The above mentioned process was initiated by Land Tenure and Management Unit of Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN. This was held on 24 & 25 November 2008.
The meeting was attended by FAO officials (mainly Land Tenure Unit, Forestry Department, Right to Food Unit, but unfortunately no one from Fisheries Department due to illness, from Indigenous Peoples focal point, and Gender Unit), IFAD, UN-Habitat, Global Land Tools Network, International Land Coalition, CGIAR. Klaus Deininger, from the World Bank was not able to attend the meeting.
Representatives from the following governments were also there:
- Nepal, Ministry of Land Reform
- Palestina
- Finland, permanent representation to FAO
- Germany, GTZ
- Sweden, SIDA
- Norway, permanent representation to FAO
- Brazil, permanent representation to FAO. The Brazilian representative played a very active role in identifying key questions and in framing the process in a more political way.
The other participants were from the academia, consultants and NGOs. The organizers tried to invite representatives from the private sector but none of them was able to attend. A consultant made a presentation about how to involve the private sector in this process.
Substantial issues were addressed and discussed during the meeting. The most relevant were:
- Nature of the process: are these guidelines supposed to be the outcome of an intergovernmental negotiation process with broad civil society participation like the guidelines on the right to food; or are they rather supposed to be the result of a technical consultation? The idea is to go for the first option but the mind setting of the officials involved is very technical.
- Nature of the instrument: why going for voluntary guidelines? Why not going for a code of conduct?
- Tenure vs. territory: Indigenous representatives expressed unease about the concept land and natural resources tenure because it does not capture their profound relationship with Mother Earth.
- Good governance vs. human rights: why not directly develop an instrument to protect and promote the human rights of marginalized groups related to land and natural resources instead of talking about good governance?
- Scope: Only land? Land, water, fisheries and forest but excluding minerals and biodiversity? Altogether? Only tenure? Or tenure and use/management?
- ICARRD vs. commoditization of land and natural resources: IPC strongly advocated for understanding this initiative as follow up to ICARRD in order to make operative the ICARRD principle of adopting a rights-approach to land and natural resources. The government of Brazil and some FAO officials supported this view. Academics from Eastern Europe and Central Asia and some consultants were the strongest advocates of privatization and commoditization.
- Rural and urban land tenure issues should be dealt with during the process. Therefore, it will be a joint initiative FAO-UN Habitat.
- Importance of involvement of civil society, highlighting the particular importance of social movements was reiterated. Importance of establishing a clear and transparent mechanism for CSO participation.
Next steps in the process:
- FAO's Land Tenure Unit will revise the discussion paper according to the outcome of the meeting.
- Briefing to all permanent representations in February next year in order to seek the support from governments to the initiative.
- Initiative will be presented to the Committee of Agriculture (COAG) in order to get a mandate to start officially the process. The Brazilian representative suggested presenting the initiative both to COAG and the Committee on Food Security (CFS). COAG and eventually CFS will decide then about the nature, scope and content of the initiative.
- Regional consultations. The original idea is to hold them in the course of 2009 but this schedule might be too tight. It is not decided yet if the regional consultations with civil society will be held linked in time and venue to the official ones, or if they will be separated. Resources were mentioned as a constraint to the breadth of civil society consultation.
Next steps for IPC participants:
- Discuss about the open questions related to the substantive issues above in order to decide what kind of process we want.
- Lobby national governments from now on to April so that they take into account our proposals in their decision during COAG and CFS.
Some experts were represented the interest of Market Economic Policies and promoted the privatization as a means of better option for the land tenure process.
Also, we felt with the Eatern European analysis, the Liberalization of the land and Natural resources contribute to the resonsible governance of those resources.
Although the WB did not represent the meeting physically, the presented paper from WB had the trend setting towards the privatization of the land and natural resources as responsible governance.
By: Mr. Herman Kumara
General secretary of WFFP
Convener of National Fisheries Solitarity.
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