Land provides income and employment for a large majority of people in developing countries. Three of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas—2.1 billion living on less than $2 a day and 880 million on less than $1 a day. Agriculture is a source of livelihoods for an estimated 86 percent of rural people: this group includes waged agricultural labourers working on plantations and larger commercial farms, as well as those labourers who make their living working less formally for smallholder farmers. In most developing countries, however, land ownership remains highly unequal, with Gini coefficients ranging from 0.51 in Sub-Saharan Africa, 0.54 in South East Asia to 0.78 in Latin America. This means that the benefits of agricultural growth are generally captured by the large landowners, and that it potentially delivers fewer benefits to poor people.

Land and labour are inextricably linked. Providing secure tenure can enhance an individual or household’s asset base, creating incentives for investment and improving labour productivity. There are clear linkages between control over land and control over labour assets, for example through reciprocal exchange and linked contractual arrangements such as sharecropping. Exchanges or transactions in land markets can be tied (or ‘interlocked’) with transactions in other markets including, in the case of sharecropping, labour.

However, agricultural workers have not been considered important stakeholders in many land reforms, and most often they have not benefited much of land reform processes. This has further contributed to their marginalization. In such cases, land reform is likely to have a limited impact in terms of poverty reduction and improvement of poor people's livelihoods.

By paying adequate attention to poor agricultural workers/labour and vulnerable people, and ensuring provision of appropriate complementary inputs and services, land reform processes can effect poverty reduction by protecting property rights, improving productivity and conditions of labour and contributing to sustainable rural development.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed by FAO and ILO in 2004 includes a specific area of work on issues related to access to land. During the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) held in March 2006 in Porto Alegre (Brazil), the interest by the two organizations to revitalize collaboration on areas related to land tenure/land reform was reconfirmed.

Further collaboration will focus on local development planning, with particular attention to decentralization and land management at local and village level, land use planning and Participatory Negotiated Territorial Development (PNTD).

 

Contacts

FAO Focal Point: Paul Munro Faure, NRLA (NRLA-chief@fao.org)

ILO Focal Point: Lene Olsen, ACTRAV (olsen@ilo.org)