A/HRC/16/63 5. In the present study, the Advisory Committee focuses on the rights of the most vulnerable people working in rural areas, in particular on those of smallholder farmers, landless workers, fisher-folk, hunters and gatherers. The Committee does not focus on the rights of other people working in rural areas, such as those working in the business industry or public administration. B. Smallholder farmers 6. Around 50 per cent of the world’s hungry live on small plots of land and produce crops for subsistence and/or sale on local markets. Most of them cannot produce enough to feed themselves, essentially because they do not have sufficient access to productive resources such as land, water and seeds. Two thirds of smallholder farmers live on remote and marginal lands in environmentally difficult conditions, such as in mountainous areas or areas threatened by drought and other natural disasters, while good, fertile land tends to be concentrated in the hands of wealthier landowners. For example, most of the fertile lands of central Guatemala are part of huge plantations, while the majority of smallholder farmers and indigenous people are left to cultivate the steep slopes of the country’s mountainous regions.4 The same is true in many other countries, such as Bolivia (Plurinational State of)5 and Ethiopia.6 7. In Guatemala, land ownership is highly concentrated: 2 per cent of the population owns up to 80 per cent of agricultural land, while 90 per cent of small farmers survive on less than 1 hectare.7 Hunger and malnutrition levels in Guatemala have been found to be closely linked to the quantity of land held; children of families possessing less than two manzanas8 of land are 3.2 times more likely to be malnourished than families possessing more than five manzanas.9 Poor subsistence farmers lack access to sufficient, good quality land and survive on microfincas (smallholdings) of less than one hectare of unproductive land, although they really need 25 hectares of fertile land to feed their families adequately. As a consequence of extreme inequality in access to land, indigenous people and poor peasant farmers or agricultural workers living in rural areas account for the large majority of the hungry and malnourished.10 8. The situation is similar in Bolivia (Plurinational State of), where poor small-scale farmers own only 1.4 per cent of the cultivated land, while the wealthiest 7 per cent of Bolivian landlords own 85 per cent of cultivated land.11 In the west, the poor and hungry are mostly indigenous people, living in rural areas and struggling to survive from smallscale and subsistence farming on the cold, windy plateau of the altiplano. Most people have very small landholdings, barely large enough for subsistence. Most agricultural work is done by hand with little access to machinery even to plough the fields, and there has been little investment in irrigation and other infrastructure that would allow increased 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 4 See E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.1 and A/HRC/13/33/Add.4. A/HRC/7/5/Add.2, para. 14. E/CN.4/2005/47/Add.1, para. 11. Foodfirst Information and Action Network, The Human Right to Food in Guatemala, 2004. One manzana = 6,987 m2. United Nations, Common country assessment: Guatemala, 2004, p. 16. A/HRC/13/33/Add.4, para. 11. Stephan Klasen and others, “Operationalizing pro-poor growth, country case study: Bolivia”, discussion paper, Universität Göttingen, Ibero-Amerika-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung 101, Goettingen, October 2004.