Author Profile: Darryl Vhugen

Darryl Vhugen

About Darryl Vhugen

Darryl Vhugen is a senior attorney at Landesa. Prior to becoming a senior attorney, he was the state director for Andhra Pradesh (AP) in India where he led Landesa’s AP office in Hyderabad. Vhugen led Landesa’s work in partnership with the state government and others to help secure land rights for landless women and families. The Landesa-designed Indira Kranti Patham program has already helped thousands of landless women purchase land, and provided legal aid to more than 70,000 poor families. In 2007, Vhugen consulted Landesa on land tenure security issues, working in the field in India. Before joining Landesa, Vhugen spent 25 years in the private practice as an international and domestic business lawyer and litigator. He advised foreign and domestic clients in a broad range of business matters involving the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia. Vhugen earned his B.A. with highest honors in economics from Lewis & Clark College and his J.D. with honors from University of Washington.

Next steps to put voluntary guidelines into action to address the global land rush

Since 2008, a global land rush—sparked initially by a dramatic rise in global food prices and now driven by a variety of factors including increased demand for food and biofuels, carbon markets, and speculation—has been remaking the face of agriculture …
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Growing profits – and a greener planet

While many people are aware that agriculture is highly susceptible to the effects of climate change, few know that agricultural practices contribute about 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to the development of an entirely new …
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Uprooting Families to Save Trees

Much has been written about the global land rush –the trend in which investors, eager to establish plantations to produce food or biofuel at a discount, buy up or lease vast swaths of farmland in the developing world. In the …
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Takeaways from World Bank Conference on Land & Poverty

I just returned from the annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington, DC.  I was happy to see that conference built off of last year’s focus on large scale land acquisitions. A full one-third of the sessions …
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Top 6 Myths About Land Acquisitions

In my last post, I wrote about the risks and benefits of large-scale land acquisitions in developing countries. Judging by the growing number of related articles and commentaries, the issue is increasingly finding its way on to the radar screens …
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Can the Global Land Rush benefit investors and farmers?

Neil MacFarquhar’s recent piece in the New York Times describing how African farmers are being displaced by large-scale land investments raises some important issues.  As he points out, large-scale investment in land in developing countries has accelerated rapidly in recent …
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