More than 840 million people worldwide are affected by hunger and starvation. At the same time, our planet’s natural resource base is under serious threat. Issues of food security, land use and the environment have therefore been longstanding areas of emphasis in our work.
Hunger is not just a question of sufficient global food production, but rather a question of people's ability to buy or produce food themselves. It seems to be a contradiction in terms that the majority of the hungry live where food is actually produced: of the 1.2 billion extremely poor people in the world, 75% live in rural areas.

Denied acces to resources
Many poor are denied access to vital resources like land and water, resources that are of key importance to their sustainable livelihood and development. Others may loose their resources for different reasons: they may have been evicted from their land; their land may have become infertile and water sources may have dried up; biodiversity may have been reduced; they may have been denied their traditional user rights, or may have lost access to their local markets, not being able to compete with falling food prices.

Threats to farmers' livelihood
The local situation often depends on national and international framework conditions. The intensification of agriculture in the process of the “Green Revolution” and now the “Gene Revolution”, the legal framework created for the patenting of seeds as well as the liberalisation of worldwide agricultural trade have all been detrimental to the livelihoods of small-scale farmers, who have always contributed very substantially to local food security. Also, in most cases “modern” agriculture has been accompanied by increasing concentration of land in the hands of the few. Hunger, therefore, is the result of an unequal distribution of strategic resources. Where people are systematically excluded from these resources, their human right to feed themselves is violated.

Approach of Misereor
Against this background, our funding policy links the aspects of sustainable use of natural resources with asserting people's rights to these resources. In the centre of our work is thus the empowerment of the rural poor in order to enable them to defend their legitimate interests and also to influence the political framework. This is complemented by our information, development education, lobbying and advocacy work in the North.

a) Sustainable land use

b) Access to land

c) Water

d) Biodiversity

e) Right to food

f) Fairer trade in agriculture

Policy document "bioenergy"