Farming Matters | 27.4 | December 2011

A day doesn’t go by that the present food crisis – in which nearly a billion people are going hungry – is used as proof of the food scarcity plaguing the planet. There is scarcity – but not of food. The world produces enough food. People are going hungry today because they can’t afford food, especially when prices spike. The recent extreme price volatility and price spikes cannot be explained by simple supply and demand models. In fact, there has hardly been any change in world food demand over the last three years. The falling land productivity of industrial agriculture, the spread of agrofuels diverting arable land to fuel crops, climate change and an inadequate investment in agroecology are all adversely affecting food supply. But despite their devastating impacts, these supply-side factors don’t explain the extreme volatility and price spikes in global food markets seen in recent years.

Food price surges are the result of a new phenomenon: massive hoarding of food commodity derivatives. These are specialised financial products invented by powerful financial institutions. As a result, prices skyrocket because these investors have created a financially-induced demand, thereby imposing immense artificial scarcity on the global food market. In 2008 and again in 2010, prices for staple crops like rice, wheat, and corn doubled and tripled, and extended the grip of poverty and deprivation to hundreds of millions of people. And what’s more, institutional investors knew their speculation was driving food prices higher.

The “financialisation” of our food began with the creation of tradable commodity indexes, which turn some of the basic necessities of life into speculative assets. The trading of agricultural commodities, which in itself serves an important function for corporations with a real stake in agricultural commodities, is taken advantage of by financial speculators. Financial speculators are merely concerned with financial profit – not the destination of the food commodity or the functionality of the global food system. On top of this, new regulations allow institutional investors to trade commodity futures contracts without position limits, disclosure requirements or regulatory oversight. With the crash of the housing bubble, followed by the economic recession, institutional investors flocked to the unregulated commodity index funds. As a result, financial capital flooded the market, taking massive positions in food and concentrating them in just a few, corporate hands – without having to report any of it!

By opening up food commodities to financial speculation, global food commodity markets have seen the most price volatility and biggest price surges ever. The Occupy Wall Street protestors are not off the mark. Wall Street has been occupying our food system for far too long – with disastrous results.

Text: Eric Holt Gimenez

A longer version of this column appeared first in The Huffington Post.

The post Opinion: Food scarcity à la Wall Street appeared first on Ileia.

Speciality crops for pacific islands
C.R. Elevitch (ed.), 2011.
Permanent Agriculture Resources. Holualoa, Hawaii. 558 pages. Read more

Payments for ecosystem services and food security
D. Ottaviani and N.E. Scialabba, 2011.
FAO, Rome. 281 pages. Read more

Food sovereignty: Reclaiming the global food system
S. Branford, 2011.
War on Want, London, 54 pages. Read more

Food movements unite!: Strategies to transform our food systems
E. Holt-Giménez (ed.), 2011.
Food First, Oakland, 323 pages. Read more

The politics of seed in Africa’s Green Revolution: Alternative narratives and competing pathways
I. Scoones and J. Thompson (eds.), 2011.
IDS, Brighton. 120 pages. Read more

Climate change and food systems resilience in sub-Saharan Africa
L.L. Ching, S. Edwards and N.E. Scialabba, 2011.
FAO, Rome. 448 pages. Read more

Land grabbing

Recent literature that estimates the magnitude of land grabbing and/or explores what is driving it, how it is affecting small-scale farmers and what can be done, include “Land tenure and international investments in agriculture” (by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, 2011), “Land and power: the growing scandal surrounding the new wave of investments in land” (Bertram Zagema, 2011), “Land grabbing in Africa and the new politics of food” (Future Agricultures policy brief 41, 2011) and “The great land grab: Rush for world’s farmland threatens food security for the poor” (S. Daniel and A. Mittal, 2009). Literature that presents alternatives to international land acquisitions include the “Access to land and the right to food” report (O. de Schutter, 2010), “Responding to land grabbing and promoting responsible investment in agriculture” (IFAD, 2011) and “Alternatives to land acquisitions: Agricultural investment and collaborative business models” (edited by L. Cotula and R. Leonard, 2010). Both the “Development” journal (volume 54, issue 1, 2011) and “The Journal of Peasant Studies” (volume 38, issue 2, 2011) have dedicated a special on land grabbing, and the website of the “International Conference on Global Land Grabbing” (held this year by Future Agricultures) contains articles that cover several aspects of the topic. “A historical perspective on the global land rush” (by the International Land Coalition, 2011) relates the current wave of land grabs to the past legacy of colonisation and neo-liberal reforms.

