Fao Land Tenure Studies

This publication deals with key issues in land tenure, especially as they relate to food insecurity and rural development situations. Land tenure issues are frequently ignored in rural development interventions, with often long-lasting, negative results. This guide is designed to assist technical officers in governments and civil society in understanding why and how land tenure issues should be considered in rural development projects. It analyses important contexts such as environmental degradation, gender discrimination, and conflicts, where land tenure is currently of critical concern.

This issue of the Land Tenure Journal includes a geographically and technically diverse range of papers covering Europe, Africa, and Asia. They cover a variety of different situations where land tenure plays a key role in improving food security and reducing poverty: from land consolidation as an alternative to compulsory land acquisition in Germany; to rural land markets and land concentration in Romania; to the impact of secured land rights on crop productivity in Pakistan; to customary land associations and sustainability issues in Papua New Guinea; to addressing land conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) through a Green Negotiated Territorial Development approach.

This publication contains an English version of the FAO multilingual thesaurus covering terminology used in the field of land tenure, mainly relating to the following subjects: legal, institutional, historical, description of space, traditional or written land tenure regulations, topographical and land management information techniques. The purpose of the thesaurus is to provide reference material for FAO officials and field experts involved in the implementation of land tenure projects, as well as for use by researchers in rural development issues and for use in training in natural resource management.

Main types of communal tenure. Origin and description of communal tenures. Primary tenures. Secondary tenures. Tertiary tenures. Advantages and disadvantages of primary and secondary communal tenure. Future prospects of communal tenure.

This Technical Guide explains how investors can invest responsibly in agricultural land in line with the Voluntary Guidelines.(Although the Voluntary Guidelines address both forests and fisheries this guide focuses only on investments in agricultural land. ) It is not an attempt to set new standards. Rather, the guide explains what the Voluntary Guidelines mean and how they can help firms to understand and manage risk related to land tenure.