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Land Grabs in Poor Countries Set to Increase
PARIS - After weeks of rumors sparked by the leaking of a draft World Bank position paper on so-called land grabs in poor countries, the international financial institution has officially released its report on the surge in farmland purchases and leasing which have elicited controversy for over two years.
Acquisitions of vast tracts of fertile land in Africa by foreign governments and companies eager to secure affordable food resources in highly volatile commodity markets stirred public attention when the South Korean company Daewoo bought more than a million hectares of farmland in the east African island state Madagascar.
The World Bank report, titled "Rising Global Interest in Farmland. Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits?" and released on Sept 8, cautions that "an astonishing lack of awareness of what is happening on the ground" exists -- even by the public sector institutions mandated to control this phenomenon.
It estimates that 2009 saw 45 million hectares of farmland deals going through and predicts that, "given commodity price volatility, growing human and environmental pressures, and worries about food security, this interest will increase, especially in the developing world".
At the beginning of Sept 2010, riots over steep increases in the price of bread left seven people dead and hundreds injured in Maputo, the capital of the southern African country Mozambique, sparking fears of another food crisis like the one that affected several African countries two years ago.
That same week, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization announced that, "surging wheat prices drove international food prices up five percent (in Aug 2010) in the biggest month-on-month increase since November 2009."
Several huge farmland investment deals have been decried for bringing uncertain benefits to recipient countries, and sometime for leading to smallholders' eviction from their land and adversely affecting local livelihoods.
The World Bank report reckons that "one of the highest development priorities in the world must be to improve smallholder agricultural productivity, especially in Africa".
But the report deems that "when done right, larger scale farming systems can also have a place as one of many tools to promote sustainable agricultural and rural development". It then proceeds to detail many conditions for these deals to benefit developing countries.
"When assisted, family farmers have been able to compete in global markets. Many companies have successfully collaborated with local farmers," Lorenzo Cotula, who researches the topic for the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, told IPS. The non-profit IIED promotes sustainable development.
"But national laws in recipient countries need to be changed and better implemented, so local people can have more secure rights to their land," he cautions.
The report states that farmland investments' adverse effects on local development are often due to the fact that host countries' governments "were ill-equipped and ill-prepared to deal with the sudden influx of interest".
Indeed, many such deals have been rushed through, and several have brought minimal revenue to public coffers. "The fact that there appears to be significant interest in countries with weak governance implies that the risks associated with such investments are immense," the report warns.
Cotula concurs and adds: "Governments must be able to regulate investment and skilfully negotiate with investors. Civil society should be able to scrutinize government and investor action, and farmers' groups should be able to negotiate with government and investors.
"International agencies can play an important role in making these three conditions come true," he suggests.
The World Bank report calls for global implementation of investment principles it drafted last year with other developmental institutions such as FAO.
But it acknowledges that the "effectiveness of these rules depends on the mechanisms for disclosure and enforcement that are available to assess whether actors comply with standards, and to deal with cases where they do not".
Such enforcements mechanisms do not yet exist, and some observers are skeptical.
"Relying on voluntary enforcement of such principles would never work as investors would pay no heed to them. Many already hide behind governments and shell companies", says Antoine Bouhey, who leads the campaign for farmers' rights in developing countries as organized by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Peuples Solidaires in association with international NGO ActionAid.
"What we need is constraining legislation, both in recipient countries and at home where the investing corporations are headquartered," he argues.
"This will take a while. In the meantime a moratorium on these investments should be declared in developing countries that have not reached millennium development goal one (eradicating extreme poverty and hunger)," he adds.
While the World Bank report anticipates that demand for land may be increasing, it admonishes that, "at the same time, scarcity of information on what is happening encourages speculation on a large scale".
But, in a hopeful conclusion, it observes that "these risks correspond to equally large opportunities", as "increased productivity and effectiveness in the utilization of (large areas of land currently not cultivated) could have far-reaching developmental impacts".
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22 Comments so far
Show AllThe way I see it - American imperialism is a puppet of the World Bank.
hey, hey, no need to bicker; you're both right!
Exceprts from: "Every Man a King" -- Radio Speech to the Nation by Huey P. Long
delivered 23 February 1934
original text is here: http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hueyplongking.htm
"Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.
So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other, until there is not any kind of business that a small, independent man could go into today and make a living, and there is not any kind of business that an independent man can go into and make any money to buy an automobile with; and they have finally and gradually and steadily eliminated everybody from the fields in which there is a living to be made, and still they have got little enough sense to think they ought to be able to get more business out of it anyway.
... Then we have heard of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialog between Plato and Socrates, in which one said that great riches brought on great poverty, and would be destructive of a country. Read what they said. Read what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man."
It's galloping right along now, faster and faster, for the few to control the food, the water, even the air because they are pro-pollutant/anti-regulations, the jobs or lack of same, the medical care and medicines, housing, fuel ... and you name it with prices for what we need out of sight or much no longer available as the market games are played by investors and speculators.
Plus I read not too long ago that the over-all three-tier plan driven by The Rothschild Dynasty has as it's last part to set the Western World against the Islamic world. We're there, folks. Given our totally controlled and obedient media to brainwash the ignorant with the likes of Glen Beck and others, hatred is growing, and of course, there's all those deaths and maimings and sufferings from the U.S. wars in the mid-east with Great Britain as the quieter partner and Tony Blair, with the big mouth, gung-ho to go to war with Iran and control that black-gold stuff.
The confusions of Germans when Hitler took power was the rapidity of laws and rules changing or ignored and takeovers of all kinds at many levels just part of the daily landscape.
You either see it or you don't, and most don't see it still, but get stuck on one or two issues.
Big-time takeover, and David Rockefeller's expressed intention in his memoirs quite a few years back was this is the way it rightfully should be with those who really know how to run things fully in charge.
