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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new 'resource curse'? - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...60526

food security international crisis development pambazuka foodsecurity agribusiness biofuels agriculture mozambique

shared by Arabica Robusta on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
  • The mentality of ‘grabbers’ could not be more different. ‘We are not farmers…’ stated an official from SLC Agricola, Brazil’s largest ‘farm’ corporation. ‘The same way you have shoemakers and computer manufacturers, we produce agricultural commodities.’
  • But with Africa losing an estimated US$148 billion in development finance each year, 60 per cent as a result of multinational mispricing, in addition to the direct servicing of odious debts – (amounting to a global figure of US$560 billion per annum of an outstanding US$2.9 trillion), little or no rents derived from the liquidation of exhaustible resources is redistributed in intangible capital. This is precisely because across Africa citizens are not required to finance the state budget – as occurs in high-income countries through intangible capital – they lack the political representation necessary to influence policies and usurped power structures.
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  • The terms differ from country to country, with the bulk of Ghana’s leased land allocated for export, in contrast to Ethiopia’s mixed status, but the issue remains one of control and exploitation, whether it is over local food monopolies or exported crops.
  • over 100 known specialised land funds and investments firms have embarked on ‘private sector’ land grabs, including well-known entities such as Morgan Stanley. Facilitating this process is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank group, ensuring for investors the ‘enabling environments’ and positive ‘investment climates’ required for the extractive industries, such as repatriation of profits and tax ‘competition’. From 1991-2002, deregulation proposed by IFIs composed 95 per cent of changes implemented in host countries.
  • development finance siphoned from Africa, whether through the extractive industries, or land grabs, are unlikely to be revealed as the IMF scrapped mandatory information exchange. Global watchdogs, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) remained beholden to high-income nations as a ‘subsidiary’ unit in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB), founded and finance by the ‘big four’ accounting firms – maintaining units in secrecy jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands – prefers multinationals to self-regulate trade via arms length transfer. What this effectively does is enable multinationals, conducting 60 per cent of global trade within rather than between corporations, to determine the future of entire continents such as Africa, where primary commodities – extracted by corporations, account for 80 per cent of exports.
  • Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
Arabica Robusta

Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development | F... - 0 views

www.foodfirst.org/2905

food security international development agriculture foodsecurity gates bio-technology

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The revived dream of an African Green Revolution in the new millennium, however, is actually a much larger project to make Africa safe for capital.
  • It is difficult to disentangle the web of alliances between the Gates Foundation, USAID, and various U.S., African and pseudo-African biotech research institutions-but the motives are crystal clear. USAID is currently headed by Rajiv Shah, former director of agricultural development programs at the Gates Foundation. It has become one of the main agencies promoting the expansion of biotech crops in Africa. The push for GM crops received a boost from the Global Food Security Act (AKA the Lugar-Casey Bill) based on a suspiciously appropriate Gates Foundation report entitled "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty." The Lugar Casey bill would restructure aid funding to include over $7 billion for GM crops, giving Aid-dependent poor countries few options for formulating "home-grown" agricultural solutions.
  • The Gates Foundation recently donated US$ 270 million to CGIAR. According to Prabhu Pingali, head of agriculture policy and statistics at CGIAR, the plan is to double the organization's funding to $1 billion over the next four years. The Gates Foundation seems to have acquiesced to the reality that Africa is a complicated continent with myriad social networks, and that CGIAR's planned new consortium of research centers and it's decades of "Green Revolution" experience, might help him ramp up his own vision of a ‘modernized' and ‘marketized' African agriculture.
Arabica Robusta

TRADE: UNCTAD "Forgets" Real Risks Faced by African Farmers - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp

food security international development agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity crisis

