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Land reform In many developing countries, rural poverty and food insecurity exists because of access and control over land - or more specifically inequitable land tenure patterns. Those that farm the land often to not have security of tenure - and thus their livelihoods - because legal ownership in many cases belongs to absentee land lords. Without security of land tenure, farmers can easily and legally be displaced by industrial farming interests (such as the situation in Brazil with soya production) and have little incentive to undertake more sustainable agricultural practices. Poor communities that ActionAid International works with often have no or very little access to land. Where they have access to land, they have no control over it in the form of legal titles. Land titling is a key issue that affects a large number of smallholder farmers. Often a simple issue of land demarcation becomes an obstacle in gaining a legal entitlement. ActionAid International Uganda is actively supporting women's land rights through ensuring the inclusion of the co-ownership clause in the National Land Act, as well as working with and supporting the Uganda Land Alliance and the Uganda Women's Network. Benet families who are hunter-gatherers from Uganda who were driven off their land in 1992 when it became a national park, succeeded in getting the government to grant them land with support from ActionAid. Land is a scarce commodity in Vietnam with per capita land holding less than 0.036 ha. It is even moreso in remote northern mountainous areas. Access of poor people to productive land therefore is crucial. In Ha Giang province ActionAid International Vietnam has been able to convince the government allocate 80 ha of government land to a group of 20 poor households on a 10 years lease. On a pilot basis eight farmers have grown Citronella (a herb) on about 12ha, market for which is ensured by a company in Hanoi. Such initiatives will ensure food security of poor household by ensuring their access to land resources. In Nepal ActionAid supported 350 tenants in Sindupalchowk to file cases at district land office and claim ownership in 2002. ActionAid Nepal is also engaged in a process of rehabilitating the Khamaiya (ex-bonded labourers) through securing their right to land. Land concentration in Brazil Brazil has 850 million hectares of land, of which 371 million are considered good for agriculture. Today only 65 million hectares are used for crops, less than 1/5 of available arable land. More than 100 million hectares of agricultural land remain idle and huge areas are under-utilised. One hundred million hectares (or one million square kilometres) are an area 2.8 times the size of Germany and 1.8 times that of France. The main reason for under-utilisation is speculation. Forty-four percent of agricultural land is owned by 1% of rural landholders who exploit only 4 to 5% of their area. Presented below in some detail is the case of women coconut breakers from Brazil. ActionAid has worked alongside with them in their struggle for use and access to traditional lands. The case of babassu coconut breakers Small-scale farming families, escaping drought in various regions of the Northeast, settled the Middle Mearim region of Maranhão. Through a traditional land use right, the families were guaranteed use of the land that they had settled. The farmers cultivated crops and the women and children gathered and broke babassu coconuts, an activity that became a crucial component of family economy. The land conflict that began in 1985 continues today. While many of the small- scale farmers still have no title of their lands, many families in the area of operation of Assema have achieved land rights. When these families finally regain access to their lands, they realize, however, that there were many problems still to be resolved: the land is in terrible condition, many of the babassu trees have been cut down and replaced by grasses and weeds. The families continue "in the hands of" the middlemen and have no access to accumulation of resources. To collect babassu coconuts the women still need to enter the large-scale farms as the still existing trees on their own land are few. Besides this, the region is still being cleared of trees by the landlords, in order to plant forage and raise cattle, and by the women's own husbands and neighbours in order to clear fields for agriculture. After more than 20 years on the land, the families were forced to either leave or submit to large-scale farmers who had bought up the land through a fraudulent process known in Brazil as grilagem. Whereas the families had no legal proof of ownership of the land, these new landlords had false documents of private property obtained in registry offices that allowed them to "legally" expel the small-scale farmers from their former lands. It was thus that the life of the people in Maranhão entered in a new phase, one of dependency and subordination. In exchange for the right to cultivate their former lands, the families had to give half of all they produced to the new landowners. And in order to gain access to fenced lands for gathering babassu coconuts the women had to not only give the landlord half of their harvest, but work for them planting forage. Besides this unequal power relation with the large-scale farmers, the people found themselves in a power struggle with the market: the buyers of their products (the middlemen) while paying a devalued price for the babassu coconuts, sold their own products (coffee, sugar, etc.) to the women at inflated prices. In areas with no local commerce due to difficult access especially during the rainy season, this economic disadvantage was aggravated by the fact that these exchanges were highly irregular. This irregularity resulted in women with surplus coconuts and no access to the products needed to sustain their families. The people continued to submit themselves to these conditions until things got even worse. The landlords started to prevent the women's access to the babassu trees and began cutting down the trees so as to increase their pasturelands. When the women were caught collecting and breaking coconuts they were threatened by the landlord's hired men and taken to the police station. The women started to work together in small groups to ensure their safety, thus marking the birth of their grassroots organization. The women's health groups created by social assistants working in the region had an important role in organizing and mobilizing the women. As these groups were a safe place for women to come together they became the seed of women's organization in the region. In response to these difficulties and others, four Rural Workers Unions of the Middle Mearim region decided to create an association with the aim of assuring the families permanence in the reconquered land. After many visits to local projects with the same aim, Assema was created. The greatest result of the process of empowerment of the local women and organizations was the conquest of the Free Babassu Law. The law grants free access and common use of this natural resource by the coconut breakers and their families who depend on the trees for familial and community economy. Any act that will directly or indirectly harm the trees, such as knocking down, clear cutting, burning, use of toxins or the cultivation of crops that could damage their growth, is prohibited. With the new law came a new struggle - the fight for enforcement. Before the law the women stood up to the landlords, impeding the cutting down of the trees through the strategy of physical prevention. Now, when the trees are being cut down the women denounce the event to the authorities and have to wait for a response that usually comes too late, after the trees have been cut down. This is a result of the existing power relations between landlords and women coconut breakers - the landlords hold the public power by which they prevent enforcement of the law. However, the law gives the women ammunition to keep on with their fight and to attempt to change these unequal power relations. Some issues to consider A recent ActionAid International - Uganda and USA's discussion paper, Rethinking Participation: Questions for Civil Society about the Limits of Participation in PRSPs has raised several critical questions regarding land reform policies: Why should a market-based strategy to land reform be chosen in the first place, over a (re)distribution strategy? If a market-based reform is being pursued, what sorts of mechanisms could create a more just distribution of land, such that land-poor farmers seeking to buy land would at least have equal, or more equal, access to services that can fairly assess the value of their land? How much transparency is there regarding landholdings, e.g., are large landowners required to report their holdings or does the law enable them to shield them and thereby avoid taxes? How can small farmers who take out large bank loans with market-level interest rates to purchase land be protected against falling into unsustainable debt and losing title to their new land and being expelled all over again? What systems could prevent this cycle? Why do the IFIs insist on abolition of communitarian arrangements for land use? Why should market-based ownership of titles be imposed on borrowing governments when these have been shown to lead to increases in land inequality (even where they initially appeared to create more egalitarian distribution)? Ruchi Tripathi Food Trade Policy Analyst ActionAid Hamlyn House MacDonald Road London N19 5PG Ph: 44 207 561 7560 ActionAid's vision is a world without poverty in which every person can exercise their right to a life of dignity. 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