Unlike land rights, the right to food is strongly affirmed by international human rights law. Article 25 of the UDHR states that everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living, “including food”. Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) specifically refers to the right to food by explicitly affirming the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living “including adequate food”. Article 11, paragraph 2, proclaims the “fundamental right of everyone to live free from hunger”, while article 11, paragraph 2 (a), obliges States to “improve methods of production, preservation and distribution of food”, in particular to reform agricultural systems in order to achieve the most efficient use of natural resources; and article 11, paragraph 2 (b), which requires the implementation of an “equitable distribution of world food”. More recently, the link between land rights and the right to food has become even clearer in the context of large-scale land purchases, also known as land grabbing (TAYLOR, 2009). After the 2008 global food crisis, several major capital-importing and capital-exporting countries, having lost confidence in the world market as a stable and reliable source of food, accelerated the process of large-scale acquisition of suitable agricultural land (COTULA et al., 2009). In other words, these “food insecure” governments, dependent on agricultural imports, have embarked on a policy of acquiring large tracts of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production and also to increase their investments in increasingly valuable foreign farmland. In this context, land rights were seen by some as an essential tool to guarantee the right of the local population to food. The current UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, for example, has directly linked the right to food to the issue of large-scale land acquisition through a recent report: Outside of situations of violence and conflict, regulations and policies governing land rights are often at the heart of any major economic and social reform. Land rights play a catalytic role in economic growth, social development and poverty reduction (INTERNATIONAL LAND COALITION, 2003). Recent figures suggest that nearly fifty per cent of the world`s rural population lacks secure land tenure rights and that up to a quarter of the world`s population is landless, making insecure land titles and lack of access to land obvious components of poverty (UNITED NATIONS HUMAN SETTLEMENTS PROGRAMME, 2008).
Article 16 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which emphasizes the elimination of discrimination within the family, requires States parties to take all necessary measures to ensure that both spouses have equal rights with regard to “property, the acquisition, administration, enjoyment and disposal of property” (FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, 1979). Although land rights are not mentioned directly, the reference to ownership and ownership could be considered implicitly relevant to land ownership. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (`the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women`) explicitly emphasised this link in its General Recommendation No 21 on equality between marriage and the family, which focuses largely on Article 16. The General Recommendation states: This, in turn, has spawned several land rights movements demanding the recognition and affirmation of the fundamental right to land. The claim that land rights are human rights has been a common denominator for movements in India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and many other countries around the world. For these land rights movements, articulating a land right is seen as a way to promote the protection and promotion of a central social issue: the recognition that local people have the right to use, own and control developments on their own lands. Land rights not only directly affect individual property rights, but are also at the heart of social justice. The most recent step towards equal land rights in India was the Hindu Succession Act 2005. The Act sought to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex contained in the Hindu Succession Act, 1956. In the new amendment, daughters and sons have the same right to receive land from their parents.
[14] This law was both a legally and socially important step for women`s rights to land. It not only prescribes equality in land inheritance by law, but also affirms the role of women as equals in society. Food insecurity, climate change and rapid urbanization have also drawn attention to how land is used, controlled and managed by states and private actors. Land rights are generally not seen as a human rights issue. These rights generally concern the rights to use, control and transfer property. These include the right to occupy, enjoy and use lands and resources; restrict or exclude other people from the land; transfer, sale, purchase, grant or loan; inherit and bequeath; development or improvement; leasing or subletting; and benefit from improved land values or rental income (FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, 2002). Legally, land rights generally fall into the categories of land laws, land ownership contracts or planning regulations; But they are rarely associated with human rights laws. At the international level, no treaty or declaration specifically refers to a human right to land. In fact, strictly speaking, there is no human right to land under international law. The above examples certainly represent an important development in international human rights law. However, it is paradoxical that, despite the increasingly accepted perception that the realization of two fundamental human rights (food and housing) depends on the protection of the right to land, this right is not considered fundamental, as it does not appear anywhere in international treaties, despite the demands of activists, international non-governmental organizations and other actors of civil society.4 It is questionable whether human rights are not putting the cart before the horse by affirming that land rights are essential, without anchoring them clearly and anchoring them in the legal framework.In many countries, access to and rights to land are often stratified and based on hierarchical and segregated systems in which the poorest and least educated have no security over land ownership. Control of land rights has always been an instrument of oppression and colonization. One of the most striking examples is apartheid in South Africa, where land rights were used as a central element of the apartheid regime. Although less extreme, the vast social movements of landless peasants across Latin and Central America are also a response to the control of land by the wealthy and dominant elites. More and more people are being forcibly displaced or evicted from their land to make way for large development or commercial projects such as dams, mines, oil and gas facilities or ports. In many countries, the shift to large-scale agriculture has also led to forced evictions, displacement and local food insecurity, which has contributed to increased rural-urban migration, putting additional pressure on access to urban land and housing. This reference to cultural integrity found some echoes in the recent decision of the African Commission on Human and Peoples` Rights (ACHPR) in the case of the Endorois community in Kenya. The case involved the forced eviction of the Endorois community from their ancestral lands in the heart of the Great Rift Valley to create a game reserve, plunge a community of traditional pastoralists into poverty and bring them to the brink of cultural extinction. In this case, the indigenous community asserted that access to its ancestral territory “is considered sacred in the same way as the guarantee of livelihoods and is inextricably linked to the cultural integrity of the community and its traditional way of life” (AFRICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES` RIGHTS, 2010, para. 16). In its decision, the African Commission was granted the right to cultural integrity by recognizing that the removal of the indigenous community from its ancestral lands constitutes a violation of its right to cultural integrity based on freedom of religion (Article 8), the right to culture (Article 17) and access to natural resources (Article 21) of the African Charter.
Many laws and international conventions affirm the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1989 Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO 169), the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the American Convention on Human Rights. In the economy, property rights form the basis of all trade, and the allocation of property rights in a society affects the efficiency of resource use. Property usually refers to the ownership of a thing or things, but the word is also often associated with the idea of ownership of land. The right to property is a common denominator in most of the world`s legal systems, which generally consider it one of the fundamental freedoms of the individual. Most constitutions have a strongly entrenched guarantee of this right (ALLEN, 2007), which has played an enormous role in the development of human norms and values. Although land rights are fundamental to achieving a higher standard of living, certain groups of individuals are systematically excluded from land regulations.
Comments are closed.