Strategies to Get Gender onto the Agenda of the “Land Grab” Debate

Strategies to get gender onto the agenda of the “land grab” debate

Author: Elizabeth Daley - 2011

The International Land Coalition (ILC)’s Commercial Pressures on Land initiative aims to support the efforts of ILC members and other stakeholders to influence global, regional, and national processes to enable secure and equitable access to land for poor women and men in the face of increasing commercial demand. Its global research contains a careful and focused analysis of the gendered impacts of commercial pressures on land (CPL), and especially the impacts on women. This concludes that:

1. Women (and women’s NGOs and CSOs) need to actively and strategically organise at all levels to get gender issues around CPL on the table of current and forthcoming processes on regulatory responses;

2. The gendered impacts of CPL need to be seriously addressed within this process in relation to all four aspects of women’s vulnerability (systemic discrimination related to land access, ownership, and control; systemic discrimination related to decision-making; relative income poverty; and general physical vulnerability); and

3. Gender issues must not be subsumed within the broader debate on CPL.