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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.
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.
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.
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.
A recent gathering in Colombia, organized by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, was an important moment to assess the current state of play and ready strategies to face the current and impending onslaught of land grabs.
If one thing is clear coming out of the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing last month in Bogotá, it is that the land rush is here to stay—and it's gaining momentum. The concept of land rush serves as an umbrella for the multidimensional land grabs that occur at different scales. It helps us grasp chaotic and insurgent moments—such as the one now underway—which are pushed forward by multiple actors and often involve violence.
The gathering in Colombia, organized by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, was an important moment to assess the current state of play and ready strategies to face the current and impending onslaught of land grabs. It was a cutting edge convergence of frontline social movement leaders, unapologetically progressive researchers, and policymakers with backgrounds in grassroots organizing—all dedicated to land politics and representing 69 countries.
The land rushes that are reproduced to sustain capitalism are held up by intersecting levers of oppression, among them class fragmentation and socially constructed identity politics like race and gender.
These efforts come at a critical time, when the media's spotlight on land grabbing has dimmed—signaling that the practice has become a routine part of international politics. The following are five key takeaways from the meeting in Colombia about the state of the land rush and the resistance that seeks to stop it in its tracks.
Grabbing land, natural resources, and territory has always been an integral part of capitalism. The system thrives on crises—the more, the more profitable—which in turn provoke waves of uneven development. Contemporary land grabs are a layering of these factors, all of which are extractive in nature. When the 2008 food price crisis became ensnarled with global disruptions in finance and energy, it reconfigured large-scale land grabs as the world has come to know them.
Although agribusiness has been a defining feature of decades of neoliberal reforms, it has proliferated even more across the global South in recent years—turning peasant farms and Indigenous forests into monocrop business ventures. A striking case is that of Tanzania, one of the most heavily targeted countries for land grabs 15 years ago. Now it is bracing for a new surge of land deals for mass export crops, made worse by the oppressive seed policies that have been imposed throughout the African continent. These older land deals are on the map to stay, and the situation is further complicated by their newer counterparts.
Green and blue grabs—the idea of "selling nature to save it"—masquerade as a solution to the climate crisis and have resulted in an advanced surge of extraction, commodification, and financialization of nature. Such initiatives have brought new actors to the scene of the extractive economy, some of whom initially opposed it, in a vastly complicated alliance.
Cambodia, for instance, was the first country in Southeast Asia to endorse the Blue Skies & Net Zero 2050 campaign, which is one of the latest developments in carbon trading—earlier versions of which have devastated rural communities through massive land, water, and forest grabs. International financial and intergovernmental institutions continue to blame farmers, fishers, and forest dwellers for worsening climate change through "backwards" techniques—when the real culprit is violent foreign intervention coupled with decades of natural resource grabs led by agribusiness. Instead of attacking this problem at its root, programs like Net Zero make promises to resolve hunger, unemployment, and the climate crisis at once. The devil, however, is in the details—in this case shouldering local Cambodian peasants with the burden of mitigating big corporate pollution from abroad, unavoidably leading to more land grabs.
Land, water, and food have long been weaponized against marginalized populations through extreme violence. While our understanding of contemporary land grabs has often been one of transactionary land deals, usually large in scale, and often synonymous with agribusiness, we have yet to fully incorporate land seizures carried out through military invasions and wars into the equation. We must expand our conceptualization of the land rush to more comprehensively include these factors, also paying attention to the geopolitical environments in which they unfold.
An important link here is that for many peasant and Indigenous populations, land is not only a resource, but also territory. Seeing land grabbing as territory grabbing is a way of coming to terms with how land capture in violent conflict is an abduction of people, movements, culture, and history. As such, it has resounding place-specific and collective implications. Today genocide and ecocide in Gaza as a result of the Israeli invasion have refocused global attention on the question of Palestine. Analyzing these actions as territory grabs may contribute to a more just resolution of violent conflict—not only in Palestine, but also in other militarized geopolitical contexts as diverse as Haiti, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
The land rushes that are reproduced to sustain capitalism are held up by intersecting levers of oppression, among them class fragmentation and socially constructed identity politics like race and gender. These forced divisions are the driving force behind past and present colonial projects. Across the Americas, the plantation economy was made possible by the enslaved labor of Black bodies, the removal of Indigenous ones, and the cheapening of female and gender nonconforming ones. Struggles for independence and liberation from these processes have only partially been won, which is illustrated by modern land grabbing as an extension of plantation economies.
Land grabbing feeds on race, class, and gender as overlapping forms of oppression—and as such affects the Global North in addition to the Global South. In the highly racialized context of the United States, agribusiness continues to operate on lands stolen from Indigenous peoples with the labor of undocumented migrants—many of them displaced by extractive activities led by the United States in countries south of its Mexican border.
