Location
The goal of the WFAL 2016 had been to organise a world forum in 2016 to address the major issues linked to unequal access to land, natural resources (see The Call). Finally, the global assembly took place in Valencia, Spain (31st March, 1-2 April 2016) with more than 400 participants from 70 countries from today at the Global Forum on Access to Land and Natural Resources.
Ten years after the World Forum on Agrarian Reforms (Valencia, Spain, 2004) and the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2006) the trends seemed unchanged if not worse.
Making a precise assessment of the situation had been imperative. An evaluation of the short and long terms consequences had been essential. It couldn’t must ignore none of the great economical, social, political and environmental prejudices due to the ongoing processes. It was the condition to identify responses able to solve the problems.
Implementing such an analysis had been possible according to the signatories of the WFAL 2016 Call, if citizens from every continent and the organizations in charge of representing or guaranteeing their interets could effectively debate into a structured and contradictory process: farmer and other civil society organisations, governmental organisations, indepedant or public research institutes.
The WFAL 2016 Call aimed at creating the conditions necessary for such a debate, with the guarantee that each one’s point of view and analysis had been taken into consideration by all, towards the invention of the most constructive proposals.
Members:
Resources
Displaying 1 - 5 of 25Workshop 1: Land Grabbing and Land Concentration The Quantitative Evaluation, The Players
After an initial plenary session on developments in access to land and natural resources in the different continents, the workshop participants were given the opportunity to give their many personal accounts, describe the various forms of land grabbing and concentration, discuss the scope of the processes under way and question whether the tools available to quantify them were adequate.
WORKSHOP 3: HALIEUTIC RESOURCES
We are currently seeing the development of a set of laws and practices preventing artisanal fishermen and their communities from having rights to fishing stock. The topic of halieutic resources generally provokes little interest when raised in relation to natural resources grabbing, despite the fact that millions of people’s income earning rely on fishing and aquaculture1. In the same way, fishing is vital to ensuring global food security. In many countries, fish is the largest source of high-quality animal protein for people and form an important part of their diet.
WORKSHOP 2: FOREST TERRITORIES
In the same way as other resources, forest territories are being grabbed. Companies, often with the support of States, degrade these territories and deprive local people of their homes or resources on which their living conditions depend.
WORKSHOP 4: EVICTIONS, RURAL EXODUS, MIGRATIONS, CONSEQUENCES FOR CITIES
There is a close relationship between the health of family farming and the state of urban development.
WORKSHOP 5: THE DIFFICULTIES OF WOMEN’S ACCESS TO LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES
Throughout the world, the vast majority of women are faced with conditions of access to land and control of land and natural resources that are unequal to those of men.
Social relations have trivialized the fact that they are entirely in charge of domestic work and the education of children, which prevents them from devoting themselves as much as men to agricultural activities. In the fields, they are the forced laborers of the family and take on the often less valued tasks, considered as part of their domestic obligations. As a result, they generally receive no income.