The “No Land, No Life!” is a campaign to promote the whole range of human rights of small food producers facing land and resource grabbing – from their economic, social and cultural rights to their civil and political rights – and demanding State accountability to uphold these rights. To do this, it gives specific focus on human rights advocacy and how it can help further build and sustain the local and regional campaigns against land and resource grabbing.

PANAP and our partners are organizing national and regional trainings on human rights work. These trainings include how to properly document cases of human rights violations related to land conflicts and how such documentation can be used for policy advocacy at the national and international levels by maximizing existing human rights instruments.

But at the same time, we recognize the inherent limitations of legal (whether national or international) instruments to advance human rights, especially in relation to the struggle for land as an economic, social and cultural right. In general, the issue of land as a right is not substantially articulated and developed in many legal instruments. Worse, national laws in many instances are designed to favor the moneyed and powerful land and resource grabbers and not the poor and marginalized rural folk. In Asia, for instance, legality is tilted in favor of foreign investors and local elite, and laws including national constitutions are amended to favor them upon the “recommendation” of multilateral institutions.

Thus, our human rights advocacy includes, more importantly, understanding the concept of and upholding People’s Rights to assert the right to land and other productive resources. As defined by IBON International, people’s rights are collective rights that go beyond individual rights and freedoms. It recognizes that the conditions of the social class or group to which someone belongs mainly shape his or her dignity and wellbeing. The concept of people’s rights also acknowledges that people would want to develop their conditions individually as well as collectively.

Advocates of People’s Rights look beyond legal instruments and laws that sometimes fail to recognize the social and historical injustice inflicted upon small-scale and landless farmers, indigenous people, fisherfolk, and rural women. To illustrate, the lack of a piece of paper certifying legal land ownership should not delegitimize the claim of a peasant community to the land that they have been tilling and enriching for generations.

Many rural communities in Asia, including PANAP Partners are already doing the assertion of People’s Rights such as land occupation and collective farming or cultivation campaigns.

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