Post Type: Article

The Human Element of Mangrove Management

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
Fish trap checking in mangroves of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Originally appeared on Medium.

As global climate change continues to threaten coastal communities in the tropics, governments have increasingly focused on the promotion and conservation of mangrove forests for their protective qualities. Mangroves — trees and shrubs that grow in tropical estuaries — are among the world’s most productive ecosystems and, compared to other forest systems, have an impressive capacity to sequester and store carbon at high rates. They also serve as an important physical buffer, protecting coastal areas from storm surges and acting as “bioshields.” Despite these clear benefits, since 1980 the world has lost approximately 20 percent of its mangrove forests. With this in mind, there is a growing need to understand the factors, both biophysical and societal, that contribute to sustainable mangrove management.

Property boundaries in community-managed mangrove forests of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Property boundaries in community-managed mangrove forests of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo credit: Stephen Brooks/USAID

To date, discussions around mangrove forest conservation and rehabilitation have been highly technical, and focused primarily on ecological conditions under which mangroves can be planted and promoted. Lacking from this conversation is a more robust analysis about the ways land governance, resource rights arrangements, and land use planning — the social aspects of the conservation challenge — affect mangrove conservation and rehabilitation.

Compared to terrestrial forests, mangroves’ unique placement straddling land and sea has led to great ambiguity as to the specific jurisdictional agency overseeing their management (i.e. Forest, Aquaculture, and Marine) in many countries. Regardless, local land and resource governance systems often determine the ultimate success or failure of resource conservation efforts.

Read the full photo essay on Medium.

Land, Conflict and Sustainable Development

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
A man in Kakata, Liberia. Nearly all Liberians have been touched by land disputes in some way.

Originally appeared on Medium.

When I arrived in Liberia six years ago, I was tasked with facilitating the development of the country’s first national land policy. Of the many reasons why such a policy was needed — improving the enabling environment for economic growth; advancing better land and resource management in a country rich in natural resources — none was more striking than the prevalence of land disputes. Virtually every single Liberian has been touched in some way by a land dispute. Although disputes over land and natural resources played an important role in the 14-year civil war that ended in 2003, today the majority of land disputes do not grab headlines. But they are nevertheless a source of real anxiety and insecurity. No one can be sure that their land is free of disputes without clear laws governing who can own what land and under what conditions. And clear laws and policies need to be complemented by an accurate and up-to-date land information system that can tell you with a reasonable degree of certainty who owns what pieces of land and where the boundaries are.

According to a 2008 survey, 59 percent of Liberians said that violent land conflicts arise ‘often’ or ‘always.’ And 62 percent said that land was the most important cause of violent conflict between communities. This is confirmed by 2013–2014 baseline data from USAID’s impact evaluation of a program to strengthen community land governance. That data showed that almost every community surveyed described an ongoing, protracted land dispute.

Read the full photo essay on Medium.

Harvesting Sweet Success

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari

How Land Rights are Helping Tajikistan’s Apricot Farmers Reap the Fruits of their Labor

Originally appeared on Medium.

In the sweltering mid-June heat, a group of farmers in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province gathered to attend a training on land rights and farming techniques for one of the region’s most promising cash crops: apricots.

Farmers attend a training on women’s land rights and learn how to dry apricots for market on a local farm in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province. Photo: Sandra Coburn / The Cloudburst Group

Tajikistan was once known for its wide variety of sweet apricots and served as a primary producer of the fruit in the region. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of civil war in the 1990s devastated Tajikistan’s regional export fruit market. Farmers chopped down the trees for firewood and replaced the orchards with cotton fields. At the time, cotton was the nation’s most viable commercial crop due to a Soviet-era legacy that mandated cotton production on collective farms. After 1999, production began to recover, and since then, the Government of Tajikistan has made efforts to diversify agricultural production, including allocating more land for orchards.

An apricot farmer with her dried fruits in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province. Photo: Sandra Coburn / The Cloudburst Group

For this landlocked, mountainous nation, where roughly ten percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas and agriculture employs 53 percent of the workforce, cash crops like apricots represent an opportunity to increase household incomes and food security.

