IN THIS ISSUE:

Omidyar Network Provides $4.3 Million to RDI to Bring Land Rights to Millions in India
RDI is pleased to announce one of the largest grants in its history: $4.3 million from Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm committed to creating opportunity for people around the world. The grant will allow RDI to expand its work with the state government of Andhra Pradesh and provide land and opportunity for millions of rural families. More...

Land Rights and the Global Food Crisis
What does the global food crisis have to do with land? For nearly half the world’s population--the majority of whom live in rural areas and survive on less than $1 a day--land means everything. Read the response of RDI’s founder, Roy Prosterman, on the world food crisis and how secure land rights can lead to food security. More…

Women’s Land Rights in Burundi: "Hot and Bad News from Bujumbura"
Just days after RDI attorney Deborah Espinosa returned from Burundi, violent conflicts erupted in the capital. Read her inside look at Burundi’s efforts to rebuild after a 12-year civil war, and the status of women’s and widows’ land rights. More…

SOLD OUT: Saving Land for Farmers in China: A Case for Barefoot Lawyers
On Friday, May 30, RDI attorneys Li Ping and Zhu Keliang will hold a policy briefing on land rights for China’s farmers and a new initiative to bring legal aid to the countryside. Want to get involved and help support this new initiative? Read on. More…

Omidyar Network Provides $4.3 Million to RDI to Bring Land Rights to Millions in India

RDI is pleased to announce one of the largest grants in its history: $4.3 million from Omidyar Network. Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm committed to creating opportunity for people around the world. Established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network supports nonprofit and for-profit efforts that enable people to improve their lives and make powerful, lasting contributions to their communities.

This grant from Omidyar Network will help RDI expand its work to provide women and their families with secure land rights in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. The grant will also allow RDI to expand its collaboration with Andhra Pradesh’s state government and other partners to implement programs that provide land and opportunity for the more than 2 million rural landless families who live there.

RDI’s ongoing work in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal and Orissa all confirm that even a small plot of land can provide a foundation for extremely poor people - especially women - to build a sustainable livelihood and a better economic future.

“Omidyar Network is deeply impressed by the work RDI is doing in India," said Omidyar Network's Managing Partner Matt Bannick. Bannick noted that after he and Omidyar Network's Founding Partner, Pierre Omidyar, observed RDI's work in India firsthand, Omidyar Network became even more excited about how micro-land ownership can empower women and help them to pull themselves out of poverty. "We're pleased to support RDI and its innovative work," Bannick said.

Since 2002, RDI has been working with the local nonprofit Society for Eradication of Rural Poverty to help rural families –particularly women – gain access to small plots of land as part of the RDI-designed “Indira Kranthi Patham” (IKP) program. Through activities that RDI helped design, IKP assists poor families in gaining access to land in two distinct and innovative ways: (1) the negotiated purchase of land, and (2) legal aid to families who have claims to public land formally allocated to the family in the past. RDI also will work with Andhra Pradesh partners on a third option: the negotiated lease of agricultural land by poor women.

Last December, India’s central government endorsed micro-land ownership as a key strategy for poverty alleviation by including it in its 11th Five-Year Plan. Since landlessness is the best predictor of poverty in India, the Five-Year Plan aims to allot micro-plots the size of one-tenth of an acre to landless rural families in India.

After three years of intensive research and assistance to state and national policy-makers, it is exciting to see the national government embrace key RDI-proposed programs for micro-land ownership.

With the support of Omidyar Network, RDI is able to continue to provide the Indian government with the support and tools it needs to expand land access for its poorest and most marginalized citizens. This investment will dramatically expand the growth of programs that provide land rights to the poorest in Andhra Pradesh and help RDI improve women’s access to land and livelihoods.

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Land Rights and the Global Food Crisis
By Roy L. Prosterman, Founder and Chair Emeritus

The UN Food & Agriculture Organization’s food-price index soared by 60% between March 2007 to March 2008, and in some markets basic grain prices have increased even more. Resulting riots and unrest reach more poor countries every day, and many of their governments attempt drastic measures like export bans or rationing. What may well be conservative estimates put 100-130 million people at great risk of severe hunger as a consequence of the price increases, and it is hard to envision the impact not extending to most of the 1.2 billion on our planet who survive on less than $1 a day.

