On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (Tenure Guidelines), Inclusive Development International joins more than 100 organizations of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, workers, urban communities and civil society to call on states and the UN system to enact agrarian reforms to realize the right to land.
The statement, We Belong to the Land, underscores the critical importance of land rights for achieving social, environmental, gender and intergenerational justice. It notes that while grassroots advocates have used the Tenure Guidelines to advance their struggles over the last decade, communities around the world still face land grabbing, exclusion and violence. It highlights the concentration of control over land and other natural resources in the hands of corporations, financial investors and other powerful actors as a key driver of inequality and notes that measures taken by governments during the COVID pandemic have disproportionately benefited corporations, financial firms and wealthy individuals.
Together with the other signatories, we are calling for states and international organizations to address the structural drivers of exclusion, dispossession and inequality and to recognize that protecting land rights must be central to their efforts to address interconnected food, economic, ecological, health, social and political crises.
The full statement is available in English, French and Spanish.