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Rio+20 will focus on an economy model that promotes sustainable development and aims at eradicating poverty (a “green economy”), and on the institutional framework required to meet these goals.

Participants at the conference will include high level government representatives of UN member states, together with non-government stakeholders who participate in formally constituted “Major Groups”, representing farmers, civil society organisations, women and indigenous peoples, etc.
Greenwashing or a historical opportunity?

There are those who fear that Rio+20 is going to be a repeat of the 1992 conference and become another event where the necessities of eradicating poverty and saving the environment are discussed, without leading to any concrete results. They wonder if Rio+20 will lead to “green” measures that are built upon the existing system, which has caused much of the problems we are trying to solve.

The Women’s Major Group has emphasised that a “green economy” need not necessarily contribute to poverty eradication and sustainable development. There is a risk that the term “green economy” will be used for “greenwashing” existing unsustainable economic practices. Instead of this, Rio+20 needs to focus on questioning and fundamentally transforming the current economic paradigm.

From a more optimistic perspective, others argue that Rio+20 offers a historic opportunity to transform abstract commitments into concrete actions. Rio+20 can be a platform for fundamental transformation. There are real opportunities to upscale sustainable practices and to support viable local food systems.

No green economy without sustainable family farming

“The global mode of agriculture has dismally failed us”
Shuhao Tan, Renmin University of China
Agriculture is both part of the problem and part of the solution. How do we move from the present un-sustainable global food and agriculture system towards a much more diverse system that is fair and respects small-scale family farmers and environments across the globe?

Cosmetic changes are not enough. The Major Groups of farmers, civil society organisations and women are making strong cases for sustainable family farming, regionalised food systems, and for upscaling time-tested agro-ecological approaches.

Agriculture can nourish everybody with healthy, diverse and culturally appropriate food, provided the right political choices are made. The outcomes of Rio+20 need to support rights and access to resources for women and indigenous people. Land grabs need to stop, and food production should not be compromised for biofuel production. Public funding for agricultural development should be restored, including support for (participatory) knowledge generation and dissemination.

Building a roadmap

“There is an urgent need to bring a balanced perspective on small farmers to the Rio+20 debate. The disbelief of policymakers must be challenged head on”
Olivier de Schutter, Special UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food
We need a roadmap informed and inspired by the concrete experiences of farmers. Both successes and failures (which tell us the obstacles to upscaling sustainable practices) need to be widely shared and systematised. Rio+20 should give a boost to efforts that document crucial practical experience.

Let us use Farming Matters to share convincing experiences and reach out to policymakers and policy advocates, providing them with the ammunition they need.

We ask you, our readers and authors, farmers and scientists; those with a deep and experiential understanding of sustainable farming, to make your voices and your experiences heard in Farming Matters. Family farming does matter in a truly Green Economy.

Farming Matters forms part of a global network of magazines: www.agriculturesnetwork.org Together we reach more than half a million agricultural practitioners in 194 countries. This is a strong platform. You can influence global thinking on agriculture. Share your views, dreams and practical experiences! The more inspiring contributions we get, the stronger the message that Farming Matters will convey in Rio will be.

Text: Laura Eggens and Edith van Walsum

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Two hundred and twenty seven million hectares of land in developing countries – an area the size of Western Europe – has been sold or leased since 2001, mostly to international investors.

The bulk of these land acquisitions have taken place over the past two years (see Oxfam Report: Land and Power). Think about this. If this trend continues, the entire planet would be sold to international (and local) investors within the next two decades. No one can foresee the implications of this, but they will be far reaching.

