Controversial farmland deals in developing countries can have a
negative impact on the people who live on the land, according to a new U.N. report.
While investment in agriculture is essential to help developing
countries reduce hunger and poverty, the U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization says these large-scale “land grabs” don’t always help. The
surging global demand for food, fodder and fuel crops is driving a land
rush in parts of the developing world. Investors are pouring money into
large-scale farmland leases in Africa, Asia, former Soviet countries and
elsewhere.
‘Daylight robbery’
The Gambella region of Ethiopia is home to many such leases. It is also
home to some of the last best farmland on Earth. The Ethiopian
government says it has leased more than 225,000
hectares to foreign investors, who have put more than $2 billion into
the deals.
Ethiopian officials say this is just the kind of agricultural
development the country needs to modernize farming, improve food
production and provide jobs. Obang Metho, who grew up in Gambella, sees
it differently. “I am not anti-investment,” he says. “But I am
anti-daylight robbery. What is going on in Africa is robbery.” Metho
heads the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia, an activist
group based in Washington. He says farmers in Gambella have been pushed
off their land to make way for companies from China, India and Saudi
Arabia that are exporting the harvest back to the home country. Human
Rights Watch estimates that 42 percent of the land in the region is
leased or on offer.
Hungry nation
Metho says that’s a serious problem for a country like Ethiopia, with
hunger problems of its own. “If they have land to give to the Indians,
or the Arabs, the Chinese,
the Saudis to come,” he asks, “why did Ethiopia not use this land to
feed the Ethiopian people?” Ethiopia’s Washington embassy says it’s not
displacing small-holder
farmers, and that it takes great care not to infringe on the rights of
local people.
But large-scale land deals in developing countries have become more
common in recent years as global food commodity prices have spiked.
Critics call them “land grabs.” “’Land grab’ is sort-of a controversial term, but I think it’s
accurate in this case,” says Michael Kugelman, lead editor of “The
Global Farms Race,” a new book on agricultural investments and food
security.
Search for farmland
He says food-importing countries are looking for farmland abroad to
limit their exposure to volatile global markets. “These food importing
countries also lack the land and the water at
home to do the farming themselves,” he says. “So they’re going abroad to
countries that are very willing to host them.” Data are sketchy, but
estimates of land leased are in the tens of millions of hectares
worldwide. Outcomes have been mixed, says Jomo Kwame Sundaram, economic
and social development chief at the FAO.
The organization’s new report highlights the need for investments in
agriculture in the countries hosting these land deals. But Sundaram says
land deals may not always be the best way to do it. “Land acquisisions
are one of the most difficult type of investments
to produce the types of desirable outcomes that we have in mind, like
food security, local economic development, etcetera,” he says. Countries
get better results from public-sector investments in research and
infrastructure, for example.
Pocketing the proceeds
Michael Kugelman says the food security and economic development
benefits promised to the people of the host countries have not
materialized. But he says many of the governments have benefitted. “A
lot of the governments in the countries hosting the deals are
corrupt, they’re not very democratic, and they’re happy just to pocket
some of the proceeds from these investments.” And some of these deals
are sparking conflict.
Protesters overthrew the government of Madagascar in 2009 in part
because of a land deal that would have leased half the country’s arable
land to a South Korean firm. The new government canceled the deal
.
Responsible investment
International organizations, including the FAO and the World Bank
among others, have developed voluntary guidelines for responsible land
investment to try to promote more equitable investment. The FAO’s Jomo
Sundaram says the investor community wants the guidelines, too. “There
is quite a bit of demand by the private sector for those
guidelines that will help them to protect their own investments,” he
says.
But Obang Metho from the Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia
doubts that voluntary guidelines will change the behavior of corrupt and
autocratic governments. “As long as the regime doesn’t respect the
rights of their people, nothing will work,” he says. Meanwhile, the
rising demand for food will continue to drive fierce
competition for the limited remaining land on which to grow it.
No comments:
Post a Comment