Category: Uncategorized

In Forécariah, Guinea, a remote-controlled mini-helicopter provided in cooperation with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is helping the Government of Guinea and the local community aerially map the most likely locations of diamond deposits. That information will enable miners to lease parcels of land that are more likely to generate a return on their investment, the Government of Guinea to better monitor and regulate artisanal mining, and farmers to grow crops on surrounding land with fewer conflicts. Land conflicts in the region are expected to decrease overall due to this effort. This project, and others that are innovatively combating poverty, will be featured at USAID’s Frontiers in Development conference on September 18-19, 2014.

The aerial mapping in Guinea is necessary because neither the government nor miners know where diamonds are most likely to be found. Alluvial diamonds are carried by rivers and deposited across valleys and plains; without geologic surveys, the only way to find them is by beginning to dig and look for telltale signs of their presence. The mini-helicopter uses GPS and a camera to collect high-resolution aerial photos and videos through a process developed by USGS to map the elevation and terrain, leading to possible better understanding of where deposits may be found. The imagery will also be used to help in community mapping of property boundaries. Members of the community were introduced to the mini-helicopter prior to its first flight and confirmed that it would be useful to know where diamonds might be found or where they could continue agricultural practices uninterrupted.

Like many countries, Guinea’s poor resource governance and insecure land tenure have allowed artisanal miners and mining areas to be exploited by predatory actors trying to control and benefit from mineral resources. Consequently, mines are exhausted and left degraded – unfit for agricultural use and often serving as malarial breeding pools, and miners themselves are constantly on the move to new mining areas—sometimes forced to work—never earning full value for the minerals they extract. In order to address this exploitation and the trade in conflict minerals, miners must have clear and secure rights to use land for mining and/or for other economic uses such as fish ponds or gardens.

Through the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project – a joint initiative by USAID, USGS, and the U.S. State Department – the United States is taking a whole-of-government approach to supporting the Kimberley Process (KP), the international mechanism that prevents rough diamonds from fueling conflict. PRADD was implemented from 2007 to 2013 across the Central African Republic, Guinea, and Liberia. In all countries PRADD’s goals included: 1) improving compliance with the KP; 2) increasing the number of diamonds entering the formal chain of custody; 3) improving livelihoods; and 4) rehabilitating the environment. The KP’s Washington Declaration urges KP member states to improve livelihoods, resource governance, and land tenure. PRADD II is a $19-million, five-year initiative that is now being implemented in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire (with co-funding from the EU in Côte d’Ivoire). Each country program responds to the realities of rural livelihoods in that country and provides particular strategies for: improving resource governance (including passing or amending laws, building capacity, or changing fees); strengthening local mining communities (with a focus on land rights, resilience, formalization of their work, and incomes); and rehabilitating exhausted mine sites.

PRADD’s positive impact on local communities is clear. In the Central African Republic, PRADD assisted the mining ministry’s distribution of nearly 3,000 “certificates of customary rights.” After only one year, the number of diamond-related conflicts plummeted from 142 to 4 in the area of project implementation. By December 2012, 654 artisanal mining sites had been rehabilitated through gardening, tree planting, and fish pond construction, and some former miners earned more income from fish farming than mining. In Guinea, PRADD had been suspended in 2009 when the government was overthrown, but restarted in 2013 with a multi-step consultative process to define the program activities. The process sought input from KP stakeholders (government, civil society organizations, and the diamond industry), the private sector, and other donor-funded programs (e.g., the World Bank), as well as local communities, through interviews with men and women of all ages, migrating diamond miners, and local authorities. Through the aerial mapping exercise described above, it is expected that land rights, environmental stewardship, and incomes will all improve.

PRADD has also made a global impact, providing technical assistance to the Ivorian Government so that Cote d’Ivoire could meet the KP minimum requirements and have its nine-year United Nations embargo on diamond exports lifted.

Beyond the diamond trade, USAID is also working to strengthen property rights and promote responsible mineral trade and clear chains of custody through the Capacity Building for Responsible Minerals Trade (CBRMT) project in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Addressing Biodiversity-Social Conflict in Latin America (ABC-LA) project.

Learn more about PRADD’s work in Guinea at USAID’s Innovation Marketplace during the Frontiers in Development Conference, which will take place in Atrium Hall in Washington, DC’s Ronald Reagan Building on September 18 and 19 from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm.

By Frank Pichel, Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist, USAID.