In Africa, large tracts of agricultural land are being bought or leased by foreign investors for ridiculously low prices. In India, tour operators, movie stars, politicians, resorts, urbanites and land mafia are speculating in ever smaller pieces of land and prices are skyrocketing (see Suprabha Seshan’s column). Whatever the shape of transactions, they all show one major development: land has become currency in the hands of politicians, investors and speculators – just like food and water.

Land is the basis of existence for 400 million small-scale farm families. The Earth is their “mother”: she needs to be respected and cared for. These farmers will be the first victims of the present rush for land. The global rush for land is being justified by claiming that small-scale farmers are unproductive and incapable, and that the best option is to ease them out and invest in “rational” agriculture. This misrepresentation of the importance of small-scale farmers, pastoralists and forest dwellers for our planet, and the denial of their productivity and of their rights to land, food, water and other resources, must be challenged head-on.

This issue of Farming Matters has been produced with the valuable support of Oxfam Novib. It builds on a central theme for Oxfam International: the issues of land and power. Monique van Zijl invites readers to be part of a metaphoric bull (see theme overview) in which disparate alliances work in alliance with each other to create a powerful body of people and institutions that stand up for common sense. Let us join forces and support small-scale farmers in their legimitate quest for land rights.

Text: Edith van Walsum, director ILEIA

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Munkhbolor Gungaa: “Joining hands is vital”

Climate change is having a severe impact in Mongolia: pasture lands seem to have shrunk, and many water sources have disappeared, seriously affecting the traditional lifestyles of the country’s nomads or “malchid”. Their traditional way of life is being equally threatened by mining, particularly in the South Gobi region, and drastic changes are also being presented by some as part of the solution (see article on page 18).

Should pastoralists leave this region and look for opportunities elsewhere? Or should they fight for their rights? Munkhbolor Gungaa is the director of Tsagaan Myandar, an NGO which supports Mongolian pastoralists in their efforts to protect their culture and livelihoods while improving their access to resources. She thinks that the first step is for pastoralists to agree among themselves, and the second is to join forces with others.

Pastoralist leaders have been encouraged to attend meetings and events (such as the Global Gathering of Women Pastoralists that took place in India) and to join international efforts such as the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples. “This exposure is helping them see that solutions are easier to find when there is commitment and concerted efforts”. Deciding what to do can be easier as part of a platform. “Joining hands is vital, and external support also helps”.

Fakeye Oluwaseun: “We need to continue being extra alert”

Photo: ERANigeria is becoming an increasingly popular target for foreign investors and agribusinesses: according to some statistics, only 40% of the land is being “used”. But there is growing opposition amongst Nigerians to land grabs, partly as the result of organisations like Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, and also as a result of the work of its members (including farmers’ associations, NGOs, civil organisations and food agencies).

Fakeye Oluwaseun, currently at Van Hall- Larenstein University, highlights the campaigns and rallies that these organisations are carrying out in order to make more people aware of what is happening, and the consequences of these land deals. “One of its major successes has been to influence the passing of a bill meant to control the sale of land to foreign investors. This is a way to make sure that deals do not severely affect farmers, and that environmental factors are also taken into account.”

Investors are expected to help with infrastructure facilities and food processing activities, providing jobs for the local populations. “This is all welcome. But advocacy organisations need to continue being extra alert: foreign investors in the country are known for not following the rule of law.” The legal structures for enforcing it need to be strengthened further.

Isabel García Martínez: “Thinking about the future”

Photo: Isabel GarcíaMartínezAs in many other regions in Europe, land prices in the south of Spain have increased dramatically during the past ten years. Many analysts see this as one of the main reasons behind the current economic crisis. But another important effect is that young farmers find it almost impossible to obtain access to land. Those who do not inherit land from their parents see no other alternative but to leave for the cities, looking for better opportunities – even when much land in the villages remains unused and unproductive because their “old” owners feel unable or unwilling to farm.

With support from the European Union, the Junta de Andalucía, the regional government, is running a project that aims to help this group of farmers acquire land for farming – basically by providing them with subsidies; facilitating access to loans and microcredit; and reducing the taxes involved. “Their objective is to promote a ‘generational renewal’ by helping young farmers to buy their own land”, explained Isabel García Martinez, working at Quality & Cargo Survey in Almería.

