Central America is currently a very diverse region. With a valuable cultural legacy inherited from the Mayan and Nahua cultures, which inhabited much of Central America in the Precolombian era, the isthmus is now a region with widely differing social and economic development in its constituent countries.

Poverty is a feature of all the countries of Central America. According to recent studies carried out by the FAO and other international agencies, approximately 46% of the 42.2 million people in the region are in poverty, and one in every five is in extreme poverty; despite the slight progress made in the last five years (53%), the situation remains serious. As in the remainder of Latin America, in Central American countries the indigenous population, which makes up a large proportion of the total population in some countries such as Guatemala, Belize and Panama, suffers most from poverty.

As regards land tenure, the pattern of distribution of this natural resource in Central American countries is the result of a long process of settlements and distribution processes. This pattern originally started with the appropriation by Spanish colonizers of the best land by mandate, the nationalization and municipalization of territory during the postcolonial era, and the sale of much of this to national and foreign investors in the late nineteenth century.

From the 1930s and particularly the 1960s onwards, agrarian reform processes, land distribution during the civil wars and restitution and purchase measures carried out through Peace Agreements changed the forms of land distribution in the various Central American countries.
Supported by the Alliance for Progress, agrarian reforms were carried out in Central American countries as a means of resolving the great inequality in land distribution in the field, developing markets and internal production. With the exception of the reforms in Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador, agrarian reforms in Central America were carried out by distributing state and agricultural frontier lands, not always of good quality, by forming cooperatives or associations, which ultimately had little impact on changing land ownership patterns.
With the end of the war, the Peace Agreements encouraged the development of new distribution models based on Land Trusts and other means of access based on acquisition. It was through international cooperation projects and with government equity funds that land purchase experiments using credit and production subsidies were developed through support for the Peace Agreements in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

LAPs emerged in Central American countries in an attempt to resolve the informality, legal irregularities and land disputes that existed during the 1990s and which still persist in some properties and which needed to be resolved to ensure the efficient, transparent operation of land markets. This informality and these irregularities were the result of: the disintegration of agrarian reform processes, cooperatives and associations; the overlapping of rights owing to land distribution processes during wars; the illegal occupation of land in many of the countries; and finally the existence of informal community mechanisms certifying land transactions versus cadastral and registration systems that were not working properly. LAPs also emerged in Central America as a response for resolving legal tenure situations that had many irregularities, by strengthening and modernizing the institutions responsible for land administration, developing modern, functional cadastral and registration systems, developing dispute resolution methodologies and supporting territorial planning and boundary services. It is important to mention that a feature of LAPs in Central American countries such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras is that they are set up in parallel with initiatives also seeking to guarantee access, and in this respect they sometimes coordinate activities and services in the same target areas.