I was pleased to attend the June 2014 intersessional meeting of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) in Shanghai, China and want to share several noteworthy achievements for USAID’s ongoing efforts to strengthen land tenure and property rights and prevent conflict.

Côte d’Ivoire was welcomed back into an active role in the Kimberley Process (KP) after the United Nations lifted its nine-year-old ban on Ivorian diamond exports in April. Lifting the export ban was largely due to the Government of Côte d’Ivoire’s efforts to improve its legal and regulatory framework to comply with the KPCS. Members of the KP recognized the key role of USAID’s Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project in this major achievement. The PRADD project, which is co-funded in Côte d’Ivoire by the European Union, has worked with the Government of Côte d’Ivoire to strengthen its diamond systems by developing procedures for production and sales tracking, enacting new customs and mining regulations, and registering thousands of miners. The project is a model for increasing legal diamond exports while improving the livelihoods of artisanal diamond mining communities.

Another important development was that the United States Government was granted observer status in the KP Working Group on Artisanal and Alluvial Production (WGAAP), which has emerged as an important mechanism for promoting economic security, formal regulation and sustainable development to increase the number of alluvial rough diamonds entering legitimate chains of custody. In 2012, USAID worked with the WGAAP to develop the Washington Declaration, which formally incorporates development objectives into the KP. Many of the Washington Declaration’s policy recommendations – from strengthening artisanal miners’ property rights to expanding access to mining inputs – are derived from lessons learned under the PRADD program (which also operates in Guinea and previously operated in Liberia and the Central African Republic).

A final noteworthy development was the KP Chair’s endorsement of a regional approach for four West African countries – Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – to comply with the KP. The objective of the regional approach is to help participating countries better coordinate to improve internal controls, mitigate smuggling vulnerabilities, and harmonize efforts to prevent the trafficking of conflict diamonds. Read more about how the PRADD project will support this regional approach in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea.

Read more about the PRADD project in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea.

Guest commentary by Kent Elbow, Independent Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist.

The second edition of the “Land Tenure Meetings of Bujumbura” (Rencontres Foncières de Bujumbura), sponsored by the Swiss Agency for International Development and Cooperation (SDC), took place in Bujumbura, Burundi June 3-5, 2014. The meetings examined land tenure policies in Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and were informed by Madagascar’s experience with decentralized land tenure management over the past decade, as well as case studies from Burkina Faso, Senegal and Central African Republic. The June 2014 meetings – building on a first set of meetings in 2011 – targeted two specific issues:

• Use of parcel-by-parcel inventories as a means to identify and account for diverse types of (especially informal) land property rights; and
• The challenge of achieving institutional, technical and financial sustainability of recent reforms (heretofore mostly sponsored by international donors) that support decentralized land tenure management.

Management of land tenure is particularly challenging in post-conflict countries like Burundi and Rwanda where intense demographic pressures are further complicated by the demands of returning refugees and internally displaced persons. Most land rights are not written down and exist only in the form of local customs and practices. SDC and other donors have sponsored various approaches and methodologies targeting identification and documentation of land rights based on parcel-by-parcel surveys.

Discussions during the Bujumbura meetings suggest that, at least at a general level, a standardized approach to conducting land rights surveys may be emerging. Among the standardized steps are: a communications campaign to inform rights-holders in the targeted zone; “participatory” parcel-by-parcel visits that include families and neighbors in addition to the presumed parcel “proprietor;” and a period during which declared rights may be challenged by competing claimants. While a primary parcel-level property rights holder often emerges from the surveys, identifying and recording customary access and use rights to land and resources remains a significant challenge. Women and migrants are among the user groups whose access and use rights are not always fully accounted for during the land rights formalization process. The meetings discussed that a possible response would be to accompany parcel-by-parcel land rights surveys with sociological studies that aim to document the full range of customary rights to use land and natural resources.

Another challenge to the survey approach to land and property rights identification is the sustainability of the institutions and tools that support them. For example, SDC and other donors have sponsored establishment in Burundi of decentralized Land Services in a significant number of Communes. Although the line of inquiry is somewhat preliminary at this point, the (partly theoretical and partly empirical) calculations examined during the Bujumbura meetings suggest that financial sustainability, while challenging, may be achievable.