During the past few years, the number of young and female farmers has increased in the countryside as they have had the opportunity to buy or rent plots. “These policies have been successful, but we have to be sure that they continue. Land prices have not gone down, and it is still very difficult to get started. In any case, it is good to see that local politicians are also thinking about the future.”

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Farming Matters | 27.4 | December 2011

I am witness to the butchery of land, habitat, indigenous communities and traditional farming systems in the Western Ghats, a large mountain range in south-west India. This butchery accompanies another hideous process: amalgamation and theft.

A couple of centuries ago, the Western Ghats were the home of hill tribes, vast forests, abundant wildlife and sparkling rivers. The various petty kingdoms in the plains had little to do with these remote areas, other than occasional skirmishes with the more warlike tribes, seasonal exchanges of produce and pilgrim visits to holy rivers and sacred forests. Colonial rulers – the predecessors to the neoliberal (or “neo-colonial”) commodification forces currently at work – were the first to see “opportunity” in these high mountains. Over time, several massive transformations in land use patterns have taken place, not to mention ecological changes at landscape level with grievous consequences for all.

The mountains are now the destination of world tour operators. They are also being gobbled up by movie stars, politicians, resorts, back-to-nature urbanites, and a land mafia indulging in speculation with land as their currency, in a violent, turbulent and corrupt marketplace. In addition, they are being urbanised.

I’ve been living here for 20 years, in these once beautiful mountains. Butchery (in its current avatar) arrived after I did, after wildlife tourism, ecotourism, and plantation tourism. Tourism arrived with the crash of small-scale and cash crop farming and the abandonment of government-controlled pricing of farm products. It brought the corporate nouveau riche to their own “backyard” wildernesses, for weekend outings to “commune with nature”.

A couple of years ago I started enquiring about the activities of the sub-registrar offices where land is transferred between buyer and seller. I found that each of the seven sub-registrar offices in Wayanad district (about 2500 km² in size) dealt with several thousand transfers a year: each year the number of transactions grew, each time the pieces became smaller and smaller – and each time the prices skyrocketed. Every now and again, they would be amalgamated into one big transaction by a massive hotel, a movie star or a politician.

Now, in my immediate neighbourhood, a tea farm sells at 1 million rupees an acre. A few years ago it would have been a fifth of this price. Of course this means that rural people are leaving the countryside. They are leaving independent and stable (though, not easy) lives to become consumers in the shanty towns around cities.

Who does this serve? What happens when you break the relationship between people and land, when small-scale farmers or adivasis become dependant on the state for food and water?

Text: Suprabha Seshan

Suprabha Seshan is an ecologist and educator at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a forest garden in the Western Ghat mountains of Kerala, India, dedicated to the preservation of plant species, restoration ecology, and environmental education.
E-mail: jungler@gmail.com

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Land is a crucial asset for people all over the world. But land is not only

an economic asset: it is the means to ensure sustainable livelihoods and the economic is just one of its numerous values.

However, when others, such as foreign investors, arrive with other legal frameworks, titles become of immense importance. These titles and ownership structures differ from common practice in the countries where land grabs are going on at this very moment.

Clashing systems: the common good and the individual interest

Many non-Western cultures and value systems are built on the premise that what is good for the collective is good for the individual, and this is constituted in customary systems. Customary land tenure is made up of rules that regulate behaviour and relations towards land, including trees or watering holes, which have been built upon local and often traditional social norms and networks. As described by Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel laureate for economics, these tend to be embedded in the desire for a sharing of resources for the good of the community, rather than for the individual. This is very different from the system of individual ownership and capital accumulation that comes with the current wave of so-called investments and land acquisitions.

Pastoralists, fisher folk, indigenous people, or most people in rural areas, know no better than that natural resources belong to everyone, or to some spiritual unit, and are not to be tampered with. It is an eco-centric outlook on life whereby people are part of nature, as opposed to the anthropocentric approach which dominates Western cultures, whereby people are at the centre and nature is there to serve us. The “we belong to the earth” or “the earth belongs to us” paradigms are very deeply entrenched, resulting in fundamentally different beliefs and value systems. These different worlds and value systems are now meeting each other very rapidly and creating huge and unprecedented tensions to the detriment of those living in poverty.

