September
2015
LAND
UP FOR GRABS
Investors
are grabbing a Japan-size chunk of the developing world and displacing
local people and wildlife.
By
Erica Gies
Foreign investors are increasingly buying or leasing large swaths
of developing countries in pursuit of food, water, and profit, according
to human rights groups and academics, putting people and the environment
at risk.
In Papua, Indonesia, forests that have sustained Malind
hunter-gatherers for millennia are being razed to make way for foreign-owned
biofuels and industrial agriculture plantations in a government scheme
called Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate, according to awasMIFEE,
a U.K.-based activist group. In Brazil’s delicate tropical savanna
ecosystem — one of Conservation International’s top 25 biodiversity
hot spots and home to rare animals such as giant anteaters, tapirs,
and armadillos — more than 32,000 acres of habitat are being tilled
for crops and biofuels by the Qatar Investment Authority. Ethnic pastoralist
and subsistence agriculture groups in Ethiopia, meanwhile, have been
pushed off their ancestral lands by deals the Ethiopian government
has struck with developers such as Karuturi, an India-based flower
and agribusiness company, and the privately owned Saudi Star Agricultural
Development, according to the Land Matrix and the Oakland Institute.
Activists call these acquisitions land grabs that violate
human rights. The International Land Coalition, a group that includes
Oxfam International and the United Nations Environment Programme,
defines land grabs as acquisitions completed “without prior consent
of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of the social
and environmental impacts.”
Since 2000, international investors have grabbed an estimated
93 million acres worldwide — an area the size of Japan — according
to the Land Matrix, an international initiative that tracks the phenomenon.
By the Land Matrix’s reckoning, Indonesia has been the target of the
largest number of deals, with 120, followed by Cambodia, Mozambique,
Ethiopia, and Laos.
Lack of consent from residents is a key distinction between
a land grab and other overseas investment. In the Saudi Star deal,
for instance, locals did not know that 25,000 acres of their land
had been given to the company for rice cultivation until bulldozers
arrived to clear the area, said an Anuak tribal person who was quoted
in a report released recently by the Oakland Institute, a California-based
think tank that documents impacts of international land deals.
Land grabs can have domestic and international effects,
according to Anuradha Mittal, the Oakland Institute’s executive director.
Local people can often go hungry when they’re displaced from their
farmland or food grown there is exported. “Before the investor arrived,
the community used forests for fruits, food, medicines, tuber roots,
for building tukuls [huts with thatch roofs], hunting, and shelter
for animals. Now it is all cleared,” said Mittal’s Anuak source, whose
identity was not released to protect the villager from retaliation.
The conversion of rainforest to palm oil plantations in
Indonesia and Malaysia is releasing carbon dioxide, decreasing biodiversity,
and destroying critical habitat for native species, such as endangered
orangutans. The deals also divert water supplies for local people
and ecosystems because industrial agriculture is often water-intensive
compared with that of displaced subsistence farmers, said Satoko Kishimoto,
who studies land grabs at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute,
a research and advocacy organization.
The deals almost always include government promises of
water from a nearby river or aquifer, she said. For instance, Saudi
Star is taking water from the Alwero River but is also building a
dam on the Alwero to obtain more. The company is working to finish
30 kilometers of irrigation canals this year so it can flood its rice
crop, which will be primarily for export, according to reports.
Saudi Star did not respond to requests for comment. But
the company’s owner claims the investment benefits Ethiopian citizens.
“While contributing to the food security of the Kingdom, the project
will provide enormous benefits to Ethiopia in terms of foreign investment,
job opportunities and food,” states the website of the company’s owner,
Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi. “Around half of the increased production
is expected to remain in Ethiopia for local consumption.”
Experts say land grabs accelerated after the world food
crisis of 2007–2008. In the arid Middle East, countries such as Qatar,
which import 90% of their food, sought to secure food supplies overseas.
Growing basic staples locally is unsustainable for such countries.