In order to ensure a self-sustaining process for local land tenure management, Burundi’s communes need a critical mass of local participation and buy-in, and it is not yet clear that has been achieved. Among the questions debated in view of filling the possible gap between short-term local buy-in and longer-term sustainability is whether securitization of land tenure (via land certificates in the case of Burundi) should be treated as a public good to be subsidized by the central government, a private good to be purchased by land rights holders, or some combination of the two. While a definitive answer to this and other questions debated during the Bujumbura land tenure meetings remains elusive at this time, recent advances in decentralized land tenure management and conduct of property rights surveys in Burundi, Rwanda, Madagascar and elsewhere continue to appear extremely promising and worth pursuing. No further Bujumbura Land Tenure Meetings have been announced by SDC, but they would be useful in taking another step toward a more nuanced and detailed understanding of land tenure issues and appropriate policy responses currently being tested and expanded throughout Burundi and its closest neighbors.

Further Reading

• Read more on land tenure in Burundi from USAID

On May 19, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) began multi-stakeholder negotiations intended to finalize the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI)—a set of critical principles that can help guide national regulations, global corporate social responsibility initiatives, and individual contracts covering all types of investment in agriculture. The RAI principles were developed through a broad, inclusive multi-stakeholder process, involving governments, civil society and the private sector.

The United States Government—through a broad inter-agency group, involving the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Department of State (DOS), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service (USDA FAS) and the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR)—is committed to making progress toward finalized RAI principles. USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Division Chief, Dr. Gregory Myers, is leading the U.S. delegation for the negotiations.

The United States Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome welcomed the ongoing negotiations with the following press release:

The United States is pleased to participate in negotiations on the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) this week as part of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) in Rome. These multi-stakeholder negotiations are intended to finalize critical principles that can help guide national regulations, global corporate social responsibility initiatives, and individual contracts covering all types of investment in agriculture.

With the world population expected to reach nine billion people by the year 2050, FAO estimates that we will need to increase agricultural production by 60 percent to ensure that everyone is fed. “The task of ensuring enough food for our growing population is too large for governments and public-sector organizations alone,” notes U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome, David Lane. “We must engage the private sector more effectively—including smallholder farmers themselves—to promote much needed private sector investment that will contribute to achieving better food security and nutrition outcomes.”

The United States believes that RAI can provide a clear, practical and predictable guiding framework for investment in agriculture that is pro-growth as well as pro-poor. According to USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Division Chief, Dr. Gregory Myers, who is leading the U.S. delegation for the RAI negotiations, “An increasing number of private sector firms are taking steps to improve corporate practices related to agricultural investments, especially those involving large-scale land transactions. Yet, many companies still lack a clear understanding of what exactly these practices should entail. For that reason, the U.S. is pleased that the global community has come together to develop clear guidance through a common set of voluntary principles that reflect best practice in responsible agricultural investment.”

CFS negotiations on the RAI Principles began on May 19. The RAI will build on the accomplishments achieved with The Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, which were unanimously adopted by the CFS two years ago this month through a broad and inclusive consultation process involving civil society, the private sector, and governments, that is the hallmark of the CFS. The RAI Principles promise to be an equally important tool for addressing global food security.

Guest Commentary by Provash Budden, Mercy Corps’ Colombia Country Director.

This week, Mercy Corps Colombia and Guatemala are hosting the 14th regional exchange between government institutions of Guatemala and Colombia. This exchange aims to share knowledge to improve public policies and public and private institutional responses aimed at the rural sector in both countries and the opportunity to share best practices that address the processes of individual and collective certification of public and private property. Mercy Corps is also facilitating the exchange of ideas about the challenges to achieve lasting peace by addressing the structural problems of the rural sector, land use and the victims and minority ethnic groups affected by armed conflict.

Throughout the week you can follow the conversations and activities of this exchange in Bogota and also in Tolima where participants will travel to learn more about Mercy Corps’ work with coffee farmers who are formalizing property, improving coffee production and protecting natural resources. Blogs, pictures, video and activities will be posted on Mercy Corps’ Red Tierra web site. This site is managed in Spanish but comments in English are welcome.

Participating in the exchange are 10 officials from Guatemala who include the Director of the Land Fund, the Director of the RIC, six managers of these two institutions, two Senators of the Republic of Guatemala who are involved in the commission of land and two officials from Mercy Corps Guatemala. These officials will meet with high-level delegates of the Colombian State including the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Director of INCODER, the Director of IGAC, the Managers of the Land Restitution Unit and other entities responsible for Rural Development, Collective Territory Titling and Rural Property Formalization.

Mercy Corps has been working on property rights, conflict resolution and natural resource management for over 10 years in Colombia and Guatemala with support from USAID and continues to support South-South exchanges to connect public policies and practical actions that address land issues in Latin America.

