The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an intergovernmental body and functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) mandated to promote gender equality and the advancement of women. The fifty-sixth session of the CSW, which takes place at the UN Headquarters in New York from 27 February to 9 March 2012, will focus on the theme “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges”.

This paper on agroecology and women's empowerment in Brazil includes a long section on "The Right to Land and Natural Resources in Brazil"  from a feminist perspective. It is published by the Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). The summary of this article follows. 

Front Line Defenders

On 23 January 2013 Front Line Defenders released its fourth Annual Report on Global Challenges facing Human Rights Defenders around the World in 2012.

The report explores the situation on both the global and regional level including several countries examined in focus namely: Burundi, Vietnam, Guatemala Kazakhstan and Algeria. It highlights the 'unabated' targeting of human rights defenders for their work documenting abuses, exposing corruption, or pushing for reform.

Land and Agrarian Rights Movement

Communities of Grand Cape Mount, Liberia

March 25th, 2013

ETC Group

Oxfam International

Food First & Transnational Institute

In the face of violent dispossession and incorporation into an exploitative labor regime, indigenous peasant families in northern Guatemala are struggling to access land and defend their resources as the basis of their collective identity as Q'eqchi' peoples or R'al Ch'och ("sons and daughters of the earth"). This brief is the first in the Land & Sovereignty in the Americas series, co-published by Food First and the Transnational Institute.

European Coordination Via Campesina and Hands Off the Land Network

The Inspection Panel is an independent complaints mechanism for people who believe that they have been, or are likely to be, adversely affected by a World Bank-funded project. The Panel provides for accountability through assessment of Bank's compliance with operational policies. The process is designed to pro-vide redress to affected people and address issues of policy non-compliance and harm.

ETC Group has been monitoring the power and global reach of agro-industrial corporations for several decades – including the increasingly consolidated control of agricultural inputs for the industrial food chain: proprietary seeds and livestock genetics, chemical pesticides and fertilizers and animal pharmaceuticals. Collectively, these inputs are the chemical and biological engines that drive industrial agriculture.