"...now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
In other words, ... and the rich shall grab the earth and we're supposed to like it.
Amazing how quickly all the pieces are being slipped into place now. Parts of Africa are a nightmare now, but the people haven't seen anything yet, and likely neither have we.
/cm
Cee, you are right. See This: http://news.oneindia.in/2007/09/28/bharti-rothschild-jv-includes-del-monte-as-third-partner-1191040051.html
Companies owned or controlled by rothschild include: Del Monte; Fresh Fields and Fieldfresh.
Other interests include RusAl (the largest aluminum concern in the world and its "takeover" of Norilisk (check spelling) which is the largest mining/refining concern of non-ferrous metals that has recently given Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a "headache". John Paulson (of the "shitty little deal" fame at Goldman Sachs) is heavily involved in this deal as well.
We can talk the Communications, IT, Energy and Water treatment sector as well. The others are too numerous to mention.
Moving people off of their farmland and fishing and hunting grounds and into slums where they become a desperate and easily exploitable labor force is always the first step to prepare the way for the juggernaut of Capitalism, going back to the Enclosure Acts in England at the dawn of the capitalist era.
African farmers are now complaining they make nothing when commodity prices are depressed but when prices start rising due to scarcity, Foreign Nations prematurely dump free food aid on the market,thereby preventing the African farmer from ever making a profit.
Makes the African farmer very vulnerable to being forced to sell their land.
Who would think to turn food aid into a weapon?
Geee I forget which buk I is gonna type in to look sumo inellekual.Last depression and dust bowl made the farms here corporate tool. We are in no better shape than the other banana republics that we look down on. Enjoy the perception of superiority while you may. Who runs may read.
The South Koreans who bought all that land in Madagascar (a terribly sad story...) saw the future and they took predatory action.
This will escalate to (resource) wars.
Iraq and Afghanistan are resource occupations.
A nightmare is rising in Africa and Central Asia; it will move like a tornado over the continents and the oceans.
The demand for land is increasing among corporate hogs. The little piggies just can't get enough.
Our government helps them instead of us.
Trade policy is dominated by corporated interests. They dump cheap US agricultural products into these countries, driving farmers off their land because they can't compete. Then they buy up the land.
The people in these countries have nothing to lose and as others in that position, they will fight. The corporations are going to try and externalize that cost by making us think that impoverished third world farmers all belong to Al Qaida and sure as night follows day, they will attempt to drag us into another war.
Another reason why the US government condemns Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia. Giving land to poor and small farmers is just not an American ideal or foreign policy.
Demand for land (and water) increases severalfold when there is a great demand for meat and dairy products. This is a "softer" form of violence, if there is one - where consumers inflict violence on vulnerable people indirectly. Or, maybe not so indirectly.
Mozambique is one of the many countries that have experienced significant Mennonite immigration to the detriment of the local indigenous population. Try performing an advanced Google search of Mennonites, with the 'exact wording or phrase field' Mozambique.
I do not think it is to the 'detriment of the local indigenous population', but there are many Mennonites in Bolivia, especially in the Gran Chaco region.
The Mennonites clear-cut the forests, thus altering and often destroying the native habitat indigenous people relied upon for survival.
The land is then devoted to other uses, notably the establishment of palm oil plantations, GMO soy, and GMO corn. The grains they raise are mostly grown for animal feed to supply the CAFO's they construct. Essentially, a once vibrant and diverse bio-system is reduced to one of near mono-culture---that is bad news for everyone on the planet, not solely the displaced indigenous peoples.
True, Mennonites have large holding in Bolivia. They have also moved into Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Belize, San Salvador, and Guatemala, clearing rain forest, displacing tribes, and converting land to methods of commercial restricted cultivation.
The question to ask, then, is short term agricultural advantage worth the environmental costs?
If history is any guide, it will be noted that everywhere that mono-culture or near mono-cultural farming has been practiced, the results have always been the same: destruction of native flora and fauna and eventual exhaustion of the land.
Even as I write this, the remnants and ashes of about a dozen white oak trees lie smoldering just a couple of miles down the road. Having once reigned majestically over the landscape for the last seventy years or so, they are now in the way because the Mennonites want to plant soy beans.
and on it continues...
It's good and it's bad. Agricultural "land grabs" will allow for mechanized production and increased yield -- the food is needed. This is a good thing, the bad side is that a way of life, home place, and family connections will be destroyed. The people who made a basic life on the land, will now concentrate in more urban areas, where both husband and wife will need to work to support the family. This is not a problem they both worked to survive before, but now they need employment to work, and many will join the ranks of unemployed. Food that was sometimes scarce and always labor intensive, will now become plentiful, available, and very easy. It also will lose much of its nutrition, be unaffordable and of course highly profitable for Agra business.
The poor will continue to suffer -- we've always had them, the wealthy will prosper... but the economic disruption to the middle class will greatly increase. Bottom line, given time to work it's magic their economy will more closely resemble our own. I'm afraid it's change that moves relentlessly under the name progress. The challenge is for Americans to more closely examine the health risks of "factory food" and through our buying habits teach Agra business to provide a healthy product within a society where wages provide access to health care, to healthy diet, to adequate housing and educational opportunity. Tragically the in US today we are moving closer to the problems we fear in the "land grabs" in poor nations. You don't suppose that 90% of profit going to 10% of the population eventually leaves commodity on the shelf, the population in need, and the total economy is shambles?
We do not own land, we are just temporary occupants and the land will ultimately consume us.
24,000 people, mostly children less than 5 years old, die of hunger every day. So rich countries, rather than try to relieve this unconscionable hunger are busily trying to make it worse. the endless murders of the Global South during the last 500 years weren't horrible enough?