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "The greatest enemies of the small African farmers are the agro-industrial sector; unsteady prices for food at the world markets caused by speculation; and so-called free trade agreements," Hoering told IPS.
  • "All these factors drive agriculture at the local and the global level in the opposite direction as the one the UNCTAD calls for – towards monocultures, and towards more private seed patents and other expensive farming inputs."
  • In a joint report, the German bureaux of the humanitarian organisations Oxfam and Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN) complained that three years after the start of the world food crisis, "the agro-industrial sector (in the industrialised countries), with the help of governments, continues to powerfully push the liberalisation of international food markets and the acceptance of genetically modified agriculture (GMA)." The survey, titled "Grenzenlos und billig" ("Borderless and cheap"), shows that the food industry in the developed countries uses the stalemate in the international trade negotiations to advance bilateral trade agreements with the developing countries in order to gain access to new markets for their food goods.
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  • "Instead of promoting food export (towards developing countries), the industrialised world should be supporting fair trade," Marita Wiggerthale, expert on agriculture at Oxfam in Germany, told IPS.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Food crisis in the Sahel: Real problem, false solutions - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...66292

food security international crisis development agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity pambazuka agrofuels agroecology sovereignty biofuels

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Tidiane Kassé cautions that by tackling the consequences rather than the causes of the crisis, the region’s people are likely to remain vulnerable to hunger.
  • In contrast with other former French colonies in Africa, where independence parades have been held in a manner devoid of substance and sense (and built on the failings which have reinforced the links of subject to metropole and other examples of power –political, economic, etc), Niamey’s authorities are to limit themselves to a military parade on 3 August. With symbolism put aside, the reality needs to be faced up to: some 8 million Nigeriens – or half the country’s population – are affected by the famine.
  • In addition to the 8 million affected Nigeriens are some 1.6 million Chadians and 500,000 Malians. These statistics are only, however, the visible aspect that institutions and international non-governmental organisations display. They suffer from the limits around reading data on Africa, notably on rural areas and a region of the Sahel in which pastoral traditions and a nomadic lifestyle are a prominent feature.
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  • n the face of empty granaries, Niger’s people have begun to develop a strategy for survival. ‘In Niger, women cover a desert-like environment in search of anthills in order to dig up and retrieve grains of millet, corn and other crops that the ants have collected,’ tells Charles Bambara, in charge of communications for Oxfam GB in Dakar. In the north of Mali, farmers, keen to allow their livestock to drink, have taken to using the water points actually intended for elephants (in a bid to protect the last pachyderms alive in the country).
  • The disorder of the world food crisis in 2008 did not become hazy, and this new peak comes to remind us that, in the Sahel, the crisis results from an endemic problem. This is a problem that, as the thrust of recurrent fever testifies, is more a question of structure than conjuncture, that these are the failings of agricultural policies that impose their own tough realities, and that the recommended solutions are not different from those pushed in the 1980s with the establishing of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) which sounded the death knell of Africa’s agricultural policies.
  • The reduced investment imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had then destroyed the base of an agriculture geared towards food sovereignty. Industrial cultures were promoted which washed the soil (leading to greater soil erosion, the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser) and disrupted the balance of the systems of production behind subsistence and the generation of complementary revenues on the strength of access to local markets. From this point it was a question of food security, no matter where stocks came from. This was the period in which food aid poured in. Africa was to produce no longer, with African stomachs wagered on agricultural surpluses from Europe, the US and elsewhere. As a result, since 1980 sub-Saharan Africa has been the only region of the world where average per capita food production has continued to decline over the last 40 years.[3]
  • African agriculture has suffered a series of difficulties which, over 30 years, have left it vulnerable to the smallest of changes on both the international market and climatically. Agricultural policies applied by states, under donors’ pressure, have in effect turned their back on policies which, formerly, assured technical assistance to producers, backed up by a price-stabilisation mechanism and subsidies for commodities.
  • We could go even further towards the worst of it and look at the development of biofuels and the extent to which more and more land is being diverted away from food production. Essentially, we will be growing to power cars rather than fill granaries. And in July this year, Burkina Faso has inaugurated its first industrial unit of production, while the country remains vulnerable in the face of a food crisis.
  • ‘Today, in the smallest village, people eat bread, milk and coffee… This wasn’t part of our customs; we used to eat maize-based dough, sorghum and millet. But when you can’t live anymore from your field and you’re reliant on others (neighbours, food aid), you eat what you’re given.
  • The foundation of real food sovereignty lies in the promotion and consolidation of family agriculture, as well as the development of an agro-ecology which offers the best antidote to the wasting-away of fragile ecosystems at the mercy of deregulation.
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.
Arabica Robusta

