Defending the Commons, Territories and the Right to Food and Water
In support of social movements and grassroots activists working to defend the rights of local people to land and natural resources and to re-orient policies towards food sovereignty in a new era of fuel scarcity, climate volatility, and economic readjustment, the Land Research Action Network (LRAN) launches its second series of briefing papers in contribution to the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR), of which FIAN is a member.
This series takes up the theme of Defending the Commons, Territories and the Right to Food and Water.
This second collection of LRAN briefing papers address the issues of food, finance, energy and climate crises through food sovereignty and agrarian reform and presents some of the experiences of activist researchers working to defend the commons and vulnerable territories. As before, the papers have been written and edited for readers who are not native speakers of English, and it is intended that they can be relatively easily translated. They are particularly aimed at activists and community leaders within social movements working on land and agriculture.
The papers are grouped in three parts. The first part presents analyses of the concurrent crises and highlights the impact they have brought for vulnerable people who directly rely on their land. (Land and the World Food Crisis, Peter Rosset; Sugarcane Monocropping and Counter Agrarian Reform in Brazil, Maria Luisa Mendonça; and Weathering the Storms: land use and climate change, Shalmali Guttal)
The second set of papers relates to different ways in which land and territory are viewed from different perspectives. The papers present brief examinations of the issues and dynamics of common resource tenure, the international work to define and recognise rights to land, and the threat of massive dispossession of land as global land grabbing expands. (Rights to land and territory, Sofia Monsalve; In Defense of the Commons, Shalmali Guttal and Mary Ann Manahan; and Is Asia for Sale?, Mary Ann Manahan)
The final section of this edition of our briefing papers turns to focus on the experience of the local, and the campaigns conducted from grassroots to the national level to call for redressing the wrongs of dispossession, renewed action to redistribute land, and changes to government policies on agriculture and trade. (The Grand Theft of Dey Krahorm, David Pred; Bringing Filipino agrarian reform back to life, Carmina Flores-Obanil; and Formalizing Inequality, Natalie Bugalski and David Pred).
Read the briefing papers