Are we in a necessary transition period, which will lead to us having the best of both worlds? Or will one model win over the other, leaving damage control as the only option? The current land grabs give one the feeling that the latter is the case: the western/capitalist/ individualistic model will win, and the best we can do is to reduce the ensuing damage. However, the optimistic picture is that the multiple crises we are in, especially in Europe and North America, are a massive call for sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and for dismantling corporate power. Researchers, academics and, notably, many practitioners, are collecting evidence and arguing that our system of individual ownership and capital accumulation is not necessarily the best system or the highest achievable: other systems can work very well, and in many cases, even better. All this gives hope.

Common sense and common economic wisdom

Common sense tells us that everybody needs to eat, and if food prices go up, one still needs to eat. Food is not like a mobile phone or a new dress whose purchase can be postponed. People need to eat everyday. Common sense tells us that 1 billion people living in poverty is unacceptable. Common sense tells us that if we put food into our cars, food prices will go up. Common sense tells us that we all want a good future for our children.

Conventional economic wisdom teaches us the opposite. It teaches us that economic growth is an essential means for the creation of wealth; conventional economic wisdom teaches us that it is OK to plunder the world’s natural resources, to individualise profit and socialise losses. Common economic wisdom teaches us that, at the end of the day, everyone will choose for their own short-term benefit (as Garret Hardin argued in his 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons”).

As argued earlier, there are other value systems that lead to very different ways of looking at wealth creation, particularly in Africa. We see value systems there that are based on re-distribution of wealth, and not so much on growth. These value systems are based on the common good, but also on deriving rights. They define human existence on the basis of relationships and not just on the basis of property. These systems are based on cycles of life in which creation/birth, preservation and destruction/death are all equally important. Again, this is rather different from a system in which individual property and individual ownership are the highest achievable aims. Combined with our linear and result-oriented thinking, this view has led to vicious circles: wealth for a few, poverty for many, waste and injustice. The fact that communal, water, pasture, tree and village rights in many non-Western societies are not understood and are described as being complex, difficult and not secure, should not be the problem of people living in poverty. It should be our problem.

Common economic wisdom is based on the theory that social dependencies and relations can be replaced by market relations, and that this is desirable and essential. This is where things go wrong. But replacing mutual dependency with market relations is not desirable at all. The current economic crisis is blatantly showing us this.

The crises we will be facing if the commercialisation of natural resources, including the current “grabs”, continues at its current speed, are predictable and, arguably, permanent. More people are starting to agree. Yet most seem to see this as some kind of accidental oversight or lack of research, rather than an outcome of historical processes and systems of unspeakable injustice and power imbalance.

The “smart lane”

As mentioned, the various crises have shown that “business as usual” will only add to the existing problems, and that economic logic based on individual freedom will lead us to a situation that was not acceptable even when we were not so many – and which will be intolerable with 9 billion people. Fortunately, hunger and poverty is no longer the sole domain of organisations like Oxfam, the charities, and the “do-gooders”.

While it may be true that what gets measured gets managed, we can’t manage everything. So what should we measure on a finite planet? Tonnes of produce per hectare land, or the number of people lifted out of poverty? One thing is clear: if environmental and societal costs continue to be neglected and not measured, the costs in the long run will severely outweigh the profits at present. This means we need to shift our thinking: from maximising any one variable to optimising several key ones; from short-term profits to long-term benefits; from linear reasoning to cyclical thinking. In short, we need a massive value change, for which we need to learn from other value systems.

To a large extent, the systems that produce our food are based on highly industrialised, high-tech, often subsidised and mechanised large-scale production systems which need a lot of money and are easy to invest in: this is the “fast lane”. At the other end we find the small-scale, often labour intensive production systems which sustain millions of people, based on centuries of local knowledge. These people do not receive subsidies, are often hungry and are being pushed into dependence on charity: this is the “slow lane”. What we need is the best of both worlds: not a “fast lane” or a “slow lane”, but a “smart lane” instead.

