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land
Land Degradation Threatens Billions of Lives Worldwide, Warns UN Food Agency
"Sustainable land management requires enabling environments that support long-term investment, innovation, and stewardship," said the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Nov 03, 2025
A report published Monday by a United Nations agency revealed that nearly 1 in 5 people on Earth live in regions affected by failing crop yields driven by human-induced land degradation, “a pervasive and silent crisis that is undermining agricultural productivity and threatening ecosystem health worldwide."
According to the latest UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) State of Food and Agriculture report, "Today, nearly 1.7 billion people live in areas where land degradation contributes to yield losses and food insecurity."
"These impacts are unevenly distributed: In high-income countries, degradation is often masked by intensive input use, while in low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, yield gaps are driven by limited access to inputs, credit, and markets," the publication continues. "The convergence of degraded land, poverty, and malnutrition creates vulnerability hotspots that demand urgent, targeted and, comprehensive responses."
#LandDegradation threatens land's ability to sustain us. The good news: Reversing 10% of degraded cropland can produce food for an additional 154 million people.
▶️Learn how smarter policies & greener practices can turn agriculture into a force for land restoration.
#SOFA2025 pic.twitter.com/8U3yQk9lX4
— Food and Agriculture Organization (@FAO) November 3, 2025
In order to measure land degradation, the report's authors compared three key indicators of current conditions in soil organic carbon, soil erosion, and soil water against conditions that would exist without human alteration of the environment. That data was then run through a machine-learning model that considers environmental and socioeconomic factors driving change to estimate the land’s baseline state without human activity.
Land supports over 95% of humanity's food production and provides critical ecosystem services that sustain life on Earth. Land degradation—which typically results from a combination of factors including natural drivers like soil erosion and salizination and human activities such as deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable irrigation practices—threatens billions of human and other lives.
The report notes the importance of land to living beings:
Since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago, land has played a central role in sustaining civilizations. As the fundamental resource of agrifood systems, it interacts with natural systems in complex ways, influencing soil quality, water resources, and biodiversity, while securing global food supplies and supporting the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Biophysically, it consists of a range of components including soil, water, flora, and fauna, and provides numerous ecosystem services including nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, and water purification, all of which are subject to climate and weather conditions.
Socioeconomically, land supports many sectors such as agriculture, forestry, livestock, infrastructure development, mining, and tourism. Land is also deeply woven into the cultures of humanity, including those of Indigenous peoples, whose unique agrifood systems are a profound expression of ancestral lands and territories, waters, nonhuman relatives, the spiritual realm, and their collective identity and self-determination. Land, therefore, functions as the basis for human livelihoods and well-being.
"At its core, land is an essential resource for agricultural production, feeding billions of people worldwide and sustaining employment for millions of agrifood workers," the report adds. "Healthy soils, with their ability to retain water and nutrients, underpin the cultivation of crops, while pastures support livestock; together they supply diverse food products essential to diets and economies."
The report recommends steps including reversing 10% of all human-caused land degradation on existing cropland by implementing crop rotation and other sustainable management practices, which the authors say could produce enough food to feed an additional 154 million people annually.
"Reversing land degradation on existing croplands through sustainable land use and management could close yield gaps to support the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of producers," FAO Director-General Dongyu Qu wrote in the report’s foreword. "Additionally, restoring abandoned cropland could feed hundreds of millions more people."
"These findings represent real opportunities to improve food security, reduce pressure on natural ecosystems, and build more resilient agrifood systems," Qu continued. "To seize these opportunities, we must act decisively. Sustainable land management requires enabling environments that support long-term investment, innovation, and stewardship."
"Secure land tenure—for both individuals and communities—is essential," he added. "When land users have confidence in their rights, they are more likely to invest in soil conservation, crop diversity and productivity."
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US Pension Fund TIAA Linked to Brutal Land Grabs and Evictions of Farmers in Brazil
The 10 largest transnational landowners in the world control an area larger than Japan, according to a new report. This accumulation fuels human rights abuse, inequalities, and environmental destruction, and underlines the need for redistributive policies.
Jun 03, 2025
Angelim is a small rural community in Piauí, northeastern Brazil, where small-scale farmers and artisans have lived for generations. Their way of life dramatically changed a few years ago when a company arrived, claiming it had purchased the land. Residents report being threatened by armed men. They have faced forest clearances and the destruction of native vegetation that is essential for their livelihoods and way of life. New monoculture plantations began to dry up the wetlands. The plantations also used pesticides, polluting the ecosystem and threatening residents’ health and livelihoods.
