'Socially acceptable' land grab rejected

Over 100 community and farmers’ rights organisations from across Africa, Asia and Latin America have denounced the World Bank’s proposed code of practice on land sales. They issued a statement today headed Stop Land Grabbing Now, which says that the code effectively facilitates the corporate take-over of rural people’s land.

The World Bank starts from the idea that any investment to increase land productivity in lower income countries and rural areas “is desirable in principle”.

It admits, however, that “some countries have been confronted with informal requests amounting to more than half their cultivable land area”. The World Bank also acknowledges that the key driving forces behind this phenomenon are far from philanthropic.

They are “the 2008 price spike in food and fuel prices, a desire by countries dependent on food imports to secure food supplies in the face of uncertainty and market volatility, speculation on land and commodity price increases, search for alternative energy sources, and possibly anticipation of payments for carbon sequestration”.

The World Bank adds: “The range of actors includes agro-enterprises in agri-food, biofuels, and extractive industries, private equity and other financial institutions, government-linked companies including sovereign funds, and individual entrepreneurs.”

The opposition statement contemptuously dismisses the World Bank code, which is any case entirely voluntary, saying:

“Since these investment deals are hinged on massive privatisation and transfer of land rights, the WB wants them to meet a few criteria to reduce the risks of social backlash: respect the rights of existing users of land, water and other resources (by paying them off); protect and improve livelihoods at the household and community level (provide jobs and social services); and do no harm to the environment. These are the core ideas behind the WB’s seven principles for socially acceptable land grabbing.”

The community and farmers’ groups say that facilitating the long-term corporate takeover of rural people’s farmlands is “completely unacceptable no matter which guidelines are followed”. They also warn that the World Bank’s principles distract from the fact that today’s global food crisis, marked by more than 1 billion people going hungry each day, “will not be solved by large scale industrial agriculture, which virtually all of these land acquisitions aim to promote”.

The statement sets out its own principles for land use which support the rights of communities, small farmers, fisher people and pastoralists. They would ensure local food supply and local control over water use and bio-diversity.

No surprise then that almost the first comment posted on the statement comes from China Farmer – aka a Chinese government official assigned to monitor this issue on the web.

He/she states: “This sounds like it was written by a westerner who does not understand local situations and does not wish to help people get out of poverty. Where is analysis? Why do westerners wish to help poor people but not help poor people be rich?” This is Chinese government speak for “don’t challenge the right of our new-style agricultural corporations to rove the globe making money”.

Those governments who are buying land for profit represent a new brand of colonialism in cahoots with the global corporations, but hiding behind anti-imperialist rhetoric. Those who are selling it are not much better. They can try to put people off the scent, but global fairness can only be achieved by ending the market in land.

This means completing the anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th Century with a new political movement to overthrow the élites who inherited the colonialists’ power and are exploiting it to the full on the same free-market principles.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Cashing in on global food crisis

The intensification of the global food crisis is bringing misery to millions but profits for investors and entrepreneurs as a massive land grab takes place at the expense of local people.

Just to underline the point, it was revealed this week that China’s Jin Hui Mining Corporation has changed its name to Natural Dairy (NZ) Holdings after buying a bankrupt family-owned New Zealand business using a mixture of cash and convertible bonds. The Crafar family’s empire has land, 30,000 animals, a milk powder production plant, 200 staff and around $200 million of debt.

It was also reported that 1,000 Cambodian villagers rose up against a local business tycoon and politician trying to force them to sell their land to him at a rock-bottom price. It is only the latest in a series of protests as politicians and landowners profit from the Phnom Penh government’s policy of giving concessions to foreign companies. These are mainly from China, Vietnam and South Korea, and are running mines, power plants and farms.

Under capitalism’s business-as-usual vision, rubber-stamped at Copenhagen, demand for food will rise by 50% by 2050 whilst water shortages, rising seawater and desertification, caused by uncontrolled global warming, reduce the amount of arable land.

This nightmare vision makes land look like one of the few safe bets for investors. It, as they say, a no brainer – increased demand + shrinking supply + rising prices = big profits. New investment funds spring up almost daily, bringing private investors into an area previously dominated by farming corporations and sovereign wealth funds of China, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States.

They are buying up thousands of acres of land and turning them over to industrial forms of agriculture. The long-term result will be the same as elsewhere – soil structure destroyed, yields falling, loss of species diversity and increased greenhouse gas emissions as virgin land and forest are broken up, releasing stored CO2.

But investors pay about one tenth of the price per hectare for land in Africa as they would in Argentina or the United States. When the soil fails? Buy elsewhere and move on.

You might think that as the world faces unprecedented famine, governments would be rushing to take control. But the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2008 failed to get even a commitment on the issue. Now the World Bank is drafting a “code of practice” – which will undoubtedly be ignored.

The terrible contradiction is that while profits from food and land are increasing, agriculture itself – the actual foundation of human society – is going backwards. In six of the last eight years, world grain production has fallen short of consumption. In 2008 grain prices climbed to the highest level ever and though they have fallen a little, they remain extremely high.

Historically, the enclosure and privatisation of land was the foundation for capitalist development – it is time to reverse the process, with new forms of common ownership. Preventing famine means overcoming the alienation of human beings from the soil that, in the final analysis, is the source of all our lives. Holding land in common, with farmers’ rights protected, we can use our knowledge to solve organically the problems that herbicides and nitrates have intensified.

