Context: A report by the Land Inequality Initiative was recently launched by the Land Inequality Initiative.

• Land Inequality Initiative is steered by an informal reference group, composed of experts in the field of land and wider inequalities.

About Land inequality 

• Land inequality has been historically measured in terms of differences in land ownership.

However, currently it includes:

• Size and/or value of land that people access or hold;
• Level of security of tenure that people have;
• Quality of land, its characteristics, and assets that may be on it;
• Actual control that people have, including decision-making power over land;
• Control of benefits derived from the land, including the ability to appropriate value from it.

How land inequality is connected with other form of inequality?

• Land inequality is central to other forms of inequality as well as many global crises and trends such as economic, political, social, spatial and environmental inequality.
• Horizontal inequality, which is inequality based on gender, ethnicity or culture in specific groups of people, is interconnected with land access, ownership and control.
• These types of inequality undermine sustainability. This is because women, indigenous people and local communities tend to be the custodians of household well-being, bio-cultural conservation and social justice.

Key highlights of the Report

• Land inequality continues to threaten the livelihoods of an estimated 2.5 billion people involved in smallholder agriculture.
• The top 10 % of the rural population have 60 % of agricultural land value; the bottom half controls only 3 %.

Global land concentration has increased continuously since the 1980s.

• Today, the largest 1 % of farms in the world operate more than 70 %of the world’s farmland.
• 84 % of farms were smaller than two hectares, but they operated only about 12 % of farmland, with little opportunity to be part of corporate supply chains.

Smaller farms

• A clear trend in most low-income countries was an increasing number of farms, combined with smaller farm sizes.
• A vast majority of the smallest farms globally were in Africa and Asia, where they were essential to the livelihoods of a large proportion of the population.
• Reason behind shrinking average farm sizes in most low-income countries: Increasing number of mega-farms, each taking up thousands of hectares of space.

Larger Farms

• Across the world, and especially in higher-income countries, large farms were getting bigger.
• Polarised land and agri-food system
• Growing inequalities between the smallest landholders and the largest have accelerated with the emergence of mega-farms in terms of land size and value of production.
• The biggest danger is the expansion of corporate-controlled agriculture, which can render the locally dominant system unviable.

Suggestions to counter land inequality
Democratize land governance

• Land governance, from national policies to local institutions, should be based on broad representation, including representatives of the state and organisations of producers and other local land users.

Strengthen land-related regulation

• Governments should develop land ownership, land use, and land distribution policies and institutions to address patterns of land inequality and their drivers.

Invest in well-functioning land registries

• Invest in institutions for fully transparent land registries, including at decentralised levels.
• Land registries should include information regarding institutional ownership and control of land. This provides an informed basis for land taxation.

Strengthen transparency and monitoring of land holdings

• Ensure public access to information about all transfers of rights to use land, whether through purchase, rental, usage, or shareholding.

Legally enforce responsible corporate practice

• Governments should hold companies registered in their jurisdictions to account. They should oblige companies to report against the principles of key international frameworks, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises etc.

Recognize and protect women’s land rights

• Ensure gender equality in land rights, in law and in practice.

Build more sustainable and equitable production models and food systems

• Governments should support the more sustainable production models of small-scale producers.
• This means allowing them greater autonomy from corporate production systems and the ability to get reasonable returns from employing agroecological.

Road Ahead

• “The initial promise of agrarian reforms was to distribute land to the landless and provide title of ownership to cultivators. However, India’s agrarian reforms did not ensure egalitarianism in the agricultural community,” according to the Dalwai Committee Report asking for agriculture policies to factor in this aspect while crafting ways to double farmers’ income by 2022 as promised by Modi Govt.
• Change will require broad-based action, involving state institutions at all levels, donors and development partners, the private sector and people’s organisations, farmers and all those who make their living from land.