Angelim is located in the municipality of Santa Filomena and is just one of many communities affected by land acquisitions by Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, a company formed in 2008 as a joint venture between U.S. pension fund TIAA and Brazilian agribusiness giant Cosan. In recent years, Radar has acquired more than 3,000 hectares in Santa Filomena, adding to the land it already owns throughout the Matopiba region, which includes the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia—the latest frontier of industrial agriculture in Brazil.
Elite Group
This region sits in the Cerrado, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas, home to 12,000 plant species (35% endemic) and 25 million people, including Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food providers. But 40-55% of the Cerrado has already been converted to commercial tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production. Land grabs, speculation, and deforestation are displacing communities and damaging the environment. One of the major players in this expansion is TIAA and its asset management company, Nuveen.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future.
As revealed in our new report, TIAA is one of the world’s largest landowners and has almost quadrupled its landholdings since 2012. Managing 1.2 million hectares across 10 countries, it ranks 7th among the world’s top 10 transnational landowners, who together control 404,457 square kilometers—an area the size of Japan.
Others in this elite group include financial investors like Blue Carbon from the UAE, Australia-based Macquarie, and Canada’s Manulife; agribusiness giants Olam and Wilmar from Singapore; Chilean timber company Arauco; and U.K.-based Shell via Raízen, a Brazilian subsidiary.
Global Land Grabbing and Concentration Trends
This accumulation of land in the hands of a few transnational companies is part of a global trend of land grabbing that surged after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2000, transnational investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land—twice the size of Germany. This has accelerated a dynamic of land concentration, which has resulted in 1% of farms controlling 70% of global farmland, a trend that jeopardizes the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest, most of whom depend on agriculture.
As the case of the Angelim community shows, land grabbing and land concentration have devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems. Like U.S.-based TIAA, virtually all the top global landowners have reportedly been implicated in forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against local people.
Land concentration exacerbates inequality, erodes social cohesion, and fuels conflict. But there are deeper consequences as well: The fact that vast tracts of land, located across different state jurisdictions, are brought under the control of distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows runs diametrically counter to the principles of state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. In particular, it undermines states’ ability to ensure that land tenure serves the public good and enables the transition to more sustainable economic models.
“Net Zero” Fueling Evictions
The question of who should own and manage land becomes even more pressing in light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Transnational landowners are associated with industrial monoculture plantations, deforestation, and other extractive practices. In contrast, up to 80% of intact forests are found on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities. Moreover, small-scale food providers practicing agroecology support higher biodiversity, better water management, and produce over half the world’s food using just 35% of global cropland.
Ironically, the environmental value of community-managed land has sparked a new wave of land grabs. So-called “green grabs” (land grabs for alleged environmental purposes) now account for about 20% of large-scale land deals. Since 2016, more than 5.2 million hectares in Africa have been acquired for carbon offset projects. The global carbon market is expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and over half of the top 10 global landowners now claim participation in carbon and biodiversity markets. “Net zero” has become a pretext for expelling communities from their lands.
From Deregulation to Redistribution
While global land policy debates in the past 10 years have focused on limiting the harm of land grabs on people and nature, the scale and severity of these trends demand a shift from regulation to redistribution. Neoliberal deregulation, as well as trade and other economic policies, have fueled the massive transfer of land and wealth to the corporate sector and the ultra-rich. Redistributive policies are needed to reverse this trend.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future. However, only very few countries implement land policies and agrarian reform programs that actively attempt to redistribute and return land to dispossessed peoples and communities.
The international human rights framework requires states to structure their land tenure systems in ways that ensure broad and equitable distribution of natural resources and their sustainable use. The tools at the disposal of governments include redistribution, restitution, and the protection of collective and customary tenure systems, as well as measures such as ceilings on land ownership (including by corporate entities), protection and facilitation of use rights over publicly owned land, and participatory and inclusive land-use planning. These efforts must also be matched by redistributive fiscal policies, such as progressive land and property taxes, which remain regressive or ineffective in most countries today, thus perpetuating inequality and enabling wealth concentration.
International Cooperation
Because land grabbing is driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Colombia in February 2026 offers a critical moment for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.
To be effective, these discussions should connect with initiatives on a global tax convention and an international mechanism to address sovereign debt, empowering states to have the fiscal space to implement human rights-based, redistributive policies and just transitions. Also important are binding legal provisions that prevent transnational corporations from using the power of their money to bend national rules in their pursuit of profits.
In a world facing intersecting crises—climate breakdown, food insecurity, persisting poverty, and social inequality—and a reconfiguration of the global balance of power, there is an opportunity to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.
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Women’s Land Rights: The Missing Key to Climate Action
This year’s International Women’s Day theme, #AccelerateAction, calls on the world to address the structural barriers slowing progress. If we are serious about climate, we must start at the root of the problem: land access.