Do land tenure reforms (such as those promoted by RDI) have a role to play in addressing this global food crisis? The answer, over the mid-term and beyond, is decidedly “Yes.”

But the importance of these reforms—which bear on some of the largest groups most severely impacted—must be consciously recognized as part of the current dialogue on solutions. It is vital to recognize that the climb in world food prices is likely to be with us for a lengthy period of time, requiring far more than added food relief (whether sent or locally produced) and fertilizer shipments, vital though short-term responses.

The Forecast
The World Bank predicts that food prices will stay high through 2015, and some of the responsible factors indeed appear durable. In particular:

• Large—and welcome—improvements in diet for significant portions of the populations in China and India, as those two countries (together, 37% of the world’s population) continue to experience strong growth in GDP. Much of this improvement, towards a diet which we in the developed countries have long enjoyed, comes in meat consumption, and most of this is dependent on grain feeding.
  
  
• Continuing increases in energy costs, for a number of reasons embedded in the international geopolitical system—indeed, some now say that oil at $150-$200 a barrel is quite thinkable, and others predict that a successful terrorist attack in the Persian Gulf would make even those estimates look low. High energy prices, in turn, greatly affect food prices, through their impact on input costs (fertilizer, etc.), transportation costs (for foodstuffs not consumed at the same place they are produced), and all stages of post-farm processing.

(Some other factors that have played into the recent price increases may or may not have staying power: extreme weather conditions in some growing areas may or may not reflect climate change; diversion of cropland to produce ethanol from corn—where over 20% of American’s corn crop went in 2007—may continue to increase to meet present legislative mandates, or the mandates could end and give way to producing more-efficient switchgrass on land which does not compete with food crops; and a series of massive distortions of international agricultural markets could persist or be ended—ranging from the long-time subsidies of the EU and the U.S. to the new export restrictions imposed by some developing countries.)

So, what to do?
Emergency aid—to ship food, or buy and distribute food locally, and send inputs like seed and fertilizer to farmers (especially small farmers lacking financial resources)—are clear first steps, and there are encouraging signs that both public and private actors are mobilizing to do this.

But there will be vital further steps in the responses needed, which might be along the following lines:

• First, the opportunity must be seized, by governments, philanthropy, NGOs and the media, to redirect attention to the needs of the rural sector. “Urban bias” in development (the phrase comes from Michael Lipton, a leading British development thinker) has been rampant, and far more in resources must be devoted to the rural sector, where three-quarters of those living under $1 a day are found.
  
  
• Second, within the rural sector, there must be much more focus on the needs of the small farmers. They produce most of the food in the developing countries and, by the great weight of empirical evidence, are more productive and efficient, acre-for-acre, than the large farmers in those countries. Supporting the small farmers means addressing additional factors that go beyond access to inputs, ranging from basic technical advice and related research, to agricultural micro-credit, to marketing information and other marketing support, to possible measures like futures markets and crop insurance.
  
  
• Third, and finally, issues of land access and security of land rights—the land tenure issues with which RDI concerns itself—must be addressed:
  
  The landless poor in India
  Our “second” point above concerns itself with small farmers—that is, with families that already have access to land to farm. But what of those who have no land to begin with? In India, for example, 13 to 18 million rural households (by some estimates, more) have no land whatsoever. This comprises 70 to 100 million of the poorest people on the planet, most of them agricultural laborers paid a wage (on the days when there is work).
  
  This will be one of the groups most seriously affected by higher food prices, and their deepening plight suggests an acceleration of the Indian government’s recent commitment (in the 11th Five Year Plan, 2008-2012) to provide ownership of 1/10th acre micro-plots of homestead land to all such families. This builds on the ongoing experience with such micro-plot distributions in Karnataka and West Bengal states, with which RDI has been closely involved, and which the Plan says “should be generalized across all states.”
  
  Incentives to invest in land
  But even existing small farmers will fare much better if, besides the improved inputs, they can offer a welcoming setting for such inputs by engaging in major improvements of the land they farm (intensively improved soils, water capture and control, land leveling and terracing, etc.). And to make the investments needed to thus improve their land, farmers must have a multi-year time horizon that allows recapturing the investment and profiting from it. This requires either ownership, or long-term secure tenure, an issue seen in China, where RDI has done village research and provided advice for many years.
  