Instead of boosting the capitalist market in land, we can revitalise the soil by composting waste on a huge scale and ending the global drive towards grain-fed meat based diets, with a return to more natural, balanced diets. We should advocate a policy of no more land sales to investment banks and sovereign funds and fight to socialise the agri-businesses that dominate the food chain for profit.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

When corporations 'manage' the food crisis

If you want to know what happens if you leave corporations, bankers and global capitalist agencies in charge of something important, you just have to look at what has happened to food supply in the developing world. In spite of pledges to halve hunger by 2015, it has continued to increase worldwide, reaching over 1 billion people this year.   

So when those responsible for the crisis gathered in Madrid yesterday to discuss “food security” over a two-day conference hosted by the Spanish government, they had no intention of allowing small farmers a real voice in proceedings. Instead, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and corporations like Monsanto were given space on the panels while representatives of small farmers –  who produce 80% of the world's food – were given only a few minutes from the floor. Only some handpicked NGOs are asked to give their opinion. 

The organisers were no doubt aware that nearly 50 organisations had just signed a statement condemning the corporations, the WTO et al for intensifying the food crisis with policies based on intensive sale and use of fertilisers, agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds, alongside the acquisition of large areas of fertile land.   

They would not have enjoyed the section that says: “The central cause of the current food crisis is the relentless promotion of the interests of large industrial corporations and the international trade that they control, to the detriment of food production at the local and national levels and the needs and interests of local food producers and communities. At the World Food Summit in 1996, when there were an estimated 830 million hungry people, governments pledged to halve the number by 2015. Today, in the midst of a terrible food crisis, the figure of hungry people has risen to well beyond 1 billion.” 

Funds designated to resolve the food crisis are being used by the World Bank and the AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) in a way that can only intensify matters.

Transnational companies are moving into southern countries on a huge scale and starting to capture millions of hectares of land in order to bring agricultural production further under their control for industrial agrofuel and food production for the international market. 

Millions of peasants will be pushed out of food production, adding to the hungry in the rural areas and the slums of the big cities. The few that remain will work under full control of the transnational companies as workers or contract farmers, the statement warns. The signatories says that national governments should enhance food sovereignty and:

• bring the disastrous volatility of food prices in domestic markets to a standstill. 
  
• take full control over the import and export of food in order to stabilise local markets
• set up policies to actively support peasant-based food production and artisanal fishing, local markets and the implementation of agrarian and aquatic reform
• stop corporate land grabbing for industrial agro-fuels and food production. 
  

They also want United Nations agencies to exclude the WTO, IMF and the World Bank from implementing UN Task Force proposals and an end to the proliferation of what the statement describes as a “circus of the ongoing creation of new structures and spaces” said to be tackling the food crisis. 

Laudable as these aims are, they come up against the fact that not only the UN but most national governments are tied to the corporations and their agencies in a variety of ways. Extricating them from this relationship, creating truly democratic and sovereign governments alongside an independent UN, will require the defeat of the corporations and the seizure of their resources. The grave global economic crisis presents both small farmers and workers in the developed economies with a golden opportunity to take the initiative. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

A global land grab is underway

Today's food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. "Food insecure" governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snapping up farms all over the world to outsource their own food production and escape high market prices.

Private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, are eyeing overseas farms as an important new source of revenue. As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatised and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world's poorest and hungriest countries. A new report from the sustainable farming group GRAIN examines 100 cases of agricultural land grabbing - whether for food or simply for profit - that have exploded this year. The report says:

"Given the current financial meltdown, the investment houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds looking for a fast turnover, hedge funds driven off the now collapsed derivatives market, grain traders seeking new strategies for growth – are turning to land, for both food and fuel production, as a new source of profit. Land itself is not a typical investment for a lot of these transnational firms. Indeed, land is so fraught with political conflict that many countries don’t even allow foreigners to own it. And land doesn’t appreciate overnight, like pork bellies or gold.

"To get a return, investors need to raise the productive capacities of the land – and sometimes even get their hands dirty actually running a farm. But the food and financial crises combined have turned agricultural land into a new strategic asset. In many places around the world, food prices are high and land prices are low. And most of the “solutions” to the food crisis talk about pumping more food out of the land we have. So there is clearly money to be made by getting control of the best soils, near available water supplies, as fast as possible."

Saudi Arabia and China are just two nations out buying farms, from Sudan to Cambodia, to satisfy their own food needs. In these cases, governments, sometimes through sovereign wealth funds, are negotiating rights to foreign land - whether by purchase, concession or lease - so that their corporations can come in and produce food to export back home.

In return, they are offering oil contracts, soft loans, infrastructure projects and development funds. The food-hungry land grabbers include China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Those giving up their land, in exchange for the oil deals or investments, include the Philippines, Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, Uganda, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe. The plan is to capitalise on low land costs and high food prices wherever fertile farmland is available, such as in Ukraine, China, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan.

The money-hungry land grabbers are getting help from agencies like the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who are pressing target countries to change their laws and make stronger land ownership by foreigners possible. While political leaders and UN bodies are trying to "manage" the potential backlash, farmers' organisations, opposition parties, human rights groups and others are challenging and resisting these deals. But much more needs to be done to stop this massive sell-out of the very basis of food sovereignty.

This is an edited version of the GRAIN launch of the report Seized: The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security.