How far are the right to food and land rights connected?

The Special Rapporteur on the right to food will devote his 2010 report to the United Nations General Assembly to the issue of land rights. Land rights are crucial to ensuring access to productive resources, which in turn is tremendously important for the realization of the right to food. This will be the Special Rapporteur’s second intervention on land issues: in June 2009, he proposed a minimum set of eleven human rights-based principles and measures to ensure the right to food in the context of increasing numbers of large-scale transnational land investments.

The relationship between the right to food and access to land has been established by the FAO Voluntary Guidelines for the progressive realization of the right to food. Those guidelines, in turn, followed other important declarations or agreements, including the 2006 International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD), in which Member States emphasized the essential role of agrarian reform in the realization of basic human rights and food security.

The food and economic crises have sparked new trends and have increased existing commercial pressures on land (including speculation, ‘land grabs’ for export food production, and agrofuels). Moreover, the existing « land rights » framework is poorly implemented and requires clarifications to ensure the realization of the right to food. The Special Rapporteur currently works with international organizations, including the OECD-Club du Sahel et de l'Afrique de l'Ouest, on the operationalization of the principles he issued in June 2009. He also collaborates with research teams from Columbia University and New York University on issues of land rights and large-scale land investments.

	'Responsibly Destroying the World's Peasantry', Op-Ed of the UN Special Rapporteur published by The Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org), 4 June 2010
	'Principles for responsible investment in agriculture', keynote adress at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Commission on Investment, Enterprise and Development, 26 April 2010
	Report 'Large-scale land acquisitions and leases: a set of minimum principles and measures to address the human rights challenge' presented to the Human Rights Council [A/HRC/13/33/Add.2], March 2010
	Contribution for the 17th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-17) “The right to food and a sustainable global food system”, 4-15 May 2009, New York (May 2009)