Africans Face Competing Visions of Agricultural Development at a Critical Juncture | Fo... - 0 views

www.foodfirst.org/2933

earth institute sachs food sovereignty

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The IFIs' fixation on macroeconomic indicators leads to the misguided belief that bumping up countries' GDPs will help poor Africans by way of some mythological trickle-down effect that has yet to materialize. This metric has led, among other things, to an inexorable push in Africa for large scale industrial agriculture for export markets, while leaving the peasant farmers who produce most of the food consumed by Africans out of the equation. The aid regime has thus done more to open Africa's agricultural resources for exploitation than to mitigate the roots of poverty and hunger in Africa.
  • While it is not surprising that the IFIs mediate the global economy, often brutally, in favor of the OECD countries-the flip side would be to engage in development activities as if these global imbalances did not exist. This seems to be the Earth Institute's perspective. Their website describes their program as bringing the benefits of scientific expertise of "850 scientists, postdoctoral fellows, staff and students working in and across more than 30 Columbia University research centers" to solve "real world problems." The Earth Institute believes "finding solutions to one problem, such as extreme poverty, must involve tackling other related challenges, such as environmental degradation and lack of access to health care and education."
  • It is not difficult to succeed when one has a lot of money and one defines success as eradicating poverty in individual villages.
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  • The villagers in Sauri are understandably happy with the results, but off the record they have criticized the non-inclusiveness of the top-down approach.[i] UN officials and scientists have also been reluctant to speak against Sachs on the record for fear of retribution.
  • The Millennium Villages siphon off money better spent elsewhere, and draw attention away from creative, grassroots approaches to local problems. Long-term solutions require sustainable low-tech methods that farmers can control, such as permaculture, seed banks, and green manure; as well as redistributive land reform and marketing boards to provide some security.
  • Millennium Challenge Corporation (no direct relation to the Millennium Villages project). Created in 2004, the MCC is a U.S. Government aid organization that has spent $5.5 billion since 2004 awarding contracts to private businesses in target countries. The MCC's focus on raising the overall GDP is being pursued with the same failed policies as the IFIs: aggressive privatization, foreign direct investment (predatory capital), and global integration.  One of the more contentious aspects for small farmers are land grabs by foreign investors, facilitated via MCC contracts for "Systematic Land Regularization and Improvement of Rural Land Allocation." A recent report by GRAIN reveals that the MCC has been using "Land Regularization" to change land ownership rules and gain access to tens of thousands of acres of land in three of the ECOWAS countries: Benin, Ghana, and Mali.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Biofuels and world hunger - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...68865

biofuels agribusiness development international agriculture foodsecurity security crisis food pambazuka

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
  • If all global biofuels targets are to be met, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76 per cent by 2020 and starve an extra 600 million people.
  • While driving up food prices can create hunger, driving people off the land that they have traditionally cultivated deprives them of the last resort of growing their own food. This is happening all over the developing world. In Mozambique, farms are destroyed for industrial biofuels. Elisa Alimone Mongue, mother and farmer said: ‘I don't have a farm, I don't have a garden … the only land I have has been destroyed. We are just suffering with hunger … even if I go to look for another farm, they will just destroy it again.’
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  • Julio Ngoene is fighting to save his community and its way of life. He is the village chief of approximately 100 households of more than 1,000 people. A biofuel company is setting up a project near his village and has taken over 80 per cent of the village farmland without permission, and destroyed the crops. At the beginning of the project, the company promised to resettle the village, but two years later, Julio and the villagers have still heard nothing, and no one in the village has received compensation.
  • There have been warnings against jatropha biodiesel going back several years [3] (Jatropha Biodiesel Fever in India, SiS 36). Jatropha has been hyped as a miracle non-food biofuel crop that would simply grow in marginal areas not suitable for food crops. But there was clear evidence that it would only deliver anywhere near the promised 1,300 litres of oil per ha when grown in fertile land with plenty of water, and that's what companies have set their eyes on.
  • But this year I could not get much because of the trees that have been cut. Now they have destroyed the trees so we have lost a good source of income forever, yet we have not been paid anything in compensation. That is why I confronted the white man at the meeting.’
  • Brazil is the largest industrial biofuel producer in the developing world, where the sugar cane (ethanol) plantation industry is well established. However, working conditions are often poor. Of the one million cane workers, about half are employed as cutters, mostly done by hand, in intense heat for long hours; and a number of deaths have been reported.
  • Arabica Robusta on 05 Dec 10
     
    Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
Arabica Robusta

The European Civil Society Round-Up: Food security as key: New biofuels report - 0 views

wdev-newsblog.blogspot.com/...urity-as-key-new-biofuels.html

biofuels development food foodsecurity international security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08
     
    a new study released by the Common Fund for Commodities at an international forum on biofuels held recently in Kuala Lumpur. "Fundamentally, there is a link between poverty reduction and biofuels sector development that can be promoted," said Ambassador Ali Mchumo, the managing director of the Common Fund in Amsterdam.
Arabica Robusta

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Brazil president defends biofuels - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7351766.stm

biofuels brazil development food international lula security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    Food prices were going up, he said, because people in developing countries like China, India and Brazil itself were simply eating more as their economic conditions improved.
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    Biofuel as an export crop: Lula says it is no problem
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Why land matters to Africans regardless of agriculture - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...70601

food security international development crisis agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels pambazuka africa

shared by Arabica Robusta on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • In both cases the agrarian question in relation to agricultural productivity and ownership of land in Africa was brought to the fore not least because of the ‘new’ wave of ‘land grabbing’ across the continent.
  • The case of South Africa and Zimbabwe’s ongoing land reforms highlights this contentious relationship. On the one hand they jointly affirm the centrality of land ownership in Africa irrespective of whether Africans use it for agricultural production or not. Yet, on the other hand, they dialectically confirm the viability of agricultural productivity among the African peasantry.
  • even such a presumable better land would hardly compensate. After all they had a rationale for being where they were in the first place. It is those kind of rationales that one needs to unpack, even today, before jumping into the bandwagon of claiming such and such land in Africa is idle and hence the imperial imperative of displacing Africans to pave way for investors.
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  • land is intimately linked to identity. It is central to the production and reproduction of community. Land thus ensures cultural continuity.
  • Although all forms of land tenure recognized by the Ugandan constitution are underpinned by patriarchy, she sharply noted, research from the ground indicates that the often demonized customary land tenure is relatively far beneficial to women when it comes to ensuring their access to land. At the risk of appearing a pro-patriarchy apologetic she aptly states: ‘Customary land tenure systems and production relations have in-built social insurance mechanisms … meant to ensure that the land needs of everybody in the community, including the needs of vulnerable members of society – aged, widowed, orphans, etc, are met.
  • Customary tenure arrangements are also designed to support livelihood systems. This is not the case for other tenure systems which support highly individualized and commercialized lifestyles. As long as women’s membership to a production unit is intact under customary tenure systems, therefore, they can have access to land, social networks and mutual support systems as well as common property resources which supports their efforts to fulfill their obligations for household food production, whether they are married, widowed or unmarried.’[4]
  • By reducing “the land question to a question of livelihoods and agriculture only” they fail to grasp that in South Africa as in other African countries “there is more to the land question which has to do with fundamental claims of legitimacy over ownership and control of the country at large”.[7]
  • This blind spot, and the persistence denial of the failure of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ and ‘use it or lose it’ land reform models in South Africa, needs an eye salve from Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Unfortunately the debate on the merits and demerits of FTLRP has been coloured if not tainted by the preoccupation on the despotic regime of President Robert Mugabe. Yet when one scratches the surface on the ground it is easy to see how such selective engagement had been informed by a similar myopic discourse on land use for agriculture.
  • ‘Needless to say, a number of scholars have never recognized this potential. On the contrary, they continue to speculate about “crony capitalism” (Patrick Bond) and the “destruction of the agriculture sector” (Horace Campbell), without having conducted any concrete research of their own, or properly interrogated the new research that has emerged.’[12]
  • The irony is that even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), well known for being so quick to dismiss if not demonize any positive side of Zimbabwe’s radical land reforms, had to reluctantly swallow its pride and prejudice as it extensively quoted Scoones’ admission of being “genuinely surprised” by findings of their study on ‘Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myth and Reality’ that debunks these five myths perpetuated by “political and media stereotypes of abject failure” in Zimbabwe: (1) That land reform has been a total failure; (2)That most of the land has gone to political "cronies"; (3) That there is no investment on the resettled land; (4) That agriculture is in complete ruins, creating chronic food insecurity; (5)That the rural economy has collapsed.[14]
  • There has been a torrent of journalistic accounts on the success of the Zimbabwean farmers in transplanting commercial agriculture to Nigeria. Under titles like ‘White Zimbabweans Bring Change to Nigeria’, ‘White Zimbabwean farmers highlight Nigeria's agricultural failures’ , and ‘White farmers from Zimbabwe bring prosperity to Nigeria’. The impression is created of a massive transformation based on the ingenuity of the Zimbabwean farmers and without any support from Nigerian governments. But is this really so? The terms of the [Memorandum of Understanding] MOU which the Kwara State government signed with the Zimbabwean farmers, and developments surrounding the establishment of the farms, paint a different picture. It committed the State government to the provision of a series of services crucial for the development of the commercial farms. Crucially, it committed the government to provide land. The government undertook to clear choice land of the indigenous users’ right next to the River Niger. 1289 local farmers in 28 communities were uprooted from their farms to make way for the Zimbabwean farmers. The state set aside a total of N77m (US$513,333) as compensation for the displaced local farmers. Each of the initial 13 Zimbabwean farmers received a 25-year lease of 1000 hectares. The state's instrumentalist use of compensation and 'agricultural packages' (bicycles – 720 were distributed – , fertilizers, seed etc.) and the provision of long sought after communal infrastructure like electricity and additional classrooms in local schools helped to defuse local protests. [15]
idea-fly

