A/HRC/19/75 16. In Bangladesh, for example, more than two thirds of rural people are now landless12 (owning less than 0.2 hectares) and landlessness is increasing rapidly owing to demography and inheritance laws that divide holdings into ever smaller plots, but also to land-grabbing by powerful people.13 Many of the landless work as agricultural labourers, often for pitiful wages, and the rest are sharecroppers who work the land of absentee landlords in exploitative relationships in which 50 per cent of the crop must be passed back to the landlord. Seasonal crises of hunger are still experienced in the northern, more arid regions of Bangladesh, particularly during the monga, the lean season between crops, when no agricultural work is available for landless labourers. Increasing landlessness is contributing to migration to urban areas in search of work, forcing many people to live in the terrible conditions of the slums of Dhaka. 17. In India, the hungry and malnourished are primarily children, women and men living in rural areas and dependent on agriculture, working as casual workers but also as sharecroppers and tenant or marginal farmers with less than one hectare of land. 14 Agricultural wages are very low and increasingly precarious, the payment of minimum wages is always enforced, and many people lack work during the agricultural lean season. In some States, feudalistic patterns of land ownership persist, despite legal abolition and the official Land Ceilings Act that aimed to limit land concentration. 15 Scheduled castes and tribes suffer most from hunger and malnutrition in India; they make up 25 per cent of the rural population but 42 per cent of the poor.16 This is largely due to discrimination, as many are expected to work as agricultural labourers without being paid, and many are held in debt bondage by their higher-caste employers. D. People living from traditional fishing, hunting and herding activities 18. Around 10 per cent of the world’s hungry subsist through fishing, hunting and herding activities. In many countries, the traditional way of life of these people and their means of livelihood are threatened by competition over productive resources, leading to increasing hunger and malnutrition. 19. There are two types of fish production: fish captured in the wild from the sea or inland waters (capture fisheries) and fish farmed in the sea or inland waters (aquaculture). Both types are driven to industrialization, privatization and export orientation, which end up depriving local people of their traditional rights of access to fishing resources. 17 In agreements with Argentina and Senegal for example, the European Union managed to obtain fishing rights for endangered or locally used species, thereby threatening the food security of thousands of local fishing communities.18 Fish farming is mostly located in developing countries (84 per cent of global production is in low-income food deficit 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 6 E/CN.4/2004/10/Add.1, para. 9. Rahman A.T.R., Human Security in Bangladesh: In Search of Justice and Dignity (Bangladesh, UNDP, 2002). Sujoy Chakravarty and Sajal A. Dand, Food Insecurity in India: Causes and Dimensions, April 2005. Available from www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-04-01sujoy.pdf. E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.2, paras. 10-11. Gerard J. Gill and others, “Food security and the Millennium Development Goal on hunger in Asia”, Working paper 231 (Overseas Development Institute, London, 2003). Available from www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/1266.pdf. A/59/385, paras. 33–60. United Nations Environment Programme, Fisheries and the Environment. Fisheries Subsidies and Marine Resources Management: Lessons learned from Studies in Argentina and Senegal (Geneva, United Nations, 2002).