Stop the Global Land Grab!
La Via Campesina farmer, Dolores Hortense Kinkodila-Tombo (Congo-Brazza)
The following article was written by GRAIN, an international non-profit organization that supports small farmers and social movements in their promotion of community-controlled and biodiversity-based agriculture. GRAIN staff have been Inter Pares collaborators for several years, particularly in Canada and West Africa.
The scramble to control farmland in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by state and private investors is not a new phenomenon, but one that has intensified in recent years. In early 2008, Gulf State officials flew the globe looking for large areas of cultivable land to acquire to grow rice, which would allow them to feed their burgeoning populations without relying on international trade. So too did Korean, Libyan, Egyptian and other officials. Investor negotiations included high-level government representatives, charged with the task of securing political, economic, and financial cooperation with other countries through agricultural land transactions. In mid-2008, as the financial crisis deepened, and in the midst of increasing food insecurity, investors such as hedge funds, private equity groups, and investment banks – some of them Canadian – started buying up farmland in the South. These investors realized that there is money to be made in farming; there are many people to feed, food prices are likely to stay high over time, and farmland can be had for cheap.
This mass transfer of farmland to outside private and state actors is known as “land grabbing.” To date, more than 40 million hectares have changed hands or are under negotiation – twenty million of which are in Africa alone. GRAIN calculates that over $100 billion has been put on the table by state and private investors to make it happen. Despite governmental facilitation, these deals are mainly signed and carried out by private corporations, in collusion with host country officials. GRAIN has compiled data on the identity of land grabbers and the scope of land deals, most of which has been kept secret from the public for fear of political backlash.
Nothing in these land grabs in the South is in the interest of local communities, many of whom face severe food insecurity themselves. And this race for farmlands is designed to do away with small-scale farming, not improve it. This new global trend has thus been quickly labelled by social movements as a recipe for profound conflict over not only land, but water as well. In Ethiopia, the government has publicly stated that it wants to lease 3 million hectares of its farmland to foreign investors, with around 1 million hectares already reported to have been signed away to Arab, Asian, and European investors since 2008. Ethiopian activists claim that the impact of these policies on communities’ livelihoods will be tantamount to genocide against the country’s indigenous population.
In response to criticism, governments, international agencies such as the World Bank, and private companies are trying to work out what they call “codes of conduct” or “voluntary guidelines” to make these deals “win-win.” Social movements see things quite differently. For GRAIN, all this talk of “win-win” is simply not realistic. It promises transparency and good governance, but foreign investors are unlikely to respect communities’ rights to land when local governments fail to do so. And those who believe in win-win scenarios are divided about what should happen in the likely case of food pressures in the host countries. Should countries be allowed to restrict exports, even from foreign investors’ farms? Or will so-called free trade and investors’ rights take precedence – a real possibility under the world’s trade and investment regimes? No one we have spoken with among concerned groups in Africa, Asia, or Latin America takes this “win-win” idea seriously.
Today, with over a billion people facing hunger daily, we desperately need to build and protect food systems that feed people. The only way forward is to strengthen family farming and local markets. However, land grabs are rapidly taking us in the opposite direction. We must invest instead in food sovereignty, in a million local markets, and in the three billion farmers and farm workers who currently produce most of the food upon which our societies rely. These hold the hope for a far more viable future than mega-farms controlled by the few.
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