On April 29, 2014, the United Nations Security Council voted to lift a long-standing ban on diamond exports from Côte d’Ivoire. Ending the nine-year-old ban will encourage greater transparency in Côte d’Ivoire’s diamond sector and potentially move an estimated $12 to $23 million annually from the illicit diamond trade into the formal economy.

To lay the groundwork for the removal of the ban, USAID supported the Government of Côte d’Ivoire to develop the systems and procedures necessary to comply with the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme—the international program to certify shipments of rough diamonds and prevent conflict diamonds from entering the world’s markets. As part of USAID’s Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project, USAID sent a technical adviser in March 2013 to work with the Ivorian government to establish a system to eliminate conflict diamonds from the import/export stream of rough diamonds, create a legal and regulatory framework to support compliance with the Kimberley Process (KP), and establish appropriate penalties for transgressions. Through a new iteration of the PRADD program, which commenced in September 2013 and is financed together with the European Union, USAID hopes to expand trade and reduce conflict in this critically important sector. These efforts fit squarely within the U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa, which seeks to improve the enabling environment for trade and investment, prevent transnational criminal threats, and promote poverty reduction (among other goals).

“A year ago, Côte d’Ivoire was still a diamond trouble spot,” said Terah U. DeJong, the technical adviser who is now Country Director of the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD II) project, recently launched in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. “The government was able to integrate best practices and lessons learned from PRADD’s earlier work. The challenge now is to build on that foundation.”

At the latest Kimberley Process Plenary session, Ivorian Mining Minister Jean-Claude Brou expressed thanks to the United States and other countries that assisted Côte d’Ivoire in becoming compliant. He noted that compliance was not an end in itself, but a key step in the long-term goal of ensuring that mineral resources benefit the country and the mining communities.

PRADD II will continue to support the government as it addresses challenges and issues that are expected to include:

• ensuring responsiveness from the Ministry of Mines in continuing key reforms;
• establishing diamond-buying houses and needed law enforcement actions;
• preparing for diamond buyers who are likely to descend on the country when the embargo lifts.

PRADD II will clarify and strengthen property rights in areas where diamond mining is occurring in order to minimize the potential for land use conflicts as the diamond economy recovers. To help improve transparency in the diamond value chain, the project will map supply chain actors and distribute diamond weighing scales to active artisanal mining cooperatives to improve the accuracy of KP production statistics. The project will also help rehabilitate former mining areas by teaching local people how to convert exhausted mine sites to fish ponds.

By creatively using radio programming, PRADD II is raising awareness about the diamond industry. The project is also engaged with the government to consider additional support for local communication campaigns on the Kimberley Process—especially law enforcement issues—as it will be important to respond to the possibility of an increased interest from diamond buyers and prospectors in the coming months.

As Côte d’Ivoire’s diamond sector transitions from a black market to a legal industry the value of its rough diamonds should rise, bringing more buyers to the country and, it is hoped, greater prosperity to miners and their families.

Guest commentary by Robert Primmer, Land Tenure and Climate Change Specialist, Evaluation, Research, and Communication (ERC) Project.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recently released report draws on research from academics across the globe and concludes that the impacts of climate change are no longer a future possibility, especially for the world’s poorest communities. Climate change is already causing real-time effects including sea ice melt, Arctic permafrost thaw, coral reef death, heat waves, heavy rainfall patterns and mega-disasters. All prediction models in the report indicate dramatic, negative changes across the globe even in best case scenarios, such as an 80% reduction in man-made emissions. The potential humanitarian crises flowing from these changes will have a disproportionate impact on the poorest communities, who have much higher levels of vulnerability to environmental impacts on health, wealth and other factors, and much lower levels of capacity for coping with environmental change.

The report draws a clear line connecting climate change to food scarcity, conflict and displacement. It provides examples of recent and predicted climatic impacts on economic sectors, natural resources, ecosystems, livelihoods and human health across the globe and the resulting displacement of people. In particular, the report refers to the 2008 displacement of 90,000 people in Mozambique and the approximately 1 million people living in the Zambezi floodplain where “temporary displacement is taking on permanent characteristics”(IPCC WGII AR5 Technical Summary, 2014). In a similar vein, in 2009 the Global Humanitarian Forum issued a report on the global human impact of climate change, estimating more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year. The report indicated that most climate change-induced mortality is due to worsening floods and droughts in developing countries. This also raises questions of climate justice, since the 50 least developed countries of the world account for no more than 1% of worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases, which is less than the CO₂ emissions created by just the population of the state of New York.

