Ruth Hall
The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) is convening an international conference entitled “Land, Life and Society” together with a global network of scholars in the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) from 7-9 October. #PLAAS30
As climate change reaches a tipping point, inequality in people’s access to land and other natural resources are also reaching alarming levels, fuelling social exclusion and prompting forced migration. Concentration is rising across the spectrum – land ownership, control over oceans and fisheries, market power in food systems, and in control of water and forests. And while it is complex to measure such inequality, global data show that 1% of the world’s largest farms operate 70% of its farmland. In contrast, 80% of the world’s farms (on which most rural people depend) are less than two hectares and operate on less than 12% of the world’s farmland.
Land grabbing and paradigms of development based on corporate and elite control of natural resources have led to these dramatic increases in inequality. In some regions, these processes have involved a scale of dispossession not seen since colonial times. “Development-induced dispossession” is now a euphemism for the enclosures of the commons, and the seizure of community and family land and assets.
The FAO’s recent report on land inequality confirms widespread evidence that “land inequality not only hampers economic growth but also obstructs poverty reduction efforts”. Even on purely instrumentalist grounds, inequality is bad for development. But for the people and landscapes involved, the problem is far more serious, as homes, livelihoods, territories, and ecosystems are disrupted, dismantled and destroyed. Whole life-worlds of indigenous people in specific landscapes are disappearing, prompting struggles for the right of people to land and territory to be recognised as a human right – as an entitlement.
In 2006, the declaration of the FAOs’ International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) marked a historic moment where agrarian reform was endorsed as the path towards equitable development. It called for widespread land reforms to enable “secure and sustainable access to land, water and other natural resources” to be “an inherent part of national policies” and that “agrarian reform and rural development policies, laws and institutions must respond to the needs and aspirations of rural people”.
But the push towards land redistribution and agrarian reforms was quickly overtaken by the ‘global land grab’ – the surge that followed the convergence of the world financial crisis, the food price crisis and the fuel price crisis in the period 2007-2008. Not only farming companies but financial institutions have been seeking our farmland and natural resources as new investment frontiers. Capital-rich but land-poor countries, through sovereign wealth funds, have been on the hunt to locate places for offshore production of food and fuel for their own needs.
Even amidst this land rush – the very antithesis of agrarian reform – there has been progress at the global level to assert rights to land and territory. It laid the basis for reforms in the Committee on World Food Security at the FAO in 2009 that saw peasant, fisher, pastoralist, indigenous and other rural people’s organisations represented in multilateral negotiations that would affect them – a remarkable democratic reform – and laid the basis for more progressive steps such as the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) in 2012, as well as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) in 2007 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) in 2018.
By 2009, the African Union launched a new African land agenda, issuing policy guidelines and a declaration by all African Heads of State, noting with alarm the ‘new scramble for Africa’ and how new pressures on land are compounding existing inequalities and, in some regions like Southern Africa, unresolved settler-colonial dispossession.
Yet this is not only an African story. From the decimation of large tracts of the Amazon rainforest for monoculture cropping and ranching, to the violent expulsion of farmers across Southeast Asia to make way for oil palm and other major food and agrofuel crops, to the rise of financialised capital taking over indigenous people’s lands in North America, the story is the same: rural people’s hold on their land on which they depend is under threat from all sides.
At the global level, mobilisations across the world to confront, halt and reverse land grabbing culminated in the first ever global guidelines: the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, in the Context of National Food Security. Known as the VGGT or simply the ‘tenure guidelines’, these serve as a reference point for all policy and practices relating to who controls natural resources, and how changes, transactions and deals can and cannot happen. Similarly, Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food were adopted by the FAO, as a framework for all states to take action to ensure access to food as a human right, and to curb concentration, speculation and profiteering in the food system. While these frameworks put in place for the first time in history acknowledgement of entitlements of all people, the question remains how to consolidate the guidelines, and put them into practice within countries.
