Violent palm oil land grab hits poorest

Hired thugs working for a palm oil corporation stormed villages in Indonesia to force people off their land earlier this month so that PT Asiatic Persada could take up a government concession. It was a dramatic example of an often violent international land grab at work.

Nearly 150 homes were destroyed in the latest incident in a long standing conflict, where the Indonesian government is sacrificing the lives and of thousands of forest dwelling people to the god of growth. The army was present at the destruction of the Padang Salak hamlet in a dispersed village called Bunku in Sumatra.

On December 10 police opened fire on anti-palm oil protestors in Pujehun province, Sierra Leone. People were protesting about the activities of international agro-investor Socfin. They say they were lied to about leases and conned into allowing Socfin to move in for just $5 an acre.

After years of civil war, the Sierra Leone government has used a period of relative stability to invite the corporations in. It has signed a $1.3 billion deal with China Hainan Rubber Industry Group and Addax Bioenergy, a Swiss biofuel company, has leased 14,300 hectares in Tonkolili district for the production of sugar cane.

Another country emerging from years of civil war is Liberia, and the corporations are beating a path to the government's door. Equatorial Palm Oil has its eye on almost 170,000 hectares of land for plantations. The same story is repeated in Mozambique and Cameroon.

Local people are being bullied by their governments into leasing out land for tiny returns and for periods so long, they have in effect lost it for ever.

Claims that the corporations contribute jobs and welfare for people in areas where they work are a complete fraud. People are never consulted about roads or buildings, and few jobs are created.

And the claim that the corporations will help by paying tax to African governments is even more fraudulent. The charity Action Aid revealed a document from accountants Deloitte advising clients how to avoid paying tax in Africa. For example, by channelling funds through Mauritius they could avoid capital gains tax altogether in Mozambique, one of earth's poorest countries where life expectancy is just 49.

Fifty years ago palm oil was a minor product, but its property of staying solid at relatively high temperatures makes it useful for highly processed foods. It is present in half of all supermarket products though it may not be listed on the label other than as vegetable oil. The growing popularity of palm oil with the food processors has not reduced soya oil production; it continues to expand with an eye to the biofuels market.

The supermarket giants claim processing food into ready meals or snack products adds value. But in the UK more than 60% of adults are overweight or obese as are more than 30% of children. There is an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes and obese individuals have a 50% greater chance of dying early.

People in Africa, Indonesia and Latin America were never consulted about the vegetable oil giants moving on to their land. And people in the West were never consulted about the introduction of a diet driven by the profit margins of the supermarkets and endorsed by their friends in government.

The corporations are entities that float above society, not subject to any control, indifferent to the health and wellbeing of people or nature as a whole, and using their power to subvert any semblance of democracy. A united front of people's across the globe is needed to challenge both ends of this destructive food chain.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Biofuels land grab a 'recipe for mass hunger'

A few months ago, representatives of nine villages in Madagascar held a press conference in the city of Antananarivo to denounce the Italian company Tozzi Renewable Energy for taking away their lands as part of a 100,000 hectare jatropha plantation that the company is building.

"We small peasants are forced to leave because men armed with guns have come to throw us off our lands," they told reporters. In Sierra Leona, Zainab Kamara is one of several thousand farmers in whose lands have been taken over by the Swiss company Addax Bioenergy for a 10,000 hectare sugar cane plantation to produce ethanol.

"Now I don’t have a farm. Starvation is killing people. We have to buy rice to survive because we don't grow our own now," she says. This one sugar cane project will use 26% percent of Sierra Leone’s largest river flow during the driest months, February to April. In neighbouring Guinea, the government has sold 700,000 hectares to another European firm to grow jatropha. It’s a story repeated in South America, especially in Brazil.

These are just some examples of the havoc wreaked by an unprecedented land grab with the purpose of producing biofuels from raw materials. Europe is one of the centres of this monstrous trade, with purpose-built facilities in the port of Rotterdam part of a frenzy that resembles the ruthless colonialism of the 19th century.

Neste Oil, the state-owned Finnish oil company, has a renewable diesel plant in Rotterdam that will churn out over 900 million litres a year, using palm oil for at least 50% of its raw materials. The firm owns the world’s largest plant in Singapore, which also converts palm oil to diesel for export to Europe.

