Global Land Use Crisis, Global Health Crisis
CGIAR – Water, Land, and Ecosystems
A highly efficient virus has thrown the world into chaos. And how we manage our Earth, its land and our food systems appear to be inextricably linked to this crisis. We must look hard at some key culprits – ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and unsustainable farming systems – and urgently commit to change. We cannot afford business as usual.
Land Inequality at the Heart of Unequal Societies
International Land Coalition
Uneven Ground, released November 2020, shows land inequality is rising in most countries. Today, the largest 1 percent of farms operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland and are integrated into the corporate food system, while over 80 percent are smallholdings of less than two hectares that are generally excluded from global food chains.
Executive Summary (pdf)
John Clare and ‘the Tragedy of the Enclosures’
John Clare (1793 – 1864) was a rural laborer and poet who mourned in his verse the privatization of communal land.
A Short History of Enclosure in Britain
Simon Fairlie, The Land Magazine
The progressive enclosure of commons over several centuries has deprived most of the British people of access to agricultural land. The historical process bears little relationship to the “Tragedy of the Commons”, adopted by neoliberal ideologues as a crucial element in the campaign against common property institutions.
Enclosure on the Grand Scale
Simon Fairlie, The Land Magazine
The current wave of land grabs will “take large tracts of land out of the reach of local people,” “initiate and reinforce speculative land markets,” and “ultimately result in the concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands through a process of piecemeal accumulation.” This process can be resisted and reversed, “if the current neoliberal climate is replaced by a moral economy that places the welfare of people and of the land they live on above the need for economic growth.”
Who Owns the World’s Land?
by the Rights and Resources Initiative
Communities are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area through customary, community-based tenure systems. However, national governments only recognize formal, legal rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to a fraction of these lands.
Behind the Locked Cupboard: Uncovering the Truth about Land Grabs by Fred Pearce
A discussion of the state of authoritative research and data on the scale of foreign land investments.
A Situation: A Tree in Palestine by Liat Berdugo
The erasure of history and culture through the adaptation of land.
Common Land: The Fightback Starts Here by Fred Pearce
The commons have been under threat for decades from state control and privatization. Land grabbing by agribusiness and mining has escalated in the past decade.
Landscape as Resistance in the West Bank by Hubert Murray
The Palestinian village of Battir works to protect a 4,000-year-old agricultural landscape.
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