Women, Land, and Agribusiness

(A past-due post in honor of International Women's Day, March 9th.)

Did you know that only 2% of the world's land is owned by women?

This statistic comes from an article in the Seattle Times, where Tim Handstad argues that increased land ownership among women increases their status in home and in society, lifts families out of poverty, and leads to secondary benefits like better nutrition for the household, increased food security, and better disease prevention.

I went digging for more stats on global land ownership because this strikes me as just the tip of the iceberg. How much land do men own? What about corporations, governments, and heads of state?

I couldn't find the answers to most of these questions. (If you know where this can be found, please let me know!) Though in an ironic twist, I did find a source that estimates the largest personal landowner in the world to be a woman - Queen Elizabeth II, who comes in at 6,600 million acres valuing perhaps 17.6 trillion pounds, or 1/6th of the world's dry surface.

My inclination is that a surprising percentage of land is actually owned by large and increasingly transnational corporations. This is definitely the case in Brazil, where the Landless Worker's Movement (MST) has shifted it's political focus over the last 25 years from targeting large private landowners to international agribusiness.

To commemorate International Women's Day, hundreds to thousands of Brazilian women of the MST and Via Campesina occupied the Ministry of Agriculture, a shipping port, and at least two large industrial farms. They argue that the government should focus on agrarian reform and small farms, many for women, instead of catering to industrial agribusiness.

They also argue that the mono-cropping eucalyptus for pulp, an activity occurring at the occupied sites, destroys natural habitat, creating topsoil loss and ultimately desertification. An anecdote here: a public defender in rural São Paulo state won an immediate suspension of eucalyptus plantation in his area. While visiting some of his contacts I was recruited to translate the suspension notice into English because the companies involved were foreign with English-speaking employees. I didn't get much background on the case, but local residents were up in arms about the spread of eucalyptus in their areas.