best fishing drone - 1 views

www.idea-fly.com/-wait-for-big-fish-ashore.html

best fishing drone

shared by idea-fly on 10 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • idea-fly on 10 Sep 20
     
    In 2010, IDFTECH was established in Shenzhen, a beautiful coastal city. IDFTECH closely follows the development trend of drones and regards the application of drones as the company's research and development focus. Such as: high-definition image transmission system; PTZ stabilization system; development of peripheral equipment for fishing drones; and so on. IDFTECH and DJI have carried out strategic cooperation. DJI's excellent flight control system provides a stable and safe flying platform for IDFTECH's fishing drones. To ensure that users have a perfect experience. IDFTECH is committed to bringing new concepts to new applications of drones with technology and innovation.
geo hyd

Indian Agriculture - 0 views

www.nuziveeduseeds.com

Indian Agriculture Indian seeds industry

shared by geo hyd on 22 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • More ScienceCultivating best Technologies
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  • geo hyd on 22 Aug 12
     
    Nuziveedu Seeds is one of the top seeds company in India and also the largest hybrid seed company in India.Nuziveedu Seeds is also a market leader in hybrid cotton seed and research paddy seed.Nuziveedu Seeds offers the strength and experience of being a major Seeds company with the aim to develop and supply quality seeds for the betterment of our farmers.
Arabica Robusta

IPS - Filling the Granaries in Burkina Faso | Inter Press Service - 1 views

www.ipsnews.net/...-the-granaries-in-burkina-faso

development international news governance bank world burkina faso maize

shared by Arabica Robusta on 30 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • New, high-yielding varieties of the staple crop have been developed at the country’s Institute for the Environment and Agricultural Research (INERA) as part of a drive to improve food security in this landlocked West African country.
  • Both Kabré and Kaboré were introduced to Bondofa when they became members of Burkina Faso’s National Union of Seed Producers (UNPSB) two years ago. The UNPSB was established in 2006, and coordinates production and marketing activities as well as acting as an interface between its 4,000 members and the government.
Arabica Robusta

Expensive policies to acquire poor people's land | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ire-poor-people%E2%80%99s-land

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels land grab

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • It seems the first step in appropriating land, is to appropriate vocabulary and a language. Laws and policies that allow for this are full of phrases such as ‘participatory processes’, ‘democratic dialogues’ and ‘development of the nation’.
  • Firstly, with one subsequent clause negating the other, people will have to effectively vacate land first and then be resettled.
  • Secondly, once a project has been sanctioned, and an area is identified for this, the company proceeds to "conduct a survey" