View previous stories
	Responsible governance of land tenure by FAO / ReliefWeb   Responsible governance of land tenure: an essential factor for the realization of the right to food.   The right to food is one of the central human rights indispensable for an individual to enjoy a life in dignity. It is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.   In addition to being a fundamental and inalienable right, access to adequate food is a current day priority of the Millennium Development Goals.   At the national level, the welfare and rights of individuals constitute an objective of the state itself and the purpose for which state bodies have been created. Guaranteeing the right to food requires coherent public policies through institutions established to secure the right at a national level.   It largely depends on whether sectoral policies create the conditions necessary to make it a reality and on the fact that it must be understood as indivisible and interrelated with other human rights.   Among the most important areas in this respect are: natural resources management, trade policy, investment in agriculture, infrastructure and local markets, national social security, educational and public service systems.   The multidimensional nature of the right to food requires implementation with a broad perspective that takes into account all policy areas that bear on access to food.   The present document emphasizes the right to food as a primary objective of the set of public policies concerned with economic and social development. Achieving this objective depends on responsible governance of land and other natural resources.   The importance of land lies in the fact that it often represents a direct link with cultural identity, while serving as the primary source of food production and sustenance.   Given that land tenure and administration systems determine who and under what conditions can exercise property and usage rights of such a valuable resource, it is fundamental to analyse the relevance of land tenure in light of its effect on the realization of the right to food.   After setting forth the links between access to land and the right to food, the analysis proceeds to a more detailed look at the significance and implications of these links in legal terms. The third section of the document focuses on issues concerning national implementation; it sets forth examples in a variety of countries pointing out challenges and opportunities encountered in a human rights-based approach to land tenure policy for the realization of the right to food.   Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Visit the related web page
	Despite gains, bulk of world’s poor live in rural areas by UN International Fund for Agricultural Development   Dec 2010   Despite the fact that over 350 million rural people have escaped poverty over the past ten years, the bulk of the world’s poor are still found in rural areas, says a new United Nations report, which calls for greater investment in agriculture and efforts to boost livelihoods.   The Rural Poverty Report 2011, released today by the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), found an overall decline of extreme poverty – people living on less than $1.25 per day – in rural areas over the past decade, from 48 per cent to 34 per cent.   It also highlighted remarkable progress in rural areas of East Asia, primarily China, where the number of extreme poor fell by about two-thirds over the past decade.   Despite these gains, the report found that 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people live in rural areas, the agency stated in a news release.   Rural poverty is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly a third of the world’s extremely poor rural people, whose numbers swelled from 268 million to 306 million over the past decade.   “While Sub-Saharan Africa’s rate of extreme poverty in rural areas declined from 65 to 62 per cent, it remains by far the highest of any region,” said IFAD.   Likewise, rural poverty rates have dropped only slightly in the last decade in South Asia, which now has the largest number of poor rural people – about 500 million – of any region or sub-region. Four-fifths of all extremely poor people in South Asia live in rural areas.   The report adds that increasingly volatile food prices, the uncertainties and effects of climate change, and a range of natural resource constraints will further complicate efforts to reduce rural poverty.   At the same time, it emphasizes that changes in agricultural markets are giving rise to new and promising opportunities for the developing world’s smallholder farmers to significantly boost their productivity, which will be necessary to ensure enough food for an increasingly urbanized global population estimated to reach at least 9 billion by 2050.   “The report makes clear that it is time to look at poor smallholder farmers and rural entrepreneurs in a completely new way – not as charity cases but as people whose innovation, dynamism and hard work will bring prosperity to their communities and greater food security to the world in the decades ahead,” said IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze.   “We need to focus on creating an enabling environment for rural women and men to overcome the risks and challenges they face as they work to make their farms and other businesses successful,” he said. Visit the related web page
	View more stories