Next door to Neste Oil's Rotterdam operation is a massive ethanol plant owned by the Spanish energy company Abengoa. Swiss-based Glencore, Europe's second largest agricultural commodities trading house, owns two biodiesel plants in Rotterdam, with a combined capacity of 740 million litres per year

According to a new report from GRAIN, Europe's biofuel companies are increasingly looking for full control over production, right down to the crops. “Shell and BP, for instance, have spent hundreds of millions of euros buying up sugar cane plantations and mills in Brazil to produce ethanol. French commodities giant Louis Dreyfus is also buying up farmland and sugar plantations in South America to feed its ethanol and biodiesel plants.”

European companies are responsible for a third of all the biofuel land grabs that have been reported since 2002, with over 290 seizures totalling 19 million hectares. The forecast is that the global demand for biofuels will more than double by 2020. The additional land required is equivalent to about 80% of the total land mass of Spain.

GRAIN acknowledges that campaigns, negotiations and criticism of the European Union-driven biofuels mania have had little effect. Recent changes to its policy of encouraging biofuels are minimal. “The EU has made only symbolic gestures to add a green veneer to the brutal global land grab that has resulted,” the sustainable farming campaign says

Of the three major markets for biofuels – the US and Brazil are the others - the EU is the only one that relies heavily on imports, both for feedstock (the crops used for biofuel production) and for food to replace European crops diverted to biofuel production. Biofuels eat up over a third of coarse grain production in the US, the world’s largest exporter.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) calls biofuels “the largest source of new demand for agricultural production in the past decade” and says that they represent a new “market fundamental” affecting prices for all cereals”. In plain language, the market says that biofuels is more profitable than food, while the prices of basic necessities soar.

Add in the growing impact of climate change and the separate land grab by sovereign wealth funds to produce food in poor countries for export, you have what GRAIN calls a “a recipe for mass hunger”. As the campaign points out: “These communities and the food systems they sustain are not renewable.”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

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

Stop land grabbing!

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched at the G8 summit, is yet another business-driven initiative that will fail to tackle hunger or support food producers in Africa.

As a group of African civil society organisations and small farmers' groups said, it is neither new nor is it an alliance: "Donors have been taking steps to enable private sector investment in agriculture for decades, yet there are still a billion hungry people in the world.  If the private sector is to play a productive role, there needs to be strong evidence that these kinds of partnerships can actually deliver for small-scale producers."

They point out that the last international initiative, the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative, ends in December but so far the G8 countries have met only between a fifth and a half of their commitments to new funding.

This new proposal focuses on developing financial instruments and large-scale infrastructure and research projects. It is all about making agriculture a major GDP contributor, rather than a sustainable and reliable means of food production.

A $3 billion corporate investment initiative, far from improving food security, will actually undermine the small to medium sized farmers who are the key to making local food markets function effectively. It will speed up the transfer of food out of the global south into already well stocked markets, and from rural areas and smaller village or town markets, into Africa's burgeoning cities.

Where it speaks of a "fast track for investment in infrastructure projects", that means initiatives such as a $2bn industrial fertiliser manufacturing plant, to be built by Yara International, plus regional fertiliser distribution hubs. It will be the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. Pushing reliance on expensive artificial fertilisers will serve to undermine sustainable farming methods and this is particularly disastrous in areas where soil is already quite marginal. The new plant will probably be in Ethiopia; Yara already has plants in Egypt and Libya.

Also part of this new/old deal are "additional private investment" funds that are said to be the key to "increasing the range of financing options and innovative risk mitigation tools" available to small and medium-sized "agribusinesses". In other words, loans with strings attached that will pull more farmers into the treadmill of growing what the world, or at least regional rather than local, market needs in order to cover repayments. Expensive 'risk mitigation' insurance sounds like another round of mis-selling but this time on a global scale - the cost of insuring against drought, crop failure and civil disruption is always going to be beyond the pocket of small producers and the cover they can afford will be useless.

As part of the deal, 60 global companies have signed a "Private Sector Declaration of Support for African Agricultural Development". When you see the names on the list, it doesn't fill you with confidence. They include Cargill, Monsanto, Unilever, Kraft, Hershey, Mars, Pepsi, Du Pont and Diageo.

The programme is designed to align with the programme agreed by African leaders to 'drive effective country-led plans and policies for food security and nutrition', but it is this alignment that poses one of the biggest threats to small farmers. The commitment of African governments is to development through profit-driven growth (the only model on offer at present) and broadly speaking they see the application of external investment as the way forward. The role of the African Union is given great prominence in publicity about the New Alliance, but in reality the AU's pronouncements are a sustainable smokescreen behind which individual governments are going down the land-grabbing route.

