Smallholder Agriculture towards Sustainable Food Systems and Livelihoods

  • CONTEXT

Asia is home to 75 percent of the world’s farming households, 80 percent of whom are small-scale farmers and producers. Small-scale Asian farmers feed the world, yet they belong to the poorest, most vulnerable, and most food insecure segments of their countries’ populations. As the COVID pandemic unraveled in 2020, nationwide lockdowns and restrictions on trade and travel have disrupted food chains, which in turn have crippled the livelihoods of small farmers across Asia.

  • TARGET
  • Transformative, effective land and resource policies and programs towards enhanced access to, control over, and ownership of land and resources by rural communities.
  • Increased capacities of Asian CSOs and rural communities in defending their rights to land and resources.
  • KEY ACTIVITIES
  • Evidence-based LWA campaigns on land rights recognition and tenure reforms; research on the links between tenure and topics such as climate change, conservation, and the COVID-19 pandemic;
  • Mainstreaming Land Rights as Human Rights through campaigns on the prevention of landgrabs and the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights;
  • Empowering women and advocating for the recognition of women’s land and resource rights;
  • Facilitating connections and exchanges between and among the network’s partner-constituency-based organizations (CBOs), and convening multi-stakeholder policy dialogues; and,
  • Tooling, mentoring, and trainings for CSOs and CBOs.