common-pool resources such as forest, pastoral and swamp lands.

Behind the crisis of food security lies a deeper and more structural crisis that may make it many more times harder for the world’s 963 million hungry to escape from hunger - a crisis of land tenure security which may result in millions losing their access to land and natural resources.
However, recognising tenure rights of local land-users could open the pace for inclusive investments enabling local communities - legally or formally owners of such a scarce asset as productive land - to equitably benefit from these global trends.

What ILC is doing

Raising global awareness amongst the international community, deepening the issue’s understanding through research based activities and advocating for effective measures to be adopted through a constant engagement into international fora, are the objectives at the centre of the initiative ILC is leading on Commercial Pressures on Land. This initiative intends to promote a wide collaboration between CSOs, IGOs and research based institutes.

    To achieve these objectives, the International Land Coalition has launched the following activities:

  1. Compilation and regular update of an annotated bibliography of documents coming from a number of relevant CSOs, IGOs and research institutes addressing the issue, a case studies database and a collection of relevant press articles coming from the international media;
  2. 2. Facilitation of a collaborative research project on Commercial Pressures on Land. Launched at the beginning of 2009, this study is intended to provide a global overview of ongoing land acquisitions, to analyze its underlying causes and mechanisms and to explore related risks and opportunities for local poor land users.
  3. 3. Engagement into relevant international fora, ensured either by ILC member organizations or by Secretariat staff.
  4. All documents, reports, studies, case studies and press articles are made available on this web section through the ILC Commercial Pressures blog. This is a moderated space within ILC website where interested users are welcome to share resources and opinions. Detailed information about ILC’s engagement into international events, reports, presentations, background papers and summaries are available into this section’s dedicated pages.

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