Presentation to the Mainstreaming Seminar of the Global Mechanism of the UNCCD

at the Conference of the Parties
Nairobi , 26 October 2005

Since the 1970's, international conferences have regularly confirmed that secure access to land and related productive factors is basic to poverty reduction, food security and sustainable natural resource management. In recent times, this confirmation appears in the Millennium Development Goals, the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 1994 Convention to Combat Desertification.

Where there have been improvements in the levels of secure access to land and related productive factors, there have been:

• Reduced levels of food insecurity;
• Income gains;
• Safety net effects;
• Investment effects;
• Income distribution effects stimulating wider economic growth;
• Reduced levels of conflict;
• Physical quality of life effects measurable by nutrition levels, access to sanitation, educational participation of children; and,
• Adoption of more sustainable resource practices.

Whereas, in the absence of secure land access, poor rural people lack the incentives to conserve or invest in the productive qualities of the land. They face the daily risk of being expelled, only to have the benefits of their labor and investments expropriated by landowners. Understandably, they take from the land to meet the subsistence needs of their families with no or limited incentives to re-invest.

Fortunately, decision-makers are coming to realize that secure access to natural resources, especially land, not only benefits the landless and rural poor, but the benefits also accrue to the wider economy and the environment. Security of land tenure is the incentive for the rural poor to invest in the long-term sustain abi lity of the resource base - in the land, water, forests and coastal areas. The restorative investments by peasants in marginal or degraded lands, following land distribution and tenure programmes, confirms the beneficial effects. These actions point to the developmental and environmental role of public policies which provide and protect the resource rights of current land users, near landless and landless households.

Additionally, both empirical evidence and community-based knowledge, informs decision-makers that the water crisis is often associated to degraded rural lands and deforestation. Water tables are falling, a consequence frequently related to lack of tenure security. The effects are not only on rural water supplies but also affect supplies in more distant urban centres. And, the environmental benefits, including capturing greenhouse gases, is a benefit that accrues to the wider society and economy when landless people have the security to manage their land and forests from a long-term perspective.

In summary, the public provision of property access and user rights can prevent resource dissipation by providing both incentives to invest in the productive potential of land and security in the form of needing fewer resources to protect rights and preventing land from becoming degraded through illegal exploitation, intrusions, civil-conflict and other forms of dispute.

The compelling reasons that link property rights to sustainable resource management and countering the effects of desertification are not enough. Even in countries committed to improving access to land and security of tenure, implementation is often slow, delayed or manipulated by the power of vested interests and landed classes. Often those who control one institution also control others, which including the state tend to be controlled by the powerful non-poor. For instance, even after land redistribution, the large farmer may continue to have better access than the ex-landless labourer to production, credit, information and marketing networks, and the capacity to diffuse and insure against risk. Without access to these productive factors, land alone is not a sufficient condition to improve rural livelihoods and enable poor households to afford to invest in restoration and sustainable land management practices.

This set of obstacles requires the removal of policy biases that provide favoured access by the landed class to credit, technology, public infrastructure and other factor markets. It also means strengthening the institutions of the rural poor so that they gain more equal influence in policy making and to the provision of public services.

But policy making by governments, and their donor and financial partners, like all development actors, must learn the lessons from the past. For example, the UN Convention on Desertification in 1977 identified pastoralism as a cause of desertification, describing it to be a system of land management that would lead to further degradation through overstocking and social conflicts. This causality continued to be expressed by UNEP in 1984 and the UN Conference on Environment and Development. Then in 1994, the UN CCD recognised that improving livelihoods in drylands should be based on community participation, seemingly with a recognition that degradation had been increasing not because of pastoralism, but due to more "modern" forms of rangeland management. These practices revealed the dire environmental consequences of policies and programmes that produced sedentarization, especially around water points, leading to increased populations in permanent settlements which logically led to over grazing and resource depletion.

As this example indicates, we must move forward in full recognition of the lessons of the past and not allow myths or single solutions to been seen as where progress can be found.

Land access and land tenure can take many forms. Each form suits particular conditions and yields various primary, secondary and tertiary results. Just as pastoralism was and continues to be seen as a romanticised idea from the past that is not relevant in a modern world, land systems, today, tend to place private or individual access rights in front of community or group rights. Yet, in semi-arid lands and degraded regions, common property regimes may be most suited to the livelihoods and therefore resource management needs of local populations. In many countries mobile livelihoods, managed by customary institutions, prevent over use of low productive areas. Community use allows different sets of users to benefit from the resource, such as agriculturalists who benefit from the fertilizer provided by livestock use during low rainfall periods. And, community use provides a social safety net reducing the exploitation of fragile frontier areas where individual families would have to go for fuelwood and other needs if they did not share access to these same resources on lands they manage in common.

In closing, the links between access to land, security of tenure and desertification are visible in the conventions and agreements at the centre of the millennium development discourse.

As an alliance of intergovernmental, civil-society and governmental organisations, the International Land Coalition seeks to develop the capacity of its members and partners to improve their secure access to resources as a way to help poor rural households to build the family assets needed to improve their incomes and futures. The landless and near landless, even under agrarian reform, usually gain access to low productive and often degraded lands. Accordingly, combining the capacity of the Land Coalition with the Global Mechanism, our common host IFAD and the COP is a way to produce synergistic benefits.

Bruce H. Moore
Director