The Conference on Land and Poverty that the World Bank organizes every year serves as a mirror for what land issues that are high on the international development agenda. This year’s conference took place on April 8-11 in Washington DC and was the largest ever with more than 800 participants. A broad range of issues were dealt with in more than 70 parallel sessions covering both urban and rural land issues. No less than 15 sessions were devoted to various aspects of the phenomenon of large-scale land investments in developing countries.

While much of the discussion on this topic still focuses on the negative impacts that such investments, especially when they imply large-scale land acquisitions, could have for the food security and land rights of the rural poor, one could discern a change in the mode of engaging with this phenomenon. For instance, one session dealt with how Governments can improve the outcome of such large-scale investments for the rural poor. Several others discussed how to increase the transparency and accountability of these investments, while yet other sessions dealt with data collection systems for assessing land acquisitions trends and impact at the local level.

A related issue which also was discussed in several of the sessions was the need for securing community land rights, especially in regions with widespread rural poverty such as sub-Saharan Africa, against the background of the increasing investor demand for land there. Finally, a number of sessions as well as individual presentations in other thematic sessions were devoted to women’s land rights indicating the growing significance assigned to this theme.

Lasse Krantz is a research fellow at the Univeristy of Gothenburg and the Project leader of LARRI - Land Rights Research Initiative.