Webinar on soil governance and launch of SoiLEX 13 January 2021 | 15:00 to 16:30 CET online (Zoom platform). Ms Margret Vidar, Legal Officer, FAO

1. FAO’s technical assistance on
sustainable land management
Margret Vidar, Development Law,
FAO

2. Overview
• FAO’s Development Law work
• Main areas of FAO technical assistance
• Methodologies
• FAOLEX

3. FAO’s Development Law Work
• Support FAO members in improving and
strengthening national legislation.
• Support development and implementation of
international hard and soft law.
• Specialists in agriculture law, fisheries law, forestry
law, water law, land tenure and management,
human rights, environmental law.
• Part of FAO’s Legal Office.

4. FAO Development Law Approach

5. Main areas of technical assistance
for sustainable land management
• Responsible governance of tenure;
• Land management tools – land consolidation and land
banking;
• Agriculture (pesticide, seeds, fertilizers, good production
practices);
• Biodiversity and environmental protection, One Health,
AMR;
• Forestry (classification and conversion);
• Shelterbelt management.

6. Recent publications

7. Forthcoming publications
• Tenure obligations and responsibilities;
• Land abandonment;
• Sustainable land management and the law
• Enforcement issues
• Avoiding penalizing poverty
• Network of legislation rather than a single law
• From tenure and environmental law to soil legislation

8. FAOLEX www.fao.org/faolex
• Permanent collection: Established in 1995, with some 8,000
new records added every year
• Depth of its collection: Approximately 180,000 legal and
policy texts
• Breadth of the collection: 12 main subject areas related to
food, agriculture and natural resources management
• Wide geographic coverage: 185 between countries and
territories. Includes legislation from subnational entities as
well as policies and binding decisions from regional
organizations
• Structured data: FAOLEX offers multiple ways to browse,
including by country, region, subject area, keywords (over
400 in total), chronology and content search.

9. FAOLEX - Comprehensive one-stop shop to find policy and legal
instruments relevant to FAO domains.
FAOLEX - The information returned is relatively raw. The user is
presented documents without proper guidance on how the
documents are to be understood in context.
FAO is constructing enriched subset databases that better
illuminate key themes and documents for specific subjects.
Subset databases on soils, fisheries, water, gender, indigenous
peoples, the Right to Food, family farming, agroecology, anti-
microbial resistance and timber legality are being developed or
enhanced.
Overcoming information overload

10. FAO Legal and Policy subset databases
Facilitating access and understanding for specific subject matter domains
Eliminates information
noise by restricting the
document collection to
relevant documents
Relevance
Identifies themes and legal
elements central to the
subject domain
Conceptual model
Intuitive browsing and
clear explanatory notes to
engage a wide audience
User-friendly interface
Analyse and categorize the
document collection
according to the
requirements of the
conceptual model
Enriched analysis