  If China’s 190 million small-farm households, already on the land, all had fully implemented, secure rights to that land (the present law provides for 30 year renewable rights, but has been implemented in only some 40% of rural villages), their proclivity to invest in such land—whether via personal labor, savings, or borrowing—and thereby increase production would grow significantly. (On this, see our most recent survey results, described in K. Zhu et al. , The Rural Land Question in China: Analysis and Recommendation Based on a Seventeen-Province Survey, 38(4) N.Y.U. Journal of International Law & Politics, 817-818 (2006).)
  
  Such increased production would enhance China’s ability to feed itself, and even to export some agricultural products, reducing greatly China’s future net import requirements from what they otherwise would be.

These land access and tenure-security issues are found in many developing countries beyond India and China, and clearly warrant prominent inclusion as the various actors craft and support further responses to the global food crisis.

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Women’s Land Rights in Burundi: "Hot and Bad News from Bujumbura"
By Deborah Espinosa, RDI Attorney

“Hot and bad news from Bujumbura” was the email’s subject line, causing my heart to skip a beat. I had just returned from a two-week visit to Burundi (Bujumbura is the capital) where many women had shared that their most pressing concerns are war and rape—and then hunger. Their concerns are once again a reality. The “hot and bad news” was that the capital and six other areas were under attack again. The lives of women in Burundi were about to get even more difficult.

RDI has been working in Burundi, a small country in central Africa, to improve the legal framework for land, including securing land rights for women. Although land is the only source of livelihood for more than 90 percent of the population, and women account for 80 percent of the agricultural labor force, women have no formal rights to land. In Burundi’s conflict/post-conflict environment, lack of access to land makes women and their children even more vulnerable.

Imagine you are a Burundian woman.

Chances are you have 6.4 children and the only way that you can house and feed yourself and your children is to stay married. By law, you cannot inherit land as a daughter, and you cannot inherit land as a wife. And you do not have enough funds to purchase land. If your husband dies (as often occurs during times of conflict and where HIV/AIDs is highly prevalent), you will likely lose your house, your land, and your livelihood. And as a widow, remarriage is unlikely, further decreasing your chances of having a source of income for you and your family.

Raissa’s story is just one example of life for Burundian women. As a widow, Raissa has no access to land. After her husband died, his family forced Raissa and her three young children off of the land that she shared with her husband and which was the family’s sole source of nutrition and income. With nowhere to go, Raissa and her three children now live in a friend’s kitchen. They are able to eat only because they receive handouts from other women in the community. When Raissa sought the help of local authorities to let her return to her land, her husband’s family refused.  A woman with no access to land has no options.

As Burundi works to relocate hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced rural families, stories like Raissa’s are common. To support Burundi’s post-conflict reconciliation, RDI is providing legal analyses of Burundi’s draft land law and draft inheritance laws, with the goals of reducing land-related conflicts and improving women's access and rights to land. With the renewed conflict, women in Burundi need secure access and rights to land now more than ever.

To read more about RDI’s work to support women’s land rights, click here.

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SOLD OUT: Saving Land for Farmers in China: A Case for Barefoot Lawyers

RDI is sold-out for its policy briefing on May 30 at K&L Gates with attorneys Li Ping (RDI Attorney and Chief Representative of RDI Beijing Office) and Zhu Keliang (RDI Attorney and China Program Manager) to discuss the importance of “barefoot attorneys” in China.

More than 40 million poor farmers in China have lost their farmland due to compulsory takings by government to satisfy the demands of urban economic growth. The majority of them received little or no compensation, and they lack the education and skills to find urban jobs or alternative income. Now, most live on less than 40 cents a day.

The growing desperation has led to more than 40,000 violent protests in the countryside each year. This situation is the result of failure to enforce laws on compensation for land takings, as well as the lack of legal assistance available to rural peasant farmers.

As proven in other countries, grassroots-level legal aid (provided by “barefoot” lawyers) is an effective tool to:

• raise awareness about property rights among farmers and local officials
• help defend farmers’ land rights against various forms of violation, and
• promote the rule of law and the long-term security of land rights in the countryside.

Free and accessible legal aid will fill a critical need in rural China where millions of farmers lose their land and livelihoods every year. Secure land rights provide food security, increased income and economic and social stability.

To learn more about RDI’s work in China, click here.

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