Tainted lands 2 pager for forum

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TAINTED LANDS: CORRUPTION IN LARGE-SCALE LAND DEALS Project Briefer for 2015 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights 1. What is the scope of large-scale land deals? Recent years have unveiled a significant increase in large-scale leases or acquisitions of farmland, particularly in a small number of developing countries where governance is weak. Approximately 1,073 large-scale land deals have been completed and documented since 2000, covering in total almost 40 million hectares. 2. What is the role of corruption? The regions concerned by the recent wave of investments in farmland are those where land suitable for cultivation and water are abundant, workforce cheap, and access to the global markets relatively easy. But weak governance also facilitates such deals – a 2011 report from Oxfam noted that, “[l]and investors appear to be targeting countries with poor governance in order to maximise profit and minimise red tape . . . [O]ver three quarters of the 56 countries where land deals were agreed between 2000 and 2011 scored below average on four key governance indicators.” Studies show a significant statistical correlation between levels of perceived corruption and the likelihood of land deals. Although corruption is difficult to identify and reliably measure, it is widespread in land administration and is a major obstacle to protecting local communities from the impacts of land speculation. Corruption may play a role at four different stages: (1) in the demarcation of land and in the rolling out of titling schemes; (2) in the design of land use schemes and the identification of land as “underutilized” or “vacant”; (3) in the use of “public purpose” or “eminent domain” provisions to justify expropriation from land; and (4) in the selling out or leasing out of land to investors, by the government, or by community leaders. 3. Which initiatives have been taken so far? In May 2012, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) adopted the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security in an attempt to provide recommendations to States as to how they should ensure that access to land, particularly by small-scale farmers and herders, is sufficiently protected. The Voluntary Guidelines include a number of references to the need to address corruption in its various forms. They express the expectation that States shall “endeavour to prevent corruption in all forms, at all levels, and in all settings” (Guideline 3.1, para. 5), and they provide that “[i]mplementing agencies and judicial authorities should engage with civil society, user representatives, and the broader public to improve services and endeavour to prevent corruption through transparent processes and decisionmaking” (Guideline 5.8). Moreover, the Voluntary Guidelines make specific reference to corruption in the recording of tenure rights (Guideline 17.5), in the valuation of land (Guideline 18.5), and in the design of land planning schemes (Guideline 20.4).


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