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Food and Resources

Yaka Lucia with her baby Rosa in the her Permagarden in Palabek Refugee camp in Uganda.

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Food and water sustain us and give us life. Yet in a world of plenty, one in nine people go to bed hungry each night.

The world’s poor struggle to access land, water and other essential natural resources. Resources they need to survive and earn a living. The impact of climate change and environmental destruction is now a daily reality for many of these communities.

Thanks to you, Trócaire’s Resource Rights programme supports these communities so they don’t go hungry. So they can grow their own food. Grow better and nutritious crops in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. Earn an income to survive. Work together as a community to protect their local environment. Have access to their natural resources.

So they can join together with others to stand up and fight for their land, their rivers, and their forests.

Why Food & Resource Rights?

Every person has a right to food and water. Yet too often these basic rights are denied. Over 800 million people are going hungry. Many communities can’t access land and water.

Climate change is only making these problems worse. Drought and other extreme weather patterns are ravaging people’s lands and farms.

There is also a global scramble for land, water and other resources. This is driven by huge global and national demand for food, minerals and energy. This is often at the expense of poor rural communities.

Corporations put profit before the health of humans and our fragile earth. Large-scale commercial agriculture is failing poor communities. This model is also worsening the impacts of climate change and damaging our environment.

For many of the world’s poorest, states are also failing in their duty to protect peoples’rights to resources.

There is also a global scramble for land, water and other resources. This is driven by huge global and national demand for food, minerals and energy. This is often at the expense of poor rural communities.

Corporations put profit before the health of humans and our fragile earth. Large-scale commercial agriculture is failing poor communities. This model is also worsening the impacts of climate change and damaging our environment.

For many of the world’s poorest, states are also failing in their duty to protect peoples’rights to resources.

How do we work on Food & Resource Rights?

We work with communities to ensure they have access to resources. We ensure that people have food, water and a secure place to live with independence. Our approach emphasises livelihoods as well as food security and nutrition.

Access to and management of natural resources by the poorest people enhances resilience. It improves economic wellbeing, education, nutrition and food security.

Our approach promotes an alternative transformative model of agriculture. This is an approach that is not damaging to our environment, using zero-waste and organic techniques. It uses agro-ecological principles and low-input local agricultural systems. It is empowering, efficient and improves crop yields. At the same time it reduces dependency on pesticides and expensive seeds.

We also mobilise communities to take action on their resource rights. We support communities with access to their land and legal tenure. We protect people from land grabs from the extractive and agribusiness industries.

We also tackle the structural causes of poverty and hunger. We support communities to hold their governments to account and to challenge the policies that impact their access to land and water.

Trócaire takes actions that contribute towards people’s food and resource rights:

  • We provide access to knowledge and equipment for families to grow food and earn an income
  • We take legal action to protect land and natural resources
  • We support families to grow a wider range of sustainable food crops. A varied diet means better nutrition and families are not reliant on one crop
  • When disasters such as floods and drought strike, we help families to recover
  • We build community resilience to the impacts of climate change and environmental damage
  • We support communities to protect their local environment
  • We campaign for international action on climate change

What impact are we having?

In 2022/23, our Resource Rights programme supported people in 9 countries. It had a positive impact on the lives of 278,802 people.


Water and seeds to improve food production

Improving resilience to climate change

Access and ownership of land

Access to markets and income

Crop yields

Farming families have increased their yields in all the communities we support.

Skills

In Sierra Leone, we expanded the market information platform, AKISAID, to more smallholders, allowing them negotiate better prices for products.

Irrigation

In Malawi, 4,259 people secured access to irrigation. This has enabled farmers to increase the number of harvests from one to two or three a year.

Biodiversity

In Rwanda, awareness of the dangers of biodiversity loss was raised amongst more than 6,000 men and women through the Community Led Planning and Management for Biodiversity Protection and Resilient Communities project.

Community action

In Ethiopia, 7,106 women saved over USD 520,000 through their membership of 299 Village Savings and Loans associations (VSLAs). This helped them diversify their businesses, and access additional financing when needed.

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