Mar 08, 2025
Land is not just a means of survival; it is one of our most powerful tools to combat climate change and nature loss. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, retains water, supports biodiversity, and—crucially—underpins food production. When land is degraded—through deforestation, overexploitation, or poor management—it shifts from being a carbon sink to a source of emissions, disrupting local water cycles, accelerating desertification, and sparking food insecurity. This degradation has direct consequences, such as the catastrophic flooding that hit Valencia last year, where altered landscapes and poor land stewardship exacerbated extreme weather impacts.
Without land security, women farmers remain locked out of decision-making, deprived of resources, and forced to fight climate change and nature loss with one hand tied behind their backs.
The link between land health, food security, and climate resilience is clear. But the role of women—who form the backbone of food production globally—is often overlooked. Women have extensive ecological knowledge and are key stewards of land, particularly those in rural and Indigenous communities. Women produce up to 80% of the world’s food, consumed by families and communities worldwide, and account for between 30-40% of the agricultural workforce. Yet, fewer than 20% of landowners are women—and, in half of the world’s countries, they have little to no rights or decision-making power over the land they work. This systemic land insecurity undermines their ability to implement long-term soil and land restoration practices crucial for climate adaptation.
The Three Systemic Barriers to Women’s Leadership in Land Restoration
To truly #AccelerateAction, as this year’s International Women’s Day theme calls for, we must address the root of the problem: land access. Without secure land tenure, women farmers face three systemic challenges.
Limited decision-making power results in less resilient agriculture: Studies from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) indicate that women farmers with land rights are more likely to invest in soil conservation and water retention techniques, which are crucial for adapting to climate change. Without control over their land, women are often forced to comply with farming methods that may coincidentally be more planet-friendly (due to women lacking access to resources like chemical inputs) but are often less efficient and reduce resilience to yield variation. Women’s land insecurity translates into a lack of autonomy in adopting and scaling climate-smart farming methods that can both render their community more climate resilient and reduce hunger.
Restricted access to funding and training: Despite their deep knowledge of sustainable farming, women are often systematically denied access to credit, training, and agricultural extension services. A report by the World Bank found that if women had the same access to resources as men, agricultural yields could increase by up to 30%, reducing global hunger. Yet, because they often lack legal land ownership, they are sometimes ineligible for loans and grants that could help them transition to nature-positive forms of agriculture. Bridging this gap would not only benefit women but also strengthen global food security and climate resilience.
The disproportionate impact of climate change on women: Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities, and land degradation disproportionately affects women. Roughly 80% of the people displaced by climate disasters are women. In communities where women lack land rights, they have fewer options for adaptation and recovery. Secure land tenure empowers women to implement long-term solutions that enhance climate resilience, from agroecological practices to community-led reforestation projects.
The Path Forward: Solutions for Gender-Inclusive Land Restoration
Landscape restoration is only possible when everyone in the community—including women—has the rights, resources, and recognition they deserve. Ensuring land tenure for women is not just about equity—it’s about survival. Women are already leading land restoration efforts across the globe. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement, founded by Wangari Maathai, has empowered thousands of women to restore degraded forests, leading to the planting of over 50 million trees. In India, women-led self-help groups have restored thousands of hectares of farmland through water conservation and agroecology. These initiatives prove that when women have control over land, they invest in solutions that benefit both people and the planet. And it’s not rocket science—there are concrete policy solutions that can ensure women can lead the charge in restoring land and combating climate change.
In order to increase and enforce land rights for women, countries must reform laws that restrict women’s access to land. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, customary laws often prevent women from inheriting land, even when statutory laws permit it. Enforcing legal protections is critical. In addition, more funding opportunities must be available to women in agriculture: Only 6% of agricultural aid funding worldwide treats gender as a fundamental issue. Governments and financial institutions must close the agriculture funding gap for women through targeted grants, subsidies, and loan programs. In tandem, women’s traditional knowledge of farming and conservation must be supported with expanded access to climate-smart agricultural training. Finally, climate-smart agricultural training must consider gender dynamics, as poorly designed programmes can unintentionally empower men while sidelining women. Research shows that when gender is overlooked, existing inequalities can be reinforced. Organizations should recognize that technologies and policies often carry biases that can entrench power imbalances, restrict food security, and further marginalize women.
This year’s International Women’s Day theme, #AccelerateAction, calls on the world to address the structural barriers slowing progress. If we are serious about climate action, we must start at the root of the problem: land access. Without land security, women farmers remain locked out of decision-making, deprived of resources, and forced to fight climate change and nature loss with one hand tied behind their backs.
A just, climate-resilient future is not possible without women at the forefront of land restoration. By securing their rights to land, we not only restore degraded ecosystems but also unlock the full potential of those who have been caretakers of the Earth for generations. If we want to accelerate action, we must start by giving women the tools they need: land, security, and the power to lead.
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