Progress toward securing the land rights of forest communities has slowed around the world, with some hard-won gains threatening to be rolled back in some countries even as others see advances, say forest experts.
"If the lease has been found to be fraudulently issued, then it needs to be cancelled, that's the whole issue, that's the bottom line," says Effrey Dademo of Act Now.
RRI says the overriding picture in 2013 remained one of continuing resource grabs by local elites and corporations, aided by governments eager to give away land to investors on almost any terms.
International expert on land-grabbing Fred Pearce says the Pacific has some of the world's worst examples of the practice.
The FAO draft principles have little local basis and less community future, and are very likely to be employed to obscure the power imbalances that exist.
Let us focus on the real issue that our legislators should be grasping: how do we keep farmers operating and attract farmers to own the land they work, and not become peasants on land rented from institutional investors, domestic or foreign.
Only the Amazon and Congo basins rival Papua New Guinea for pristine tropical wilderness. But 5 million hectares of its jungle is under threat from foreign land grabs and back-door logging.
Azerbaijani Minister of Agriculture Heydar Asadov meets with representatives of Qatar Holding to study opportunities for investment in Azerbaijan’s agriculture.
At the opening of the “Emerging Equatorial Guinea” Symposium, the government announces a Co-Investment Fund to support foreign investments, including in agriculture for which it has set aside 100,000 ha.
"Agriculture land in Asia is under pressure ... there is an opportunity for responsible investment in agriculture by Asian countries in Africa," says India's Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar.
Pension funds try to adopt a sustainability perspective when investing in farmland abroad, but there is not much consensus on what it means and how to measure it.
A true revolution would be in encouraging people's own agricultural innovations not creating new (African) markets for Big Business in agriculture, argues Shalini Bhutani.