Securing Land Rights and Women’s Participation in Land-Based Investments Is Crucial for Food Systems Transformations

Food systems transformations must go hand in hand with securing land rights

Changing the way we produce, distribute, and consume food is essential to tackling many crises facing the world today—from climate change and biodiversity loss to increasing inequality, food insecurity, and malnutrition. But to bring about fair, resilient, and sustainable outcomes, these urgent food systems transformations must ensure secure and equitable land rights for communities that live on and from the land, especially for women and other historically marginalized groups. Promoting responsible and gender-responsive investments in agriculture and food systems can help achieve these critical interrelated objectives.

Inspired by our participation in the 10th Global Land Forum (GLF) in Bogotá, Colombia, last month, we reflect in this article on the important links between food systems transformations, land rights, and women’s empowerment. We propose ways that governments and other actors can promote responsible investments in agriculture and food systems that strengthen land rights and advance women’s empowerment.

The complex links between food systems, land rights, and women’s empowerment

Discussions at the 10th GLF highlighted the complex interrelationships between food systems, land rights, and women’s empowerment. On the one hand, strengthening land rights, especially for women, Indigenous Peoples, and small-scale producers, is crucial for ensuring equitable, resilient, and sustainable food systems. Women play a major role in food production globally, but are often excluded from land ownership and decision making about how land is used. Stronger land rights for women, Indigenous Peoples, and other excluded groups can support their empowerment and ensure they benefit equally from land-based investments in agriculture. Secure land tenure enables long-term investment in sustainable farming practices and is associated with better environmental stewardship and improved local food security and nutrition outcomes, especially where women are empowered. 

On the other hand, our current food systems and the market-led arrangements that govern them undermine the rights of people to live on and from the land. Industrial agriculture harms the biodiversity and ecosystems on which many communities rely for their food and livelihoods. The combination of an international investment regime that privileges foreign investors over local communities, concentrated corporate power in agricultural markets, and weak governance of land and investments in agriculture contributes to land grabs and the violation of the rights of those living on and from the land.

In many developing regions where investment in agriculture is needed to transform food systems, governance of such investments—and of land—is weak. In such contexts, large-scale investments in agriculture risk harming local communities, including by dispossessing them of their land, hindering their access to natural resources, or displacing subsistence farming and compromising household food security. They also risk reinforcing gender and other inequalities, especially where women and other groups are excluded from decision-making processes around these agricultural investments. 

In this context, it is fitting that the Bogotá Declaration both recognized the need for the urgent transformation of food systems and called for these transformations to be just, equitable, and inclusive, as well as to respect and strengthen human rights and land tenure.

Promoting responsible investment in agriculture and food systems is key to advancing just, equitable, and inclusive food systems transformations

Food systems transformation should involve or be accompanied by steps to strengthen land rights, including customary and communal rights, and advance gender-responsive land reform. Land governance should also be integrated into policy processes driving food systems transformations, including by involving participatory land-use planning, addressing impacts on land use, and ensuring tenure safeguards.

Promoting responsible investment in agriculture and food systems can also play a key role in advancing food systems transformations that strengthen land rights. Governments should strengthen the legal frameworks governing investments in agriculture, making them more robust and comprehensive by integrating recognized international principles such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure and the Committee on World Food Security Principles of Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems. Doing so can help ensure that investments in agriculture secure free, prior, and informed consent and involve the meaningful participation of affected communities and groups, including women and Indigenous Peoples; respect their rights, including customary rights; involve mechanisms, such as contract farming arrangements, that are fair and equitable; and create accountability for investors. 

Such robust legal frameworks are underpinned by comprehensive national laws governing agricultural investments, but they can also involve other complementary legal measures and tools. For example, at the GLF, IISD and partners delivered a session exploring how model agreements for responsible contract farming can be used to make contract farming fairer, more inclusive, and more equitable while advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Similarly, governments can use model contract templates for agricultural investments to promote investments in agriculture and food systems that are responsible, inclusive, and gender responsive. 

The importance of promoting responsible investment for inclusive and equitable food systems transformations is underscored in the Bogotá Declaration, which calls on governments, investors, and other stakeholders to promote investments that respect and strengthen land rights and tenure security, ensure benefit-sharing and meaningful participation of affected communities, and pay greater attention to women’s empowerment. 

Echoing this, we urge developing country governments and their development partners to redouble their efforts to strengthen legal frameworks to promote responsible, sustainable, and gender-responsive investments, making use of the full range of available guidance and tools to do so.