by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 28, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest
By the Worldwatch Institute
An estimated 70.2 million hectares of agricultural land worldwide have been sold or leased to private and public investors since 2000, according to new research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org) for its Vital Signs Onlineservice. The bulk of these acquisitions, which are called “land grabs” by some observers, took place between 2008 and 2010, peaking in 2009. Although data for 2010 indicate that the amount of acquisitions dropped considerably after the 2009 peak, it still remains well above pre-2005 levels, writes Worldwatch author Cameron Scherer.
Although definitions vary, “land grab” here refers to the large-scale purchase of agricultural land by public or private investors. In April 2012, the Land Matrix Project, a global network of some 45 research and civil society organizations, released the largest database to date on these types of land deals, gathering data from 1,006 deals covering 70.2 million hectares around the world.
Africa has seen the greatest share of land involved in these acquisitions, with 34.3 million hectares sold or leased since 2000. East Africa accounts for the greatest investment, with 310 deals covering 16.8 million hectares. Increased investment in Africa’s agricultural land reflects a decade-long trend of strengthening economic relationships between Africa and the rest of the world, with foreign direct investment to the continent growing 259 percent between 2000 and 2010.
Asia and Latin America come in second and third for most heavily targeted regions, with 27.1 million and 6.6 million hectares of land deals, respectively.
Investor countries, in contrast, are spread more evenly around the globe. Of the 82 listed investor countries in the Land Matrix Project database, Brazil, India, and China account for 16.5 million hectares, or around 24 percent of the total hectares sold or leased worldwide. When the East Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea are included, this group of industrializing countries has been involved in 274 land deals covering 30.5 million hectares.
The United States and the United Kingdom account for a combined 6.4 million hectares of land deals. The oil-rich but arid Gulf states make up the final group of major land investors, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar responsible for 4.6 million hectares.
“In several cases—namely, South Africa, China, Brazil, and India—there is an overlap between investor and target countries,” said Scherer. “Yet most of the data paint one of two pictures: First, there is a new ‘South-South’ regionalism, in which emerging economies invest in nearby, culturally affiliated countries. The other trend is one of wealthy (or increasingly wealthy) countries, many with little arable land, buying up land in low-income nations—especially those that have been particularly vulnerable to the financial and food crises of recent years.”
The food crisis of 2007–08 helped spark the dramatic uptick in land acquisitions in 2009, as investors rushed to capitalize on the rising prices of staple crops. But food prices are not solely responsible for the land-grab trend. As fuel consumption and oil prices continue to rise, the demand for land on which to grow feedstocks for biofuels will likely rise too, increasing the pressure on limited cropland.
The implications of the recent surge in land acquisitions are still unclear. In many cases, the deals displace local farmers who already occupy and farm the land, but who frequently lack formal land rights or access to legal institutions to defend these rights. The land grabs also often result in the use of industrial agriculture and other practices that can bring serious ecological and other impacts to these regions. In the absence of clear regulations, robust enforcement mechanisms, government transparency, and channels for civil society participation, further investments in land may benefit a group of increasingly wealthy investorsat the expense of those living in the targeted land areas.
Further highlights from the report:
- Approximately 56.2 million hectares of land have been sold or leased in Africa—4.8 percent of the continent’s agricultural land
- Of the 658 land acquisition deals that took place in 2000–2010 that provided information on individual investors, 442 (67 percent) of them were carried out by private companies.
- Just over a quarter of the acquired land is used for nonagricultural purposes: some 11 percent of investors are in the forestry sector, and 8 percent are from the mining, industry, livestock, or tourism sectors.
From Worldwatch Institute: http://www.worldwatch.org/despite-drop-2009-peak-agricultural-land-grabs-still-remain-above-pre-2005-levels-0
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 25, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Daan Bauwens / Inter Press Service
Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.
In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.
But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.
The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe’s target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe’s roads by 2020.
ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.
NGOs also found that the EU’s planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.
Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.
“The European Commission wants to decide on the 2030 policy without having considered the impacts of the 2020 policy first,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam’s EU biofuels expert, told IPS. “The new communication specifies hard criteria to measure environmental impact, but stays mute on the social impact of biofuels. The word ‘food’ is not even mentioned in the document, let alone food security.”
According to Herman, the Commission is moving too fast because of industry demands. “Investors in biofuel want security,” he added.
“Ever since the first target was set in 2009, the biofuel industry has been growing rapidly. This industry now wants to know what will happen after 2020. And it is an industry with lots of lobby power here in Brussels.”
In the meantime, the social effects of the growing demand for biofuels are aggravating. For instance, a large percentage of Guatemala’s indigenous population is facing a new hunger crisis because of land grabbing, forced evictions and water diversion to create large-scale monoculture plantations of palm oil trees and sugar cane for biofuel.
In one such case in March last year, Guatemalan police and soldiers evicted more than 3000 indigenous people from their homes in Guatemala’s Polochic valley to make room for a large-scale plantation. Banned from their land, these 700 families are now facing severe malnutrition and high child mortality as a consequence of diarrhoea or fever.
Read more from Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/biofuels-and-hunger-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 2, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Survival International
The Enawene Nawe Indians of the Brazilian Amazon have said they feel ‘desperate’, as their annual fishing ritual has provided them with almost no fish.
This is the fourth year running that the Indians have encountered drastically low fish stocks in their rivers, and the second year in which the ritual could not be properly performed.
This year’s catch is reportedly even lower than in 2009, when the Indians faced a catastrophic food shortage.