That is why new voluntary guidelines adopted at the United Nations in the same week as the G8 will do nothing to prevent the expanding global takeover of African land, and the brutal eviction of subsistence and small farmers. As a report published by Via Campesina says the current land grab resembles the old colonialism, but is different because it is being carried out not by imperial powers but by global corporations and countries operating as global corporations through their sovereign wealth funds. Governments are facilitating the takeover of land by foreign powers and corporations, signing leases and effectively clearing their own people off commons and traditional ownership tenures.

The grandly titled Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests are not going to be of any interest to global traders who are shifting their money out of shares and into land and food production, as wheat prices soar again this year. As the Via Campesina report says: "Land ownership currently yields more than the three large investment groups of gold, the stock market and property business. It appears that in the case of land investments, the largest part of the wealth is distributed directly to capital. Therefore it is more a matter of theft than investment."

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Land grab drives famine in Africa

Global corporations and governments are exploiting traditional forms of land tenure to force through a global land grab. It is leading to a net export of calories from Africa and Asia to richer countries and is a major contributor to famine.

In Africa in particular, the neo-colonial forms that have emerged since independence are being exploited to force people off their land and let the corporations in, according to an investigation by the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Of the 60m hectares driven on the world market since 2009, 70% is in Africa.

For many years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund bullied governments into enclosing and privatising land, in order to offer a stable capitalist land ownership model attractive to foreign investors.

The result has been the curse of big landlordism that has destroyed rural communities in India and Bangladesh, for example. Now many of those original private landlords have themselves grown into global corporations and are leading the thrust of Indian capitalism into Africa.

The process is taking an even cruder form under pressure from corporations and governments like the American who are not even waiting about for legal niceties.

Land tenure in many African countries is not by title or enclosure but by customary rights. This is being interpreted to mean that the government owns the land. And so governments are declaring huge tracts of land as “unused”, and declaring groups of their own people to be “squatters”.

This unused land includes millions of hectares used by pastoralists on a seasonal basis; tracts of land left fallow for some years in a centuries-old farming method that allows land to recover its fertility; and forest land that is crucial to people for timber and fruits and also for protecting the water supply. All of this is being classified as unused government-land and the corporations are being ushered in.

The US government is supporting a major push from corporations like Monsanto to force governments to repeal laws against GM crops, for example in Tanzania, where there was a legal framework designed to keep native species free of GM contamination. China is in stiff competition with the US in the rush for African land.

The resulting displacement of people and disruption of communities leads to a bizarre situation where formerly independent farmers are now reliant on food aid whilst the land they farmed is producing crops, using unsustainable modern farming methods, to be exported to richer countries.

Also coming into play are what the Oakland Institute calls “false climate solutions”, where the corrupt carbon emissions offsetting mechanisms are another driver of the global land grab. Some of the world's worst polluters can go on polluting if they plant a tree somewhere else, and often these trees are being inappropriately planted on land grabbed in Africa.

As the OI report says: "At the end of the day, Africans are losing their food-producing land and water resources to crops being used for agrofuels in other countries. The unwelcome surprise is that the production of these crops, with industrial fertilizers, equipment and processing, will do more harm heating the planet than provide climate solutions."

It may not be possible to restore the traditional land rights that prevailed across the world before capitalist forms of enclosure and privatisation, but we can develop and implement a new model.

We can only end famine, offer fair land rights and protect the ecology of the planets by formulating an idea for a democratic shared commons. There are plenty of models for this, from community land trusts on the Scottish islands to farmers' co-operatives, and of course traditional forms of tenure as well. The challenge is to bring about the political and economic transformation needed to implement such a project.

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

'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

Profit hunger driving world famine

The unchecked surge in the power of global agri-business is bringing the world to the brink of an unprecedented famine. At a world summit on food and agriculture which ended in Rome yesterday, the onus was placed firmly on the governments of developing nations to deliver food security to their people. The G8 countries did not even bother to send representatives.

If they had been there, they might have had to explain why it is that governments in developing countries are consistently unable to feed their populations, even when they are doing everything they can to follow the capitalist, free market development model proposed by the G8, World Bank and IMF.

Take Ethiopia, which is once again in the midst of a famine, in spite of a dramatic economic surge which has transformed the country’s economy. Over the past few years infrastructure development and industry have expanded dramatically. The nostrum is that this kind of profit-driven growth will in the end benefit the population as a whole – and yet people go on starving.

This is the country where the Blue Nile rises, and fertile land is plentiful. The government is now exploiting it according to the capitalist growth model. There is a booming government-backed industry growing flowers for export, with extensive irrigation and application of nitrates. And 300,000 acres of fertile land were sold to an Indian corporation this year for around $1 dollar an acre.

