UNITED NATIONS: Granting property rights to the poor could help roll back global poverty, a report by an independent commission said here Tuesday.
The study by the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor stressed that giving farmers titles to the land they work on can help cut poverty and increase productivity.
If the poor have titles to their land they can in fact become active participants in the economies of their countries and really help to bring their countries out of poverty and themselves out of poverty, said US former secretary of state Madeline Albright, a co-chair of the panel.
Currently there are 2.7 billion hectares of cultivable land lying idle mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia, because the land is untitled, according to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the panel s other co-chair.
The report also found that women, who make up half the world’s population and produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, own less than 10 percent of the world’s property.
If you were to look at the property rights issue you might resolve a very big percentage of the issues that are related to the suffering of people, de Soto told reporters.
The report also tackled the larger issue of legal empowerment of the poor, focusing on four areas: access to justice, property rights, labor rights and business rights.
It noted that currently four billion people did not have access to the law.
The main point of our report is how to empower these over four billion people through an integrated process of access of justice, property rights, business rights and labor rights, Albright said.
The Commission s mandate is daunting but also vital, for legal empowerment can add much to the world s arsenal in its ongoing struggle to save and enrich human lives, she added.
Launched in 2005 by a group of developing and developed countries including Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Guatemala, Norway, Sweden, South Africa and Britain, it is hosted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). – AFP
