A billion hungry people victim of land grabs

The World Bank is one now of the world’s leading land grabbers, channeling aid and loans into projects which force people off land they have used for generations. One of the results is a dramatic rise in food prices and global hunger.

Since 2008, when the World Bank put a modest monitoring and a complaints procedure in place, communities saying investments have violated their land rights have brought 21 formal complaints. Internal monitoring found that people were forced off their land in 30% of the projects the World Bank funds – that’s around one million people in total.

The World Bank’s investments in agriculture have tripled in the last decade from $2.5bn in 2002 to $6–8bn in 2012. But this investment is not aimed at easing hunger or poverty.

Rather it is simply bankrolling governments to get involved in the global market in land. Private investors and governments dedicated to carving out a toehold for their own elite in the world capitalist market are the beneficiaries.

A case in point is Cambodia, where mass removals of people from their land have brought protests, and ruthless government repression, including assassinations of campaigners and journalists.

This week 71-year-old broadcaster Mam Sonando was jailed for 20 years because his Beehive Radio supported land rights. The trumped-up charge was one of “inciting rebellion”. Security forces stormed a village in May after local people resisted the sale of a land to a corporation.

“Not a shred of evidence has been submitted in court that proves any connection between Mam Sonando and these bogus charges,” said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights, calling the verdict “embarrassingly unsophisticated and brazen.”

Reluctantly, the World Bank has frozen loans to Cambodia, after the government refused to say how it would meet the needs of displaced people (not that people shouldn’t, in principle, be displaced you understand – the World Bank accepts that kind of “collateral damage” if some gesture is made at resettlement).

So now the Cambodian government says it will halt land deals for the time being – but as 63% of all available land in Cambodia has already been passed on to private companies, there can’t be much left to deal.

A report published by Oxfam into investment in agricultural land by foreign interests found that between 2000 and 2010, 60% was invested in developing countries with serious hunger problems. Two-thirds of those investors plan to export everything they produce.

“In the past decade an area of land eight times the size of the UK has been sold off globally as land sales rapidly accelerate. This land could feed a billion people, equivalent to the number of people who go to bed hungry each night. In poor countries, foreign investors have been buying an area of land the size of London every six days,” the report says.

Oxfam estimates that 60% of land deals in the past decade are either being used to produce bio-fuels or left idle as investors wait for the price to rise. This land could have fed one billion people. To complete the vicious circle, those countries where the land grab has been most extensive, are also those suffering the biggest food price hikes.

Sub-Saharan Africa has had the highest increase in maize prices – for example 113% in Mozambique, and 47% in Malawi. These reflect poor local harvests, rises in world prices, combined with general inflation. The wheat price rose 27% in South Africa, 15% in Sudan, and 14% in India. These are higher price increases than in the major producer countries where drought has reduced this year’s crop.

And just to underline the market-driven nature of the food crisis, there have been big increases in the price of rice, in spite of this year’s plentiful harvest. The internationalisation of rice exports raises prices in local, more traditionally rice-dependent and producer countries. In India and Pakistan for example, rice prices are 30% higher than a year ago.

Land grabbing, aided by the World Bank, is about making profit while large parts of humanity go hungry. Capitalism is truly an obscene system.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Market driving hunger crisis

The world is facing a hunger crisis unlike anything it has seen in more than 50 years. Some 925 million people don’t have enough to eat and almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes each day.

That’s the stark reality facing almost one in seven of the world’s population. With food prices reaching a new high, the head of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, has called for “urgent structural change” to solve global hunger. The rapid increase in hunger and malnourishment since the food crisis of 2008 reveals the inadequacy of the present global food system, he said.

The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed between 100-150 million people into poverty.

But all Diouf’s talk of safety nets and social protection programmes, investment and support for small-scale farming is pie in the sky at a time when the market is driving land and food production in entirely the opposite direction.

