Newsletter no 41 - Beyond Land – Territory and Food Sovereignty

Box 1 - Old story, new threats: digitalization of land in Indonesia
Digital technologies are increasingly being applied to land governance across the globe. Promoters of digitalization claim that it will enhance the efficiency of land administration and provide more tenure security (see Nyéléni Newsletter on Digitalization). Digital satellite imagery, drones, electronic databases and blockchain technology are used to map, demarcate and register land, store land-related data and facilitate (...)

Voice from the field 1 - Climate change and small-scale fishers
Fatima Majeed, Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, Ibrahim Haidery, Karachi, Pakistan.
Climate change has had a profound effect on our lives as small-scale fishermen and fisherwomen. It has disrupted the fishing season, increased the sea level, and reduced the availability of fish. The number of small-scale fishers had decreased as fishing as a livelihood can no longer sustain them. Especially women were forced to take up jobs in (...)

In the Spotlight 1
From agrarian reform to people’s rights to territories: a brief history of people’s struggles for natural resources
The struggle for land has been a pillar of the food sovereignty movement since its emergence in the 1990s. At that time, peasant and landless organizations in different regions of the world were mobilizing against extreme land concentration and large farms (sometimes called latifundios), which had often been inherited from colonial times. In 1999, La Via (...)

Editorial: Beyond Land – Territory and Food Sovereignty Illustration by Luisa Rivera / www.luisarivera.cl
Land has always been a highly contested good. Control over land and related resources reflect the power relations in a country/region, and are an indicator of existing social injustices. At the same time, these resources are central to the rights, livelihoods and identity of small-scale food producers, and they have been at the heart of the food sovereignty movement from its beginning. (...)