NEW YORK – War and occupation, corporate land deals, carbon and conservation schemes, and laws that ignore customary tenure are stripping peasants, fishers, pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples of their territories and driving land concentration to historically unprecedented levels, UN experts warned today.
“The old drivers of dispossession remain at work. New mechanisms now compound the old,” said Shalmali Guttal, Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas.
In its latest report to the General Assembly, the Working Group examines how access to territories has been lost by peasants, and how it can be addressed.
Some forms and modes of dispossession are obvious: corporate land acquisitions, carbon projects often launched without communities’ consent, and industrial aquaculture and tourism that encroach on fishing grounds. Yet others leave little or no trace: the gradual buying-up of small-medium sized farms, digital land registries that can erase customary claims, and laws that treat pastures and water points as vacant land.
“Armed conflicts and prolonged occupations accelerate dispossession, with effects that outlast the conflict itself,” Guttal said. The report notes that from Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza and the West Bank, farmland has been emptied, confiscated or destroyed, along with the means to grow food.
The result is extreme and increasing concentration at one end and landlessness at the other. The largest 0.1 per cent of farms now operate more than half of the world’s agricultural land. The global North is no exception. As noted in the report, in the United States 4.4 per cent of farms controlled 61 per cent of agricultural land in 2022; in the European Union 3.1 per cent held 52.2 percent in 2013.
The experts found that fewer than 15 per cent of rural women hold secure land rights, and men are more likely than women to hold secure rights to farmland. Carbon, conservation and aquaculture projects fall on territories where women lack formal title but are still using the land.
The Working Group noted that the challenges go beyond land. ‘Territory’ includes land, water, coastal seas, fisheries, forests and pastures. They determine both food security and the exercise of every right in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People (UNDROP) Working in Rural Areas, the report finds.
“Small-scale fisheries supply close to two thirds of global catches for direct human consumption. Depriving fisherfolk of access and concentrating it in the hands of the few requires the immediate attention of Governments,” she noted.
“Formalising unequal ownership is legally insufficient,” Guttal said. The Working Group called for agrarian reform that goes beyond land titles and called on States to recognise customary and collective tenure, over fishing grounds and pastures as well as farmland on an equal footing with private property; cap land accumulation; and redistribute land to the landless, young people and other marginalised groups.
“Restitution must cover territories, not only land, for all who have been driven out,” Guttal said.
Giving effect to UNDROP, Guttal said, requires “the recognition of plural forms of tenure, redistribution where access is unequal and restitution where dispossession has occurred.”
