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Arabica Robusta

AfricaFiles | Responsibly destroying the world's peasantry? - 0 views

www.africafiles.org/article.asp

food security international development crisis agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity trading carbon environment offset

shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • It has been several years since private investors and states began buying and leasing millions of hectares of farmland worldwide in order to secure their domestic supply of food, raw commodities, and biofuels, or to get subsidies for carbon storage through plantations.
  • All too often, notions such as "reserve agricultural land," or "idle land," are manipulated out of existence, sometimes being used to designate land on which many livelihoods depend, and that is subject to long-standing customary rights. The requirement that evictions take place only for a valid "public purpose," with fair compensation, and following consultation of those affected, is honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
  • what is required is to insist that governments comply fully with their human rights obligations, including the right to food, the right of all peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources, and the right not to be deprived of the means of subsistence.
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  • Because the principles ignore human rights, they neglect the essential dimension of accountability. There is also a clear tension between ceding land to investors for the creation of large plantations, and the objective of redistributing land and ensuring more equitable access to it.
  • It should come as no wonder that smallholders and agricultural labourers represent a combined 70% of those who are unable to feed themselves today.
  • Smallholders, by contrast, produce at a higher cost. They are often very productive by hectare, since they maximize the use of the soil, and achieve the best complementary use of plants and animals. But the form of agriculture that they practice, which relies less on external inputs and mechanization, is highly labour-intensive. If smallholders compete in the same markets as the large farms, they lose. Yet they render invaluable services, in terms of preservation of agro- and biodiversity, local communities' resilience to price shocks or weather-related events, and environmental conservation. The arrival of large-scale investment in agriculture will alter the relationship between these worlds of farming. It will exacerbate highly unequal competition. And it could cause massive social disruptions in the world's rural areas.
Arabica Robusta

World Bank investment on Assam's tea plantations: hearing the voices of workers? | open... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...on-assam-s-tea-plantations-hea

food agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity international development economic development world bank labor human rights

shared by Arabica Robusta on 13 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In accordance with its dual mandate of reducing poverty and boosting shared income equality, the IFC aims to implement a sustainable ‘worker-shareholder’ model. In theory, when workers become shareholders, they gain decision-making power in a company’s operations and lift themselves out of poverty. Yet in this case, seven years on, not only has the IFC investment failed to yield meaningful changes for workers, but APPL continues to breach a number of national laws (most notably the Plantations Labour Act, 1951) and is expected to be found in breach of the World Bank’s own standards.
  • While there are several unions offering membership in Assam, only one union – the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) – is recognised by the state as having to the right to negotiate with the tea industry through collective bargaining agreements. ACMS’ dominance stems from its close relationships with both tea plantation management and the political establishment.
  • Firstly, the complainants cited concerns about labour rights violations, including long working hours, poor sanitation and health conditions, and a lack of freedom to associate. They questioned the worker-shareholder programme, contending that many workers were pressured into buying shares, often without proper information about the nature and risks of investment. Secondly, the complainants argued that the IFC violated its standard on Indigenous Peoples, claiming that APPL threatens the
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  • or instance, several workers have faced retaliation for voicing their concerns to the CAO team visiting APPL gardens during the investigation process. Moreover, many plantation managers exert tight control over workers by restricting access to non-residents and non-workers, in violation of the Plantations Labour Act, 1951, which provides for open access to the housing areas.
  • These restrictions have hindered the ability of workers and workers’ representatives to meet freely, for instance with the purpose of raising awareness about their rights under relevant laws and regulations.
Arabica Robusta

May 6 2008 - Agrofuels on Stolen Lands Continue to Threaten Colombian Rainforests and C... - 0 views

www.rainforestportal.com/...send.asp

activism advocacy agribusiness agrofuels biofuels colombia crisis food palmoil security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 May 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 07 May 08
     
    If agrofuels -- growing food for fuel -- continue to expand in Colombia, food prices are bound to rise and the nation's food security erode as is happening around the world. Decisive government action is needed to guarantee the lives and the safety of community members and to ensure reparation for environmental destruction and the human rights abuses. The exiled community leader Ligia Maria Cheverra has summed up the situation: "Our territory is being given to the palm oil producers. We need to stop every monoculture and the projects that are targeting our Colombia. This will affect the whole continent. Everything will be lost: the land, the water, the air, the animals, the people. What belongs to us is being destroyed. In Colombia those who speak out with a loud voice are being killed. Here only the ones who sell themselves are rewarded, and those who don't are called guerrilleros."
Arabica Robusta

World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Naf... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...land-carbon-grab-sengwer-kenya

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels monsanto coercive conservation

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
  • Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.
  • A letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide."
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  • ony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations." According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles that their implementation could lead to outright genocide.
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