We as land tenure and property rights practitioners must consider the links between conflict over resources (including land and water) and the mass migrations expected to be caused by sea rise, flooding and drought. We need to foresee and examine the land tenure impacts of climate induced migration. Opportunities for this discussion exist, such as the recent World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, which brought together 1080 participants to discuss land as it relates to the spectrum of development scenarios. Conspicuously absent, however, was any meaningful discussion of predicted scenarios related to a changing climate and its effects on secure land tenure and property rights, food security, poverty and conflict. Mitigation and resilience were discussed, but what happens when resilience is not developed or mitigation is not an option?

Given the dire consequences of the IPCC’s predictions, we need to consider how we can help communities become resilient when the ocean is rising and portions of the earth are drying. We need to assess the options for preventing conflict and creating housing when millions of people lose their homes and move to lands that are already claimed. Land tenure and property rights programming solutions must be based on climate modelling predictions. Given the profound impact that a changing climate will have on land use and land tenure systems, we must consider the full scale of the problem and imagine what land governance, conflict remediation, housing and service provision institutions and solutions are needed.

On this Earth Day, make sure to read the IPCC report and post your thoughts on the LinkedIn Land Tenure Professionals group.

Last week, USAID hosted three experts in the urban land tenure sector at a launch event of its new issue brief on Land Tenure in Urban Environments. Consultant Geoffrey Payne, Habitat for Humanity International’s Liz Blake, and UN-Habitat’s Remy Seitchiping all spoke about the importance of addressing land tenure challenges in cities to solve development challenges across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. The conversation builds on the many urban tenure presentations at the World Bank Annual Conference on Land and Poverty two weeks ago, and those taking place this week at the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia.

Remarks by the panelists and narrative in the issue brief reinforce the idea that land tenure issues present complex challenges. Solutions to these challenges are often nuanced, but do not need to be large – in terms of scope or money. In many cases, incremental activities are effective at increasing the perception of tenure security, which is often enough to improve lives and livelihoods.

Solutions for increasing tenure security include leveraging training, information awareness, organization and technology. Secure land tenure and property rights generate benefits for vulnerable communities, private sector investors, government and civil society advocates. These efforts also build greater municipal capacity and improve the provision of key services, which are priorities in USAID’s Urban Services Policy.

Together with its partners, USAID will work to address land tenure and governance issues in the increasingly urban developing world. Read the issue brief on Land Tenure in Urban Environments and if you have any questions, contact us or send a tweet via @USAIDEnviro or @USAIDEconomic.

Congressional Briefing hosted by Congresswoman Betty McCollum on March, 28 2014
Remarks by Dr. Gregory Myers, Land Tenure and Property Rights Division Chief, USAID (as written)

First, I would like to thank Congresswoman McCollum for hosting this event and ActionAid for organizing and bringing all of us together for this important briefing. I would also like to thank Congresswoman McCollum’s staff for their attention to these critical issues.

Background
For 18 months, I had the honor to Chair, on behalf of the United States, the Open-Ended Working Group that negotiated the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (commonly known as the VGs). The VGs were negotiated through a broad and inclusive participatory process – under the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) – that involved governments, civil society organizations and the private sector. The VGs were unanimously endorsed by 96 member countries in May 2012. With endorsement, the global community demonstrated their recognition that improving land and other resource governance systems is a strategy for improving food security, promoting sustainable development, limiting conflict, and reducing extreme poverty.

While the development and endorsement of the VGs represents an important achievement, their ultimate value will be determined by their implementation and by measured improvements in the lives and livelihoods of women, men, children and other vulnerable people around the globe.

Where we are now
Having had the opportunity to participate in these negotiations, and managing the largest global bi-lateral program supporting the VGs, I would like to offer an assessment of what has been achieved thus far and what remains to be done.

In the almost two years since the VGs were adopted, much progress has been made. The VGs have become ‘the’ guiding doctrine for emerging economy governments to develop laws and policies that strengthen the protection of property rights for women and men. Donors and development agencies, including USAID, are beginning to align their land and resource governance programs more closely with the principles and practices outlined in the VGs.

Today, in 32 programs across 25 countries, USAID is deploying over $300 million in programs that implement many of the principles and practices outlined in the VGs. These programs help to clarify and strengthen the land tenure and property rights of all members of society — enabling broad-based economic growth, gender equality, reduced incidence of conflicts, enhanced food security, improved resilience to climate change, and effective natural resource management.