We need to freeze the footprint of food and make the large-scale industrialised model more sustainable by developing these other “smart” models. The good news is that these other models exist, and in huge numbers: they are practiced by millions of smallscale farmers, pastoralists, fisher folk and artisans. These are entrepreneurs pur sang, continuously finding creative and innovative solutions to survive. They are part of extremely complex networks of knowledge, practice and potential.

Their work is seen in many great examples: in those following the System of Rice Intensification (first “discovered” in the 1970s in Madagascar and now used on a wider scale in Asia) or in the “greening” process currently seen in the Sahel. Many more examples are known and have been described in this magazine, including grain banks; indexed-based weather insurance schemes; participatory plant breeding or the re-establishment of dams and wells. All of them share a people-centred, labour-intensive and long-term approach. They also need considerable investments, but are all exceptionally economical if we include all the benefits they yield in terms of food security, institution building and poverty reduction.

What is required to make this smart lane work is, first and foremost, courage and creative thinking. It requires intelligence, people, financial arrangements and network structures that we are not used to seeing. It requires listening to people and investing in them, instead of taking away their access and opportunity to earn a livelihood by “investing” in land.

In contrast to the conventional economic wisdom of the 20th century, we have to make sure the 21st century goes into history as the century of common sense – and that the smart lane becomes the new fast lane.

Text: Gine Zwart

Gine Zwart is a Senior Policy Advisor at OxfamNovib.
E-mail: gine.zwart@oxfamnovib.nl

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International investment plays a vital role in development and poverty reduction. Investment can improve livelihoods and bring jobs, services and infrastructure when it is managed responsibly within the context of an effective regulatory framework.

The recent record of investment in land is very different. It tells a story of rapidly increasing pressure on land – a natural resource upon which the food security of millions of people living in poverty depends. Without national and international measures to defend the rights of people living on and off the land, too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights, and the destruction of livelihoods.

In developing countries, as many as 227 million hectares of land – an area the size of Western Europe – have been sold or leased since 2001, mostly to international investors. The bulk of these land acquisitions has taken place over the past two years, according to on-going research. This recent rise can in part be explained by the 2007–08 food prices crisis, which led investors and governments to turn their attention towards agriculture after decades of neglect. But this interest in land is not something that will pass; it is a trend with strong drivers.

Trends and drivers

Land in Uganda
Christine (not her real name) and her husband tell a story of how they used to grow enough food to feed their children on the land that they had farmed for over 20 years. Christine is one of the more than 20,000 people who say that they have been evicted from their homes and land in the Kiboga and Mubende districts, to make way for UK-based New Forests Company (NFC) plantations. The Ugandan National Forestry Authority (NFA) granted NFC licences for the plantation areas in 2005 and authorised the removal of the former residents. The NFA says that the people living there were illegal encroachers on forest land and that their evictions were justified. NFC maintains that locals left the land voluntarily and that, in any event, it would bear no responsibility for evictions from land licensed to it. The company told Oxfam that these “are solely in the hands of the government” and that, as a licensee, it has “very limited rights and certainly no rights to evict anyone”.

NFC’s operations highlight how the current system of international standards does not work. There are serious allegations of negative impacts on local villagers, which raise particular concerns given that NFC operations are supported by international investment from institutions such as the International Finance Corporation and the European Investment Bank, all of which claim to uphold high social and environmental standards. NFC presents itself as a “sustainable and socially responsible forestry company”. It has applied for carbon credits for carbon offsetting, and says it creates jobs in rural areas and builds schools and health facilities as part of its community development programme.

Over 20,000 local villagers believe that they have clear legal rights to the land they occupied, and both communities have brought a case before the Ugandan High Court to protect those rights. These claims are being resisted by NFC, and neither case has been finally decided. Further, their legal pleadings refer to an executive order prohibiting the evictions, which they say remains in effect. In two court cases, the High Court considered that the communities’ concerns were sufficiently urgent and their arguments sufficiently strong to justify granting orders restraining evictions, pending disposal of the full hearings. However, local communities say that evictions have continued to take place despite these orders. They describe the evictions as anything but voluntary and peaceful.

