Tag: Land

Newsletter process: Rooted in resistance, territories for climate justice

Posted on by Tom

For Indigenous Peoples, peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, forest dwellers, workers and other rural communities, land, waters, forests, and ecosystems are the foundation of life. Indigenous Peoples understand their territories as the total habitat they occupy or use, where culture, identity, and livelihoods are rooted. Beyond food production, these territories sustain essential social, cultural, spiritual, and ecological roles. Yet, land and natural goods are deeply contested, with their unequal distribution reflecting structural discrimination and historical injustices. Across centuries, processes of enclosure, colonialism, and dispossession have concentrated control in the hands of powerful actors, reinforcing oppression and exclusion.

Today, climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice – driven by neoliberal economies rooted in financialization, patriarchy and colonialism – intensify these struggles. Communities’ access to, use of, and control over land and territories remain essential for advancing systemic transformations envisioned by the food sovereignty movement. Territories are sites of resistance against extractive projects that endanger health, livelihoods, and ecosystems, but also spaces where communities build alternatives based on agroecology. These models promote food sovereignty, dignity, and justice – social, climate, environmental, gender, and intergenerational.

As social movements mobilize toward Climate COP 30 and the Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, this edition of the Nyéléni Newsletter highlights the centrality of land and territories in shaping just and sustainable futures.

FIAN International, Friends of the Earth International, ETC Group, La Via Campesina

Illustration created for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum: Cultivate or Die, Chardonnoir
Nyéléni Virtual Gallery – Axes – Nyéléni Global Forum

Read it directly on the website!          

For any further information, contact info@nyeleni.org – www.nyeleni.org
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Global land grab highlights growing inequality

Posted on by fredsaxo

Massive tracts of land in the Global South are being bought up by international investors and ultra-rich corporations, fueling growing inequality – part of a wider global trend of wealth transfers away from the poor and working people.

The report from FIAN International and Focus on the Global South, Lords of the Land: Transnational Landowners, Inequality and the Case for Redistribution, puts the spotlight on the world’s ten largest transnational landowners – who together control 404,457 km², an area the size of Japan.

This is part of a global land rush. Since 2000, corporations and financial investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land – twice the size of Germany. Today, 70 percent of global farmland is controlled by the largest 1 percent of giant industrial-scale farms.

Forced displacements

This concentration has grave implications for food security, threatening the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people, most of whom rely on agriculture for survival. It is also driving violence, forced evictions, and environmental destruction while also contributing significantly to climate change.

Virtually all the top global landowners named in the report have been implicated in reports of forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against communities.

One of the main players is the US pension fund TIAA, which has acquired 61,000 hectares in Brazil’s Cerrado region, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas. In the Cerrado, approximately half of the land has been converted into tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production — amid reports of violent land grabs, deforestation and environmental destruction which already shows signs of impacting the climate.

TIAA almost quadrupled its global landholdings between 2012 and 2023 — from 328,200 hectares to 1.2 million hectares.

Inequality

Land concentration undermines state sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, with distant corporations controlling vast tracts of land across multiple jurisdictions.

The industrial-scale monocropping, often carried out on this land, is a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction, preventing just transitions to more equitable and sustainable food systems and economic models.

These developments reflect a broader global trend of rising inequality and wealth concentration. Since the mid-1990s, the richest 1% of the world’s population has captured 38% of all additional accumulated wealth, while the poorest 50% have received only 2%.  An estimated 3.6 billion people, or 44% of the world population, now live on less than US$ 6.85 a day, below the threshold for a dignified life.

Because land grabbing is largely driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Colombia early next year offers a critical opportunity for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.

In a world facing intersecting crises – from climate breakdown and food insecurity to entrenched poverty and social inequality – and amid reconfiguration of the global balance of power, now is the time to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.

Watch an expert panel discussion on the report here:

For more information or media interviews please contact Anisa Widyasari anisa@focusweb.org or Tom Sullivan sullivan@fian.org.