USAID welcomes The Coca-Cola Company’s recently announced commitments to ensure that its sugar suppliers protect the land rights of local communities. Coca-Cola - the world’s largest purchaser of sugar - agreed to revise its corporate Supplier Guiding Principles to incorporate principles that recognize and safeguard local communities’ and indigenous peoples’ rights to land and natural resources.

A new opinion piece describes how secure land rights can improve agricultural productivity and food security. In Why Strong Land Rights Advance Food Security, Eric Postel, USAID's Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Economic Growth, Education and Environment and Tjada McKenna, Feed the Future’s Deputy Coordinator for Development, explain what development practitioners can do to improve land rights and food security in a multitude of development projects.

A guest post by Dr. Steven Lawry, Global Lead, Land Tenure & Property Rights at DAI, a USAID partner and global development company committed to shaping a more livable world. Follow them @DAIGlobal

Land tenure security has been highlighted as one important link to food security in President Obama’s Feed the Future Progress Report, formally released this week. The report points out that in Tajikistan last year, the Feed the Future initiative supported the improvement of land rights and land use by working with the Government of Tajikistan to amend its land code to include ownership of land, use rights, and increased women’s equality. In addition, the U.S.

From Latin America to Southeast Asia, land rights and resource governance are at the center of many conflicts around the globe. In Colombia, land and rural development are the first agenda items in the ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In Burma, the world's longest-running civil war has left over 450,000 people internally displaced, with approximately 215,000 more in refugee camps along the Thai border.

The vast majority of Liberian citizens – those living in rural communities – are on a path toward having customary land ownership rights recognized for the first time in Liberia’s history. A major milestone in Liberia’s lengthy land tenure reform process was reached on May 21 when the Liberian Land Commission presented President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf with the country’s first-ever Land Rights Policy, which defines Public Land, Government Land, Customary Land, and Private Land, as well as Protected Areas that will be conserved for the benefit of all Liberians.

On May 17, Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will discuss her administration’s goals, her perspective on land rights and land tenure security, and some of the challenges facing Liberia at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker in Washington DC. A live stream of the event will be available at 2:30 p.m. EDT on May 17.

According to a new research report from the Enough Project, there is a brief open window for peace to take root in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The DRC conflict, which has lasted for over two decades, has left more than 6 million people dead, displaced countless others within DRC and throughout the region, and has led to trans-boundary regional conflict.

Strengthening women’s rights to own and inherit property provides them with greater opportunities to generate income and exercise control over family resources, which can improve women’s ability to feed and educate their children. This simple but powerful message is highlighted by Deborah Espinosa’s recent Huffington Post blog In Kenya, Land Rights Bring New Hope for Women and Girls. Espinosa is a senior attorney and land tenure specialist at Landesa, which implements USAID’s Kenya Justice project.

An April 10 article from the Thomson Reuters Foundation discusses the importance of securing land rights – particularly women’s land rights – in order to combat poverty, enhance food security, and increase vulnerable populations’ access to justice. According to the article, “when women have secure land rights, family health and education improves; women are less likely to be victims of domestic violence and are less vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS, and their participation in household decision-making rises.”

Following a November 2012 public roundtable conducted in Kabul through USAID’s Land Reform in Afghanistan (LARA) project, one man was moved to grant portions of his family’s land over to each of his sisters, who had previously been denied the opportunity to inherit any of the property. In Afghanistan, women often lack secure rights to inherit and own land, which makes them more vulnerable to poverty, domestic violence, hunger and homelessness. The LARA project works to secure property rights for Afghan citizens through improved institutional, policy, and legal systems.

IFPRI has just published a new paper that considers whether or not policy changes related to gender equality and women’s empowerment in Ethiopia are, or are not, mutually reinforcing. One set of changes involves certification of land use rights at the community level. See here for a discussion of USAID’s project supporting these efforts. Certification allows husbands and wives to be listed as joint holders of the rights (these rights are inheritable by the remaining spouse when the other spouse dies).