Oxfam’s “Land and Power” report discusses the trends and drivers behind large-scale land acquisitions, and looks in detail at five land grabs in Uganda, Indonesia, Guatemala, Honduras, and South Sudan. It aims to help understand the impact of land grabs on poor people and their communities; to identify the underlying factors between companies, local communities, and host governments; and to examine the roles played by international investors and home-country governments.

Some cases tell the story of the alleged forced eviction of over 20,000 people from their lands. Others tell how affected communities have been undermined through exclusion from decisions affecting the land they rely on. In most cases, the legal rights of those affected by the land grabs were not respected. Where alleged evictions have already taken place, the picture is bleak: conflict and loss of food security, livelihoods, homes, and futures.

Most of those affected say that they have received little or no compensation and have struggled to piece their lives back together, often facing higher rents, few job opportunities, and risks to their health. The evidence is sadly consistent with many other recent studies on land grabbing.

Home and host country governments, financiers and sourcing companies, the international community and civil society groups all have a role to play. They must address the failure at all levels to respect human rights, to steer investment in the public interest, and to respond to one of the most alarming trends facing rural populations in developing countries today. Respect for free, prior and informed consent is crucial to good land governance, and essential for poverty reduction.

Change needed

National governments have failed to protect the rights and interests of local communities and land-rights holders. Instead, they seem to have aligned themselves with investors, welcoming them with low land-prices and other incentives, and even helping clear the land of people. Standards and rules appear not to have guided investments and sourcing decisions.

While local communities may find recourse in one or another complaint mechanism, these seem to be underused. Overall, the response of the international community to this devastating wave of land grabbing has been weak.

The power balance has to shift in favour of those most affected by land deals. The right of communities to know and to decide must be respected by all involved. Oxfam concludes that there is a clear imperative for action at a number of levels, both to ensure that this structural shift takes place and to remedy the conflicts that arise from the types of deals described here. Considering that members of the public can put pressure on governments and companies to grow justice, and that civil society, media and academia can help to protect rights and foster transparency, the report ends with these recommendations:

• Governments should adopt internationally applicable standards on good governance relating to land tenure and management of natural resources;
• Host country governments and local authorities should promote equitable access to land and protect people’s rights;
• Investors operating agriculture projects should respect all existing land use rights, avoid the transfer of land rights away from small-scale food producers, and carry out and be guided by comprehensive social and environmental impact assessments;
• Financiers of agriculture ventures and buyers of agricultural products should take responsibility for what happens in their value chains; and
• Home country governments should take responsibility for acts of originating companies abroad.

Text: Bertram Zagema

Bertram Zagema (bertram.zagema@oxfamnovib.nl) works as Policy Advisor for Oxfam Novib, and was the author of the “Land and Power”report. For more on the GROW campaign, visit www.oxfam.org/en/grow.

The post Land and power appeared first on Ileia.

Agriculture is the main occupation of two-thirds of the population of Nepal (and 90% of the country’s poor). Yet, according to the census of 2001, at least 25 percent of the 4.2 million households do not own land – not even a place to install a hut. Historically, land in Nepal belonged to the state and its rulers, who granted it to supporters, servants or those who pleased and prayed to them.

These lands, however, were not empty: there were farmers and tillers living and working there. The new landlords would then give farmers the right to farm, in exchange for the “koot” or rent paid in cash or kind. In many cases, farmers ended as bonded labourers (such as the “haliya” or the “kamaiya” in western Nepal), while in others they became sharecroppers, sharing at least half of their yields with those who officially owned the land.

Rooted at the community

This overall picture continued, and although a Land Reform Act was passed in 1964, it was not until the 1990s that land became an “issue” in the country’s political discussions and that various efforts were initiated. In 1995, the Community Self Reliance Centre (or CSRC) started an awareness programme in the district of Sindhupalchowk, working with landless tillers or farmers.

Since 2003 the programme has expanded significantly with the support of ActionAid and other organisations, and now reaches 50 out of the country’s 75 districts. Focusing on the strong link between access to land and the universally-accepted right to food, CSRC sees the right to land as the starting point for all its efforts. By empowering land-poor men and women, CSRC helps them to claim and exercise these basic rights. CSRC’s programmes have included capacity building of rights holders (poor women and men); changing and/or enacting polices in favour of the land-poor; developing new and alternative models of land reform; and creating and mobilising agents of change at the community level.

