ACCESS TO LAND AND PRODUCTIVE RESOURCES
The majority of the hungry and malnourished people worldwide paradoxically live where food is produced – in rural areas. 50 percent of the hungry worldwide are marginalized smallholder farmers. Another 22 percent belong to the landless, which are gaining their income either as agricultural labourers or in informal sector activities in rural economies. The missing access to productive resources - particularly land - is therefore one of the key reasons why people suffer systematic and chronic hunger.
The marginalized smallholder farmers are often victims of development processes that render them landless or endanger their access to resources. Many individuals, groups and communities are missing security of tenancy, or access to agricultural extension services or marketing opportunities. Women are often particularly discriminated. Despite their high contribution to the agrarian production, in most cases women do not possess their own land or have access to the relevant programmes like agrarian reform initiatives and other productive resources such as credits or technology. FIAN's work on access to land aims at increasing the national and international awareness for the problem of access to land and other related resources and at analysing the relevance of the issue from a human rights perspective. Apart from contributing to solve concrete cases of human rights violations, FIAN aims to develop additional human rights protection standards for individuals, groups or communities threatened by landlessness and forced evictions. One initiative carried out by FIAN, the international peasants movement La Via Campesina and others, is the Global Campaign on Agrarian Reform.