The lack of fish is blamed on pollution from the dams being built in the Juruena river basin. The Indians did not give their consent for the project, and have warned, ‘We don’t want the dams dirtying our water, killing our fish, invading our lands.’
During the Yãkwa ritual, Enawene Nawe men spend months in the forest, building wooden dams to trap fish, then smoking the fish and taking them to their villages by canoe.
This is a key part of the tribe’s culture, and crucial to the Indians’ diet as they do not eat meat.
Brazil’s Public Ministry has implemented an ‘emergency program’ and ordered the government’s indigenous affairs department, FUNAI, and the dam construction companies, to buy fish for the tribe.
Yãkwa has been recognized as part of Brazil’s cultural and historic heritage, and UNESCO has called for it to be ‘urgently safeguarded’.
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8296
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 24, 2012 | Building Alternatives, Reclamation & Expropriation
By Jeff Conant / AlterNet
Invoking the spirit of international peasant farmer movements La Via Campesina and Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra, hundreds of people entered a five-acre plot of land at the Berkeley/Albany border on Sunday April 22, in one of this spring’s first high-profile actions of the Occupy movement. Their goal? To farm the land and share the food with the local community.
Under the banner “Occupy the Farm,” a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists broke the lock and entered the UC Berkeley-owned Gill Tract on a sunny Sunday afternoon, bringing with them over 15,000 seedlings, a pair of rototillers and a half-dozen chickens in mobile chicken-tractors. Hundreds of people, including a dozen or so children, went to work clearing weeds, tilling garden beds, filling holes with compost, and planting seedlings. At the end of four hours, they’d planted an estimated three-quarters of an acre.
After last fall’s burst of Occupy actions raised a challenge to corporate control writ large, organizers of Occupy the Farm say they are kicking off the spring season with efforts to reclaim land not just as a way of occupying space, but to meet the needs of communities through food production.
The group’s press release, which garnered significant media attention and brought several TV crews out to film the rebel farmers, said, “Occupy the Farm seeks to address structural problems with health and inequalities in the Bay Area that stem from communities’ lack of access to food and land. Today’s action reclaims the Gill Tract to demonstrate and exercise the peoples’ right to use public space for the public good. This farm will serve as a hub for urban agriculture, a healthy and affordable food source for Bay Area residents and an educational center.”
The Gill Tract, an agricultural research plot owned by UC Berkeley, is the last five acres of Class 1 soil in the East Bay. Generations of UC researchers have farmed here; now UCB Capital Projects, which holds the title to the land, has slated it for rezoning in 2013. Ironically, the activists say the company most likely to buy it up for development is Whole Foods Corporation. Hence the Occupiers’ slogan: “Whole food, not Whole Foods.”
The organizers say the UC-owned Gill tract is significant not only because it is the last and best agricultural land in the East Bay, but because the struggle over this land is tied to the struggle to keep the public university serving the public interest. Over the last decade, through investments by Novartis, Syngenta, BP and other corporations, the University of California has become increasingly captured by private interests, which have come to control the research agenda and the land use policy. Now, Occupy the Farm says, the public is taking it back.
Read more from AlterNet: http://www.alternet.org/food/155127/occupy_v._whole_foods_activists_take_over_land_slated_for_development_and_start_a_farm_/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 23, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, NEWS
By John Vidal & Claire Provost / The Guardian
The World Bank is helping corporations and international investors snap up cheap land in Africa and developing countries worldwide at the expense of local communities, environment and farm groups said in a statement released on Monday to coincide with the bank’s annual land and poverty conference in Washington DC.
According to the groups, which include NGO Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) and international peasants’ group La Via Campesina, decades of World Bank policies have pushed African and other governments to privatise land and focus on industrial farming. In addition, they say, the bank is playing a “key role” in the global rush for farmland by providing capital and guarantees to big multinational investors.
“The result has often been … people forced off land they have traditionally farmed for generations, more rural poverty and greater risk of food shortages”, said FOEI in a separate report launched ahead of the World Bank conference.
The event, which promises to focus on “land governance in a rapidly changing environment”, is billed as a forum to discuss “innovative approaches” to land governance challenges including climate change, the growing demand for key natural resources, and rapid urbanisation. But campaigners say the conference mistakenly focuses on how to improve large-scale land deals rather than on helping local communities to secure or retain access to their land.
The FOEI report suggests land grabbing is intensifying and spreading, especially in rural areas of Africa and Asia. “High levels of demand for land have pushed up prices, bringing investment banks and speculators into farming,” it says.
“The World Bank’s policies for land privatisation and concentration have paved the way for corporations from Wall Street to Singapore to take upwards of 80m hectares (197.6 acres) of land from rural communities across the world in the past few years,” said the groups in a statement accusing the bank of promoting “corporate-oriented rather than people-centred” policies and laws.
In 2010, the World Bank spearheaded the development of new principles for responsible agricultural investment to better ensure that land deals respect local rights, livelihoods and resources; these guidelines have also been criticised for legitimising, rather than challenging, the global rush for land.
Allegations of land-grabbing have hit countries around the world and have been accompanied by growing concern about whether large-scale land deals are delivering promised income and employment for local people. This week, a coalition of NGOs and research institutes is expected to release the latest findings of the Land Matrix project, which has attempted to systematically document recent land acquisitions.
Current estimates suggest that 80-230m hectares of land have been leased or bought in recent years, largely to produce food, feed or fuel for the international market.
Read more from The Guardian
Photo by Floriane Vita on Unsplash