In Africa, the main development activity at present is not land redistribution, or even food aid, but an enthusiastic entry into the world of global speculation in land and food production. The dramatic weather changes caused by global warming, which governments refuse to address, is also pushing up food prices.

The role of the market in buying and selling commodity futures is a further crucial factor in driving up prices. Last year, US wheat futures prices rose 47 per cent, corn rose more than 50 per cent and soybeans jumped 34 per cent.


Catherine Flax, investment bank JP Morgan's CEO for commodities, admitted that the financial crisis and fears of inflation have made investors suspicious of banks and financial services: "I do think investors are increasingly looking at physical assets, whether agricultural assets or infrastructure type assets, in part because of the expectations of inflation but also I don't think investors are entirely over the insecurity of the financial crisis."

Rising demand in Asia is a major issue. China’s food imports are soaring, as its own agricultural development is neglected, in favour of land privatisation and industrialisation.

There is no will on the part of governments to interfere in this unbridled operation of the market. In fact, there is an increasing tendency to end subsidies and to let inflation rip.

This policy is meeting resistance, especially in North Africa. The Algerian government rapidly cut import duties when food riots threatened its own survival. The price of basic goods rose by 30 per cent in less than a month in Algeria and a popular uprising led to the arrest of more than 1,000 people, many of them minors.

In neighbouring Tunisia dozens of people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes centred on unemployment and rising food prices. Bureaucrats in China also fear unrest, with inflation currently running at 5 per cent per year according to official figures, but in reality as much as double that.

Food prices in Australia are likely to soar in the coming months as a result of the Queensland floods, with 50 per cent of crops having been affected and 20 per cent wiped out entirely.

In reality it is THE MARKET in food that is in crisis, not the SUPPLY of food. There is food enough in the world – the rich never go hungry. The operation of the market is preventing people from either growing or purchasing what they need.

The structural change required is more fundamental than that proposed by the FAO. We must rapidly move away from the spoliation of agricultural land by market-driven farming systems. We need a commonwealth in land and a system of food production based on co-operation and the assumption that adequate food is a human right for all.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Profit and food are a deadly mix

Capitalism’s inability to feed the world, in spite of increased production and a slowdown in population growth, is underlined by a report which predicts that food prices will rise by 40% over the next decade.

Prices have remained high since the price spike of 2008, which led to food riots in many areas of Africa and Asia. High prices combined with the economic crisis have left about 1 billion people undernourished, says the annual report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The price of grain is set to rise by between 15% and 40% in real terms, once adjusted for inflation, over the next decade. Vegetable oils will be 40% dearer will the cost of dairy food could rise between 16-45%.

Although the review suggests production can increase to meet demand, it warns that many people will not be able to afford the prices. It assumes that high energy prices will continue, and increase the cost of production and chemical inputs. This will have an impact on supplies and prices, and will increase the demand for bio-fuels. More areas will move out of food production and into oil crops.

The report explains that the extent to which world prices are reflected in domestic prices varies markedly by country. “The transmission of international prices to domestic markets can be impeded by border measures, domestic price supports and infrastructure weaknesses,” the FAC acknowledges.

Let’s unpack this bland statement. In a world of globalised unfairness the rich capitalist economies keep agricultural subsidies and hidden price subsidies in place, whilst the least developed countries are bullied into allowing market forces free rein in their home markets. Industrial agriculture enterprises continue to export food, while people living on their doorstep starve.

The FAO itself is entirely wedded to the free-market capitalist model, claiming that “there is a need for greater assurance of unimpeded access to global supplies” in order to “improve confidence in market functioning”. It unreservedly praises the trend towards the establishment of organised Commodity Exchanges in developing countries as a “welcome institutional development and a sign of market deepening”.

Yet Commodity Exchanges are at the centre of a great deal of reckless speculation, contributing to the economic crisis, and invariably at the expense of the smallest producers and poorest consumers. For the FAO, Commodity Exchanges are “useful and time-tested price discovery and hedging institutions, if they are regulated properly and attract sufficient volume to avoid monopolistic practices”.