In Saudi Arabia, for example, wheat is irrigated from rapidly depleting
aquifers, which are being drawn down 943% faster than they can recharge.
Local governments are often complicit in land grabs, which
are most prevalent in countries with high levels of corruption, according
to David Zetland, a water policy economist at Leiden University College
in The Hague, who was a visiting scholar last year at Saudi Arabia’s
King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center. Local elites
sell or lease land out from under longtime residents, he said, forcing
them to relocate to land that is urban, lacks water, or is already
occupied.
Residents are vulnerable because in most of the developing
world, traditional people working their ancestral lands lack formal
property rights, said Paolo D’Odorico, a professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia who studies land and water
grabbing. “The land might be owned by the state or government and
used by the communities and has been like that for centuries,” he
noted.
Collective ownership contributed to the Anuak’s dilemma
in Ethiopia because their land is controlled by the tribal chieftain,
according to Mittal’s source, a former government employee who grew
up in a small farming village. “Today, customary land laws are not
consulted or incorporated by the government,” said the villager.
Many development groups, including International Land
Coalition members such as the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture
Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development,
argue that overseas investment in agriculture is a win-win. Wealthy,
dry countries secure food with a lower environmental footprint while
poorer, wetter countries benefit from the investment in irrigation,
fertilizer, and farming machinery. Such investments improve crop yields,
they say, so food can not only be exported but also grown to feed
local people.
That attitude frustrates Mittal, who sees it as a justification
for violating human rights. “Displacement is seen as just a cost to
be paid for development without consultations with affected people,”
she said. “It is outrageous.”
Just how much land grabbing is occurring is a matter of
debate. The deals themselves are difficult to track as land sales
are made in secret in many countries. The Land Matrix crowdsources
information from on-the-ground nonprofit groups, academic reports,
and corporate accounts of deals.
Agriculture drives 77% of all land grabs, according to
the Land Matrix, but just 10% of the deals are for food production.
Thirty-eight percent goes to biofuels, for instance, and 18% to “flex
crops” such as palm oil or soy, which can be used for food. About
a tenth of deals are driven by forestry, mining, industry, hydropower,
and land speculation.
The United Kingdom, the United States, China, India, and
Canada are noteworthy investor countries for their high numbers of
questionable deals documented on the Land Matrix site, as is Vietnam,
which invests primarily in its poorer neighbours, Cambodia and Laos.
International corporations are also acquiring land.
Despite the high number of deals, just 13% of acquired
land is in production, according to the Land Matrix. Zetland said
challenges for investors include a lack of infrastructure and skilled
labour, dodgy contractors, and inadequate or inappropriate soils,
and in some cases, “elephants show up and eat everything.”
Some countries seeking food and water security are beginning
to steer clear of land grabs. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates
and Qatar are buying stocks in overseas agribusiness companies in
the hope of having a say in export decisions. When the government-owned
Canadian Wheat Board went private last year, Saudi Arabia bought 51%
of the shares.
Singapore, another resource-poor country, is diversifying
its food sourcing, said Christopher Napoli, a political economist
at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center. It sacrifices
discounts for buying in bulk from a single supplier but gains security
by purchasing from several regions, allowing it to weather supply
problems from any one country.
If countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar can secure food
and water for their people in more light-handed ways, it’s a win-win
for potentially displaced people and wildlife and for the investors,
who suffer fewer financial losses and less tarnishing of their reputation.
But land grabs are likely to continue because most are
not driven by food security, said Jennifer Franco, who specializes
in land issues at the Transnational Institute. Pointing to the many
deals undertaken to obtain mining resources, timber, flowers, energy,
and even food for profit, she said, “The primary motivation for land
and water grabbing is greed.” – Third World Network Features.
-ends-
About
the author: Erica Gies is an independent journalist who writes about
the core requirements for life — water and energy — from Victoria,
British Columbia, and San Francisco.
The
above article is reproduced with permission from TakePart.com, 28 August 2015. The original
article can be found here.
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