Social movement and academic delegates visit with signatories of the historic Colombian peace agreement on a land plot previously controlled by drug traffickers in the Puerto Salgar municipality; community members also sent a delegation to Bogotá to participate in the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing.
(Photo: @jovieshome)
If anyone knows the true value of land, it is the peasant and Indigenous communities that have ensured its survival across borders and generations. These groups of people are consistently hunted alongside the natural resources they seek to protect. Their demands—for ending and rolling back land grabs—are most often disregarded as idealistic at best and downright undoable at worst.
But against all odds, and frequently faced with great danger, social movements are winning struggles for territory. This work occurs in sophisticated alliances that straddle local, national, and international organizing efforts. Colombia was selected as the host country for the gathering against land grabbing precisely for these reasons, with hopes that bearing witness to the history being written there could inspire political gains elsewhere. From its Pacific and Caribbean coastlines, to its vast farmlands that fade into the Amazonian and Andean forests, rural communities are taking back territory—under the protection of an amenable government that is committed to an ongoing process of putting into place peasant and Indigenous autonomous zones.
Social movements are building strong convergences with politically aligned scholars and policymakers to prepare for the next phases of their still-uphill battle against the land rush—not only in Colombia, but around the world.
Analysis by a research group found that roughly 40% of Gaza land that was previously used for food production has been destroyed by Israeli forces.
The widespread destruction Israel's military has inflicted on Gaza's farmland and agricultural infrastructure amounts to a "deliberate act of ecocide," according to a new investigation that uses satellite imagery to survey the extent of the damage.
Released Friday ahead of Palestine's Land Day, the analysis by the London-based research group Forensic Architecture (FA) shows that Israel's ground forces—including tanks and other military vehicles—have advanced over half of Gaza's farms and orchards, critical food sources that the besieged enclave's population has worked tirelessly to cultivate in the face of decades of occupation.
"Since 2014, Palestinian farmers along Gaza's perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces," FA said. "Along that engineered 'border,' sophisticated systems of fences and surveillance reinforce a military buffer zone."
Comparing satellite imagery from prior to Israel's invasion and the present, FA found that roughly 40% of Gaza land that was previously used for food production has been destroyed by Israeli forces. Nearly a third of Gaza's greenhouses have been demolished, according to the investigation.
"In total, Forensic Architecture has identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, which have been destroyed since October 2023, often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks," the group said. "This destruction has been most intense in the northern part of Gaza, where 90% of greenhouses were destroyed in the early stages of the ground invasion."
It is no surprise, then, that northern Gaza is currently experiencing famine conditions, with most of the population there at imminent risk of starvation as Israeli forces impede the flow of humanitarian assistance and continue their relentless bombing campaign.
Leading human rights organizations have accused the Israeli government of using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, pointing to the decimation of the territory's agricultural sector and attacks on aid convoys. The United Nations warned less than two months into Israel's assault that "in the north, livestock is facing starvation and the risk of death due to shortage of fodder and water."
NEW INVESTIGATION: Since Oct '23, the Israeli military has systematically targeted agricultural land and infrastructure in Gaza. To mark Land Day in Palestine, we present our analysis of this widespread destruction as an act of ecocide that supports Israel’s genocidal campaign. pic.twitter.com/sgnmAsqdwa
— Forensic Architecture (@ForensicArchi) March 29, 2024
The new investigation was published amid growing global momentum to formally codify ecocide as an international crime alongside genocide, which Israel also stands accused of committing against Palestinians in Gaza.
An expert panel convened by Stop Ecocide International has defined ecocide as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts."
Ecocide is officially recognized as a crime in at least 10 countries, including France, Ecuador, Russia, and Ukraine. Earlier this week, the European Council adopted new rules that include a provision criminalizing acts deemed "comparable to ecocide."
FA's analysis argues that Israel's latest military assault on the Gaza Strip and the intentional targeting of the enclave's agriculture is "a critical dimension of Israel's genocidal campaign," fueling both a humanitarian and environmental disaster.
"The targeted farms and greenhouses are fundamental to local food production for a population already under a decades-long siege," the research group said. "The effects of this systematic agricultural destruction are exacerbated by other deliberate acts of deprivation of critical resources for Palestinian survival in Gaza."
"These acts include the well-reported, catastrophic, and Israeli-made famine ongoing in Gaza, continued obstruction of humanitarian aid destined for Gaza, the destruction of medical infrastructure, the destruction beyond repair of other areas of civilian infrastructure, including bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, and cultural heritage sites," the group added.