Originally published March 30, 2026 by the Land Portal Foundation. Republished from the original article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Related project: The Land Facility.
In the opening keynote of the 5th International Land Management Conference, Ward Anseeuw of FAO presented a new global report on land tenure and governance, offering both a sobering diagnosis and a much-needed baseline for tracking progress.
At the opening session of the 5th International Land Management Conference, Ward Anseeuw, Lead of the Land Tenure Team at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), presented the newly launched State of Land Tenure and Governance (SLTG) report as a landmark effort to document a field that has suffered from patchy evidence, uneven reporting, and limited comparability across countries. Anseeuw framed the publication as both overdue and urgently needed: While land has become increasingly central to debates on food systems, climate, investment, conflict, and rights, the data needed to understand where the world stands has remained strikingly incomplete.
That, he argued, is what makes the report so significant. Although land has featured prominently in policy debates over the last two decades, particularly since the food price crisis of 2008–2009 and the renewed scrutiny of large-scale land acquisitions that followed, there has never before been a global report dedicated specifically to land tenure and governance. In that sense, the SLTG report establishes a baseline. It brings together a wide range of data to assess not only the current state of land tenure and governance, but also the extent to which countries are making progress.
Read the Status of Land Tenure and Governance (SLTG) report: https://landportal.org/library/resources/978-92-5-140491-1/status-land-tenure-and-governance
Anseeuw’s first message focused on the persistent weakness of the global land data landscape. While land-related data initiatives have expanded in recent years, land tenure data remains far less available than data in sectors such as public finance, procurement, or health. The gap is even more pronounced when it comes to gender and inclusive land data. This shortfall, he suggested, has direct consequences for accountability and policy. It is also reflected in weak reporting against the land-related Sustainable Development Goal indicators. Despite the existence of three SDG indicators specifically focused on land, reporting rates remain low. At the time the report was drafted, none had reached the threshold of half of all countries reporting, and only a small number of countries had reported across all three. For Anseeuw, this is not simply a technical issue. Political will matters, but so too does the capacity to generate and report data.
The report also sheds new light on who holds land globally and how secure those rights actually are. Legally, states remain the dominant landholders, with nearly two-thirds of global land formally under state ownership. Yet the picture changes substantially in practice. Once actual occupation, management, and use are taken into account, customary tenure occupies a much larger share of the global landscape. According to the figures presented, customary lands account for 42 percent of land in practice, compared with only 28 percent held and managed by states and 20 percent held privately. Even so, only 35 percent of land globally has recognized and documented rights. Put differently, nearly two-thirds of the world’s land remains undocumented, underscoring the scale of the unfinished agenda.
This lack of recognition is closely tied to insecurity. Drawing on Prindex data, Anseeuw highlighted that 1.1 billion people, or roughly 23 percent of the world’s adult population, feel insecure about their land rights. More troubling still, that figure has risen since 2020. He linked this deterioration to the cumulative effects of conflict, displacement, and financial instability, including the growing inability of many people to keep up with mortgages or rents. The message was clear: insecurity is not static, and progress cannot be assumed.
A major contribution of the report, Anseeuw noted, is its ability to disaggregate insecurity and inequality across different groups. In the case of women, the findings confirm patterns that are already widely recognized, but place firmer numbers behind them. In nearly half of the countries reporting on women’s land rights, the gender gap exceeds 20 percentage points. More revealing still is the disconnect between legal reform and lived reality. Many countries have adopted at least some legal measures aligned with women’s land rights under the SDGs, yet these changes have not translated into significant gains in practice. For Anseeuw, this gap between law and implementation is one of the report’s most important findings: legislative progress matters, but it is not enough.
He made a similar point in relation to customary tenure and Indigenous peoples’ rights. Customary territories, he noted, are increasingly recognized as critical for both people and the planet. The report estimates that they contain a substantial share of global carbon and overlap extensively with key biodiversity areas and intact forest landscapes. Yet despite this importance, only a small fraction of customary lands are formally recognized. The consequences are visible in acute levels of perceived insecurity among Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and campesino communities in countries such as Colombia.
Anseeuw’s fourth message addressed land inequality and concentration. Here too, the report offers striking evidence. On average, the largest 10 percent of landholdings operate more than half of the world’s agricultural land. When measured in aggregate across the global landmass, the land controlled by the top 10 percent increases to 89 percent of agricultural land. Alongside these patterns, Anseeuw pointed to less visible but increasingly consequential trends in corporate and financial ownership. Large-scale land acquisitions are now dominated by corporate and financial actors, many operating through shareholding structures that remain largely invisible to conventional land administration systems. France, he noted, is one of the few countries beginning to track this systematically, offering a glimpse into trends that likely extend far beyond its borders.
His final message was that progress has been made, but implementation lags badly behind policy ambition. Many countries have undertaken significant land reform processes, and global frameworks such as the VGGTs have had influence. Yet when assessed against principles such as human rights, transparency, accountability, gender equality, consultation, and free, prior and informed consent, adoption remains partial and uneven. Evidence from large-scale land acquisitions in Africa illustrates the same pattern: compliance with responsible governance principles is often weak, and in many cases absent altogether.
Taken together, Anseeuw’s keynote offered neither a simple narrative of failure nor one of steady progress. Instead, it presented a more demanding conclusion. There is now enough evidence to say much more clearly where the world stands on land tenure and governance, but that evidence also reveals how far there is still to go. If the SLTG report serves as a baseline, it also serves as a challenge: to improve data, strengthen recognition, close the gap between law and practice, and confront the structural inequalities that continue to shape control over land worldwide.