GRAIN, an organisation which campaigns with small farmers has exposed this global land grab. "We're seeing over 40 million hectares of prime farm land being taken over by financial investors and rich states. We're talking about $100 billion that's being mobilised. Essentially financial investors have seen that in the food crisis there's money to be made in farmland and they're buying it up very cheap," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN.

The issue faced by the peoples of the world is not food shortages, but the intense commodification of food and land which is taking place alongside changes brought about by climate change.

Countries which have previously been able to feed their populations, such as Uganda and Paraguay, are now facing hunger. China is buying up land in other countries to try and deal with their own food shortages, caused by climate change and by the capitalist model of development now dominating the Chinese economy.

The food processing industry threatens the existence of farming even in wealthy countries such as the US and Britain. Farmers are no longer producing food, but raw materials which the global food industries process into “alue added” commodities, expanding the potential for profit. For an excellent example of how this process is being presented to people click here to see the latest McCain advert.

The raw materials producers – we call them farmers – are consistently driven down on price, and the global corporations stand between them and their potential market, ensuring that we have to buy our food from supermarkets and not from the producer.

Now this has been extended to the point where the food processing businesses are simply cutting farmers out of the process altogether and taking over the land, so that every scrap of profit goes their way. And the industrial methods they use are creating deserts and intensifying climate change.

While people in developing countries suffer from famine, their exported calories are being consumed in the west, in the form of cheap, high-fat, high-calorie diets, leading to a massive health crisis.

The movement for local food and grow-your-own may be on the right track in addressing an aspect of the problem, but it is viable only in small patches and does nothing to assist people who have no land, no economic resources and no power. That is concentrated in the hands of a handful of agri-corporations and client governments. How to overturn this obscene staten of affairs is what we need to address to prevent a global famine.

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

Food crisis fuels new land grab

A new global land grab threatens not only the world's climate but the survival of some of the poorest people on the planet. From Brazil to Cuba, Mexico to Madagascar, governments and corporations are buying up land to bolster their own dwindling food and fuel resources.

Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority, for example, has a joint venture to clear up to 300,000 acres of Brazilian rainforest for palm oil plantations. The investment cost is just $800 million dollars. Calling for urgent action to halt the plunder, rainforest campaigners explain that:

“Global ecological sustainability and local well-being depend critically upon ending all industrial development in the world's remaining old forests – including plantations, logging, mining and dams. The amount of primary and old growth forests that have been lost has already overshot the carrying capacity of Earth. Globally there are not enough old forests to maintain climatic and hydrological cycles, meet local forest dwellers' needs, and to maintain ecosystems and the biosphere in total.”

Releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, and cutting down crucial carbon sinks means faster climate change and more species extinction. But palm, soya and other cash crops grown for bio-diesel are claimed as climate change mitigation in the topsy turvy world of globalised capital. Every day some 30 square miles of virgin forest is cleared and the destruction is speeding up, in spite of all the pious statements of world governments.

The land grab is driven by growing food and fuel crises. China leases land in Cuba and Africa. Saudi Arabia holds the largest foreign ownership or control of African farmland in Sudan. Qatar has agricultural land in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bahrain, Kuwait and Burma. While a political crisis is leading to civil war in Pakistan, the government’s Investment Ministry has nevertheless put a million acres of farmland up for long-term investment or sale to foreign interests. All of this amounts to a new form of what might be called corporate imperialism, funded by sovereign wealth funds or corporations like Daewoo which are almost indistinguishable from state governments.

This is not empty land and not only forest is being cleared. People are being moved out of their homes to make way for foreign-owned agri-business. Species of all kinds are being burned up and sacrificed on the altar of profit.

Where they can, people are fighting back. The new government of Madagascar has repudiated a deal signed by the previous government, to lease 1.3 million hectares of land to Daewoo. Madagascans were so enraged by the plan they brought down the government earlier this year. In Kenya, protesters are trying to stop their government selling off their homes to Qatari interests.

As food and water shortages increase, powerful interests across the globe are declaring economic war on the poor. If need be they will take military action to ensure their survival. What they won’t do is voluntarily end the capitalist system of production and distribution which is at the heart of all our problems.

The planet grows enough calories to feed all its people already. But poor people can’t afford to buy food at prices that will deliver profits for investors. The crises of food, climate, water and fuel are in fact one major resource crisis driven by an unsustainable economic system. End that system, and we can begin to make a start on tackling these problems.

Penny Cole
Environment 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.