For example, in Ethiopia, USAID is building on the success of a series of programs that strengthened property rights of smallholder farmers by expanding the program to a traditionally vulnerable group: pastoralists. Over the past six years under this program, USAID-supported certification efforts led to the issuance of more than 500,000 land certificates to over 230,000 households. Under these programs, boundaries are clarified and validated by neighbors and community members prior to certification, reducing the likelihood of future disputes. The certificates, which can be transferred to descendants, give holders the right to use and profit from the land. This arrangement represents an important shift from the previous system, which was marked by frequent land seizures, redistribution, and declining agricultural productivity. Evidence from evaluations by the World Bank and the Government of Ethiopia suggests that household productivity increased measurably in areas where certificates were issued. In one region where the certification program was implemented, crop yields increased by 10 to potentially 40 percent per acre with no other inputs. USAID’s Ethiopia program is closely aligned with the principles outlined in the VGs.

The brief and infographic that we handed out have additional information about how USAID is supporting implementation of the VGs and making secure land tenure and property rights a reality for people and communities around the world.

The way forward
What comes next? While USAID and other development organizations have made progress supporting implementation of the VGs, more remains to be done. At the global level, we need, first, more specific guidance on how to implement the VGs. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is contributing to the development of technical guides and training programs that support VG implementation. This is a good start.

We also need better coordination and information sharing among development partners. All too often our development efforts are hampered by a lack of coordination among relevant partners striving toward common goals. The VGs represent an ambitious global agenda; achieving success will require coordinated action by civil society, governments and the private sector.

Last year more than 25 donors and development organizations came together to form the Global Donor Working Group on Land. One of our first objectives was to develop a common platform for sharing data and best practices on land programs that support the VGs. USAID led this initiative. Over the past year, we managed a project that collected information on the land and resource governance programs funded by members of the Global Donor Working Group on Land. The result of this effort is a comprehensive database of 445 programs, funded by 16 donors and development agencies, being implemented in 119 countries, with a total value of over $2 billion.

This information can help stakeholders identify opportunities to coordinate activities and leverage resources for greater impact. The database initiative also provides stakeholders with a platform to share knowledge and best practices, potentially improving the efficiency and effectiveness of current and future programs that support the VGs.

We can bridge the gap between what the global community has agreed to and what is understood and pursued at the ground-level in developing countries. At the local level, we need to experiment with new investment models that will promote smallholder agriculture and/or create opportunities for smallholders to link with commercial investors in ways that are secure and profitable for all.

The development community should also recognize that the private sector plays a key role in the success of implementing the VGs. The private sector is moving forward—in consultation with civil society, host country governments, and donor organizations—to develop better practices for acquiring land for commercial agriculture, extractives, and biofuels. Last year, The Coca-Cola Company negotiated an agreement with Oxfam to respect local property rights along its supply chain, and PepsiCo has recently agreed to do the same. The global community, with U.S. leadership, is in the process of developing guidelines for the private sector: the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (known as the RAI), which are also being developed under the UN Committee on World Food Security. These principles will provide a framework to guide global corporate social responsibility initiatives, and individual investment contracts covering all types of investment in agriculture. In other words, the RAI will provide a framework for the private sector – much in the same way the VGs provide a framework for the public sector. Responsible investment in agriculture can lead to improvements in food security and economic growth.

Another possible next step could be the development of a globally-accepted certification standard – as was done with Fair Trade Coffee or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. An industry certification, whether added to existing commodity standards or organized as a stand-alone initiative, could set an acceptable expectation for how companies will invest and conduct business with respect to land rights in emerging economies. Certification of land-based investments could also help build the private sector expertise required to effectively manage land throughout supply chains. Such a scheme could also empower civil society to monitor investments in a more systematic way and allow consumers to reward companies that behave responsibly and apply pressure to those that do not.

Conclusion
USAID appreciates civil society organizations bringing the issue of land tenure to the attention of policy leaders in the US. We welcome this opportunity to share progress and challenges with you and our colleagues on the Hill. To help ensure a stable world — where market-based democracies thrive and trade expands, where we create jobs- at home and abroad — we must focus on empowering every global citizen to make individual decisions about how they will acquire, use, enjoy, and dispose of property. The Voluntary Guidelines help all actors design and implement policies and programs that make secure property rights a reality.