Apricots can be sold as fresh produce, but farmers can also dry, preserve, can,or process the fruit into juice, and sell these products long after the summer season — adding value while limiting postharvest loss and creating additional sources of revenue. Because of their ability to increase household incomes, this fruit is an appealing crop for many farmers. Apricots and other fruits play an important role in Tajikistan’s growing regional export market, and so the government is encouraging more farmers to plant orchards.

However, while apricot orchards can improve household incomes, these trees take several years to bear enough fruit to be profitable. This can make the decision to invest in this cash crop a difficult one for poor farmers, particularly if their land rights are undocumented.

In Tajikistan, individuals and families can own small “dekhan” farms, carved from former collective farms, and they can choose the crops that they plant. But a lack of information about how to withdraw from collective farms has made land tenure less secure, leaving farmers uncertain of their rights to own and use land. In addition, women make up eight out of every ten agricultural laborers and have equal legal rights to own land, but women traditionally have even less access to information as their male counterparts due to persistent cultural norms.

For farmers living without secure land rights, the costly and delayed return in investment from tree crops such as apricots may seem too risky. If farmers are not able to reap the rewards, they are less likely to make these long-term investments.

With secure land rights, Tajikistan’s farmers can now select from a wider variety of crops that bear fruit for many years to come, knowing that this is their land for each and every harvest.

An apricot farmer expanded his business to include beekeeping when he realized that bees were attracted to the fruit in his orchard. Honey is also a cash crop. Photo: Sandra Coburn / The Cloudburst Group

Since 2005, USAID has worked with the Government of Tajikistan to help individuals and families secure their land rights and use farmland more effectively. This effort continues today through Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative.

As of 2016, through the Land Reform and Farm Restructuring project, USAID, the Government of Tajikistan and local NGOs have provided 29,000 farmers with legal services, trained 88,000 Tajiks on land rights, helped 56,000 men and women register and document their land rights and established 140,000 family and individual dekhan farms. Tajikistan’s governance on land has also improved through the project, creating fourteen new pieces of legislation and a public information campaign that has made 82 percent of citizens aware of their land rights.

These secure land rights encouraged Tajik farmers to invest in diverse food crops — not just apricots but also wheat, beans, onions, tomatoes, honey and fruit trees. And with stronger rights, farmers also have incentive to learn new agricultural techniques to improve the quality and bounty of their harvest, making rural communities in this post-conflict region more food secure while increasing household incomes and expanding Tajikistan’s presence in a growing agricultural export market: a sweet outcome for this innovative program.

Two farmers drying apricots in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province. Photo: Sandra Coburn / The Cloudburst Group

USAID’s Land Reform and Farm Restructuring project is an excellent example of how land rights activities can be effectively integrated into Feed the Future programming to improve food security, household incomes and women’s economic empowerment.

To learn more about USAID’s Land Reform and Farm Restructuring project visit: www.land-links.org/project/tajikistan-land-reform-and-farm-restructuring-project/

To learn about USAID’s work with land rights across the globe visit: Land-Links.org

Originally appeared on Medium.

From the Ground Up

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari

USAID brings together farmers, communities, and the government of Burma to create policies that promote inclusive growth and mitigate climate change.

Originally appeared on Medium.

Resource Rights and Climate Change

The majority of Burma’s population is rural and depends heavily on access to shared resources — like communally-managed land and forests — for livelihood. Most of Burma’s rural population, however, does not have clear or documented rights to these shared community assets, which are owned entirely by the state. Estimates of landlessness among Burma’s rural population currently range from 30 percent to 50 percent. As a result — and as outside investment in Burma continues to increase — rural families are vulnerable to losing access to the forests and agricultural lands they depend on to larger, more powerful interests.