Most of these activities are now co-ordinated by community members in the National Land Rights Forum. This is an organisation run by the farmers themselves, with democratically-elected committees established throughout the country. With committees in 42 districts and in more than 2,000 villages, the forum had almost 100,000 members at the end of 2010.

The National Land Rights Forum sees itself as the national organisation for all those working on the land, including the landless, squatters, tenants, farmers, bonded labourers, and all those deprived of land rights. They are the ones who are leading the land rights movement in Nepal.

Pressure and partnerships

CSRC’s support is based on a so-called “2P approach”: helping those in the field exert pressure and demand their rights, and at the same time working in partnership with different organisations and the national government (participating, for example, in the government-formed High Level Commission for Land Reform).

CSRC supports the establishment of village-level committees and organisations, and helps them plan their annual programmes and activities on the basis of their specific context, problems and issues. These groups then organise mass demonstrations, exerting pressure at different levels. One of these demonstrations was the “March of 100,000 Landless People” in 2008, where more than 1,200 rural women participated in 14 days of protests in the capital city, together with the different local and regional programmes of protests.

In March 2011, more than 1,000 farmers spent more than one week in Kathmandu, hoping to capture the attention of the government and the political parties writing the new constitution, to ensure that it would enshrine women’s right to land. In all cases, participants have been very motivated by the struggle for their rights. Perhaps the most interesting thing to see is that they not only raise the issues they want to address, but also suggest solutions to solve their problems, putting the rights of farmers and tillers at the centre of every discussion – and even managing the logistics of their efforts.

Simultaneous efforts focused on the development of partnerships have led to the “Strategic Plan for the Land Rights Movement 2009-2013”, in which different development organisations stated their commitment to providing long-term support to Nepal’s land rights movement. Drawing on CSRC’s “Organisational, Strategic and Operational Plan”, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed on January 2009 between CSRC and five partners: ActionAid, CARE, CCO/ CIDA, Danida/HUGOU, and Oxfam.

The Lutheran World Federation also joined this strategic partnership from 2011. All these organisations agreed to pool the necessary resources (with a “basket funding approach”) in order to promote security of tenure for land-poor women and men through pro-poor land reform. This “Strategic Partnership” has been moving ahead with significant success in terms of recognition by the state, trust by right holders, commitment by development partners and ownership of right holders. The International Land Coalition (ILC) has also supported short-term initiatives.

Recipe for success

Nepal’s land rights movement has been relatively successful during the past few years. Thanks to intensive lobbying and advocacy, land has been included as a major agenda point in the Interim Constitution of Nepal (which now has a provision to “pursue a policy of adopting scientific land reform programmes by gradually ending feudalistic land ownership”, while at the same time providing that “the State shall pursue a policy of providing a minimum required piece of land for settlement to the liberated bonded labourers…”). As part of its long-term objectives, the country’s Three-year Interim Plan 2007-2010 aimed “to contribute to the national economy on the basis on just land ownership and a scientific land management system through implementation of scientific land reform.”

The plan also outlined a strategy to materialise these objectives while asserting that the government would formulate appropriate laws and build institutional mechanisms to provide land to the families of landless people, tenants and squatters. One of these strategies was to constitute a High Level Commission, which is already operative. More specifically, the movement has also facilitated the direct transfer of land ownership. By the end of 2010, a total of 13,484 tenant families had obtained land titles to 3,034 hectares of land. There is still a lot to do. This experience in Nepal, however, makes us confident that working together will lead to even greater results.

Text and photos: Jagat Deuja and Bed Prasad Khatiwada

Jagat Deuja (deujaj@csrcnepal.org) works as Programme Manager at the Community Self Reliance Centre, Dhapasi, Kathmandu.
Bed Prasad Khatiwada (bedprasad.khatiwada@actionaid.org) is Theme Leader, Right to Food and Land, for ActionAid International in Nepal.

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