Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems.
The Government of South Africa has a major holding of forest land, with a total estate covering 892,000 ha of forest and associated land. Within the state's forest holding there is a wide diversity of forest and land types including: commercial plantations and other afforested land; indigenous forests; legally protected (indigenous) forest areas; and associated bare land. This land is partly owned by the state and partly held on behalf of local communities, some of whom also have existing rights to use the forest land for various purposes.
In developed and developing countries all over the world, farmers and indigenous and local communities have traditional knowledge, expertise, skills and practices related to food security and to food and agricultural production and diversity. Since its creation in 1945, FAO has recognized the significant contributions these make to food and agriculture, and the relevance of on-farm/in situ and ex situ conservation of genetic resources for food and agriculture.
From the outset, the development of agriculture has been strongly associated with women’s endeavour. In fact, women’s contribution to agriculture goes back to the origins of farming and the domestication of animals when the first human settlements were established more than 6 000 years ago. Over the years, the division of responsibilities and labour within households and communities tended to place farming and nutrition-related tasks under women’s domain. Nowadays, in many societies women continue to be mainly responsible for family food security and nutrition.
In recent years, local people and rural communities have assumed increasing prominence in strategies for natural resource management.This paper briefly reviews some of the central legal issues that are associated with this shift. In doing so, its goals are limited. It does not ad dress fundamental questions about when, where and what kind of management works, nor attempt to identify the political, social, economic and environmental ingredient s for success – subjects on which there is a huge, if still inconclusive, literature.
On the occasion of the International Year of Mountains-2002, FAO and its partners undertook a large-scale assessment and global review of the current status and future trends of integrated and participatory watershed management. The overall objectives were to promote the exchange and dissemination of experiences in implementing watershed management projects in the decade from 1990 to 2000 and to identify the vision for a new generation of watershed management programmes and projects.
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