Global research and experience has shown that when individuals and communities do not have clear rights to resources like land and forests, they are not incentivized to protect or sustainably use those resources for the long term. Without secure rights, farmers are less likely to invest in common climate risk reduction strategies, such as irrigation or agroforestry, which often require long-term investment and maintenance. This lack of incentives can result in deforestation, soil degradation, and water depletion. Additionally, the limited understanding of resource boundaries and land rights hampers basic land use planning capabilities for sustainable land management. This is particularly important in Burma where the unchecked expansion of resource extraction efforts has led to widespread land and water pollution, and alarming rates of deforestation — a key driver of global climate change.

USAID is on the ground in Burma, supporting rural families, communities, and the government to create the fundamental policies needed to strengthen community land and forest rights, empower communities to manage their shared assets effectively, curtail deforestation, and ultimately combat global climate change.

Read the full photo essay on Medium.

Two and a Half Years After the Diamond Ban Lift, Glimmers of Hope in Cote d’Ivoire

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari

Originally appeared on Medium.

April 2014.

The United Nations Security Council had just voted unanimously to lift a ban on importing rough diamonds from Côte d’Ivoire. The ban had been put in place in 2005, after the UN found that rebels were using diamonds to fund arms purchases during its civil war, which had begun in 2002.

For the first time in nearly a decade, diamond exports, which once supplied jobs for tens of thousands of workers in this West African country, once again became legal. But, after nine years out of the (legal) diamond game, Côte d’Ivoire had to completely rebuild its diamond industry.

In the intervening years before the ban was lifted, diamond buying houses had become defunct, the national mining company left the area, and legitimate financiers packed up and left. Mining had continued, but in secret: artisanal miners had dug in the night, selling at bargain basement prices to illicit buyers, who in turn smuggled the rough diamonds out of the country. Despite the ban, the UN estimates that Côte d’Ivoire extracted a minimum of 50,000 carats per year, and that the diamond industry employed at least 200,000 Ivoirians.

Now, the euphoria of lifting the ban was wearing off, and Ivoirians were grappling with the realities of how to actually re-enter the legal diamond trade.

Fast forward two and a half years, and it appears that progress has been slow, but steady. In 2015 — the year after the ban was lifted — Cote d’Ivoire legally exported 14,000 carats. This year, it has already surpassed 20,000 carats.

Read the full photo essay on Medium.

Why the African Union’s Pledge to Advance Women’s Land Rights Matters

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
A young girl winnows cereals in the village of Koure in the south of Niger

Originally appeared on the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s website, PLACE.

Earlier this year, the African Union made a groundbreaking pledge: by 2025, thirty percent of land in Africa will be allocated to women—and documented in their names.

Why does this matter?

Land is the most critical economic resource for most of the world’s rural poor. Throughout much of the developing world, women are at a severe disadvantage: they have less access, control, and ownership of this key asset. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, women make up about half of the agricultural labor force, but hold only 15 percent of the agricultural land.

When women cannot control or access land, their economic opportunities are limited and they are vulnerable to poverty, hunger, gender-based violence, and displacement. Without land rights, women often lack the incentives to make long-term improvements to the land and have greater difficulty accessing credit. And the limited amount of land that women do control is often of lower quality than that controlled by men: it may be far from water sources, for example, or located on steep inclines.

Conversely, when women do have secure land rights, they tend to invest in improvements to their property, participate in land rental markets, and earn more income. In Tanzania, women with strong land rights were three times more likely to work off-farm and almost one-and-one-half times more likely to have individual savings. They also earned nearly four times as much income …

Read the full article on PLACE.

Toward a Carbon-Neutral Future: Why Land and Resource Rights Matter

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
Rain forest in Indonesia

Originally appeared in Columbia University’s State of the Planet blog.

Next week, the Paris Climate Agreement will enter into force. It is hard to overstate the importance of this historic agreement and its potential impact on combating global warming and reducing emissions. Our efforts to address a rapidly changing climate will require progress on many fronts, from clean energy to land-use planning. Next week, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment’s International Investment Conference will highlight the implications of the Paris Agreement on one of those fronts: land and resource governance—an issue that is increasingly important to USAID’s work.

Climate change is a destabilizing force that touches all sectors of society, whether agriculture, forestry, infrastructure, energy, water or health. The inherently intertwined and complex nature of climate change impacts means that strong institutions, laws and policies are critical to ensuring that these impacts don’t impinge on the rights of local populations. Key among these institutions, laws and policies are those that deal with land and resource governance …

Read the full post on the State of the Planet blog.

Taking Stock of the Voluntary Guidelines of Tenure: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
Gregory Myers chairs the CFS 43 plenary on the monitoring and implementation of the VGGT

Improving tenure featured prominently at the 43rd session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), held during October 17-21 in Rome. Attention focused on identifying lessons learned and good practices following CFS’s endorsement in 2012 of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security.

A call from CFS to document successful experiences in using the Voluntary Guidelines resulted in a compilation of many examples provided by governments, civil society and private sector, and including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), USAID and the Global Donor Working Group on Land. Themes common to many of these examples are:

  • ensuring political will and sustained commitment;
  • establishing inclusive multi-stakeholder platforms and linking them to processes to reform policies, laws and systems; and
  • empowering stakeholders and enabling them to develop the capacity to actively engage in tenure-related issues and defend their rights.

In addition, the compilation recognizes the need to monitor the Voluntary Guidelines to inform stakeholders of progress in improving tenure governance, in particular for vulnerable and marginalized people.

A plenary session on monitoring the Voluntary Guidelines on October 19 was opened by the Chair of CFS, H.E. Amira Gornass, and led with panelists from governments (represented by Juan Pablo Diaz Granados Pinedo, Colombia; Ali Mohamed Camara, Senegal; and Ir Wiratno, Indonesia), civil society (Naseegh Jaffer) and the private sector (John Young Simpson). The session, moderated by Gregory Myers, also provided an opportunity for a large number of speakers from the floor to describe additional experiences of using the Voluntary Guidelines to improve governance of tenure.

A number of side events at CFS expanded on various aspects of improving the governance of tenure and the Voluntary Guidelines. Topics included monitoring, gender, law, transparency, and the implementation of the AU Declaration on Land in Africa.

A common message throughout CFS 43 was linking improvements to tenure with the Sustainable Development Goals, with the Voluntary Guidelines being viewed as the key reference for doing so. The report of the plenary session highlighted that “the VGGT have been used and applied in many countries since they were endorsed by CFS in 2012” and that “legal and policy frameworks, which have been reformed in line with the VGGT, will have a large impact on a high proportion of the population once implemented.”

The plenary session called for the use and application of the Voluntary Guidelines to be “monitored on a regular basis” and for “standardization of the quantitative indicators used across countries to measure the results [that] would improve the quantitative analysis in the future.”

CFS 43 has provided an opportunity to look forward to 11 May 2017, the fifth anniversary of the endorsement of the Voluntary Guidelines and plans are being developed for a significant event to recognise this important anniversary.

In the meantime, FAO is further developing its VGGT implementation support programme. The first phase (2012-16) addressed raising awareness of the Voluntary Guidelines and how they can be used at the global, regional and national levels; the development of capacity of different stakeholders to improve tenure governance using the Voluntary Guidelines; the development of partnerships; targeted support to a number of countries that reported on their progress at CFS 43; and the monitoring of the use of the Voluntary Guidelines to improve tenure governance. The second phase, already under way, emphasizes even more strongly support at the country level with continuing positive cooperation and support of donors.

Mobile Mapping Expands Across Africa

Posted on by Amrit Bhandari
USAID's Mobile Application to Secure Tenure in use in Tanzania

This post originally appeared on Medium.

Around the world, millions of people lack documented land rights. In many countries, land surveyors are rare and demand exorbitant prices for their services, mapping and land registry systems don’t work properly, and land titles— something we in the United States take for granted — can take years to issue and cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to obtain.

But what if you could map land cheaply, efficiently, and accurately, just using an Android app?

Read the full post on Medium.