But what this obscures is the need not merely to defend and secure rights that people hold now, but to push back against ongoing enclosure of the commons, commodification and concentration of property. In short, tenure and governance reforms by themselves are inadequate to confront the inequalities of the present and the crises of the future. Agrarian reform opens the way to development that is inclusive, gender-just and climate-resilient – the redistribution of ownership and control of land, fisheries, forests, water and other natural resources – so that rural populations can access and use productive resources.
Redistribution needs to be foregrounded.
So much is clear, but the interests stacked up against such a path are formidable, and getting governments to act in the interests of the majority of citizens is a challenge even in democratic states. Alliances at a global level can and must complement struggles on the ground.
This is why there is now a push towards a renewed global agenda on agrarian reform, 20 years after the ICARRD, has been driven by rural social movements and supported initially by the Colombian government, now joined by the governments of many other developing nations (Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and more) as well developed nations (Netherlands, Sweden, France, among others). Social movements are driving the call for agrarian reform at the global level, as Nury Martinez from Colombia, Saul Vicente from Mexico and Philip Seufert from Germany explain in this recent paper.
The FAO endorsed the proposal in the CFS in October 2024 “to reinforce the implementation of the VGGT and address food security and climate change challenges”, and the FAO Council subsequently ratified this agreement. The expected outcomes of the ICARRD+20 are that it will:
- revitalise agrarian reform and rural development discussions globally;
- support the Global Land Observatory to generate data and monitor agrarian reform;
- strengthen international cooperation on land issues;
- establish a network of countries that promote agrarian reform and the equitable distribution of land; and
- generate cooperation to channel technical and financial resources towards regional and global agrarian reform initiatives.
All this means that a global process is afoot to reckon with, halt and reverse the dangerous levels of inequality in access to land, and to the natural resources on which most rural people depend. As the world prepares for this make-or-break discussion about the future of rural areas in the 21st century, the Cape Town conference is a space for academics, activists and policymaker allies to gather, assess and to chart a vision for what needs to be embedded in the ICARRD agenda.
These are the reasons why we at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) are convening an international conference entitled “Land, Life and Society” together with a global network of scholars in the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI). The event also marks PLAAS’s 30th anniversary. Founded directly after South Africa’s transition from apartheid rule, PLAAS has over the past 30 years grown into a recognised hub of critical scholarship, postgraduate training and policy and community engagement.
The programme of the conference, taking place 7-9 October 2025 at UWC in Cape Town, will feature plenary debates and over 50 parallel sessions with academic papers, activist presentations and dialogues focused on themes such as land, food, politics, water, fisheries, and climate. Those not able to attend can stay tuned to follow the proceedings via a livestream link, and follow PLAAS and LDPI on social media. We’v provided individual links at the bottom of this blog for ease.
The Cape Town conference is positioning a progressive redistributive agenda at the centre of discussion – and it is apt that the conversation takes place in South Africa, with its notorious inequality in wealth, incomes, and land. Redistribution applies to land, but also to fishing rights, to control of territory, to assets and wealth in rural economies, and to participation in food systems. Diverse themes ranging from climate finance to biodiversity conservation similarly hold the potential to drive equitable development if, and only if, rural populations are at the centre of priorities, and shape their design and implementation. The purpose is to gather experiences, evidence and insights about access to land and land rights, food systems and food sovereignty, the climate and environment, water, oceans and rivers, and rural politics and its relationship to the alarming global geopolitical moment we are in.
Land concentration is dangerous – for people and for the planet. Monopolising territory, eroding ecosystems, industrial agriculture, plantation forestry, mining and other extractive industries erode the sustainability of ecosystems and the livelihoods of people. Growing landlessness especially among rural people creates added vulnerabilities in the face of climate change, and spurs migration. Concentrated power and control over territories undermines the possibilities of effective and just climate action.
A better path is urgently needed and is possible – and agrarian reform that redistributes access to land to those who need it, defends territories, ecosystems, and livelihoods, and places the needs of small-scale and family producers for the means of survival and a decent life over the interests of corporations.
Contact:
Deshnee Subramany
Communications manager – PLAAS
dsubramany@plaas.org.za
Social media links
#PLAAS30
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LDPI webpage
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