Now that’s a very big “if”. More realistically, if there are increased profits to be made from food – which for capitalism is simply another commodity – then there will be increased speculation and market distortion. The outcome will be more hunger, the elimination of small farmers and further global land-grabbing by global investors and sovereign wealth funds.

This new form of rentiér capitalism will lead to further impoverishment of the soil as intensive farming methods are extended. New areas of marginal land cleared of scrub trees for bio-fuel production will add to global warming. The drive to clear virgin forest for palm oil plantations will increase – and at the climate summit in Cancun in December this activity will be given status as a carbon offset scheme. That’s the actual “time-tested” functioning of commodity markets in action.

The point is that capitalism is capable of extending the market in commodities into any area, but not of getting them to the people that need them in a fair, affordable way. In the case of training shoes or flat-screen TVs, that’s not the end of the world. When it comes to food, it is a life or death question for millions of hungry people. More than in any other area, food production is crying out for a new approach – ecologically sustainable, just and based on common ownership of land and global co-operation. Profit and food is a poisonous combination.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Corporate locusts leave hunger behind

Since 2006, corporations and countries have spent $30 billion buying up 20 million hectares of fertile farmland – an area that equates to a fifth of all the agricultural land in the European Union. The chief culprits of this obscene land grab are countries that accumulated massive surpluses from the boom in oil prices and in the export of consumer goods.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are using their oil wealth and China, the income from huge trade surpluses, according to figures from the International Food Policy Research Institute. The Saudis have created a corporation, Foras, specifically to buy up land to grow rice. It is financed by the Islamic Development Bank, the Saudi government and private investors. Over a seven-year period, Foras aims to produce seven million tons of rice on 700,000 hectares of land in Senegal and Mali; it already has a rice farm in Mauritania. Other target countries are Sudan, Uganda and Niger.

The Ethiopian government has seized nearly 3 million hectares of land from its own people and put it up for sale to foreign companies or governments (in this instance, countries and corporations are virtually indistinguishable). This is a huge part of the country’s fertile land, and is happening when millions of Ethiopians are threatened with malnutrition and possibly starvation as a result of low rainfall.

The number of Ethiopians who need emergency food aid rose from 4.9 million in January to 6.2 million in June. There are famine alerts in Ethiopia, Burkina Fasso, Somalia, Senegal and Kenya. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says 3.8 million Kenyans are at risk and in need of emergency food aid.

All over the world the poorest people are beginning to suffer from hunger, following a 50% rise the price of staples in the last six months. In the United States the percentage of people suffering “food insecurity” ranges from 6% of the population in wealthier states to as high as 15% in poorer parts of the country.

Global food stocks are low; drought, hurricanes, floods, late rains and failed rains have ruined crops in many parts of the world. High oil prices have raised the price of fertilizer, leading to lower yields. And of course land is being turned over to bio-fuels.

This crisis shows not only capitalism’s rapaciousness, but also its failure as a system of human economy. The so-called “green revolution”, which was implemented from the 1950s onwards in countries like India, was meant to solve hunger and lead to self-sufficiency. So why are countries like Ethiopia now seeking to outsource food production?

The application of vast quantities of fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides (a system the World Bank still seeks to impose on Africa, and which the land grabbers will also use) is an abject failure and will wreak ever greater havoc on already fragile eco-systems.

What we are witnessing is the steady erosion of the world’s fertility overall. Agri-business claims its methods are based on an advanced understanding of farming; but this is not the case. It is based on a narrow capitalist short-term approach, which takes into account neither the past nor the future but only the productive and profitable present. Moving locust-like across the globe, the agri-corporations leave desert behind them.

To achieve an end to hunger, requires first a revolution in land ownership and second, a significant transformation in the way we relate to nature, where we continuously restore fertility by recycling waste products and applying them to the soil. If the cost of farming in this way leaves no room for private profit, then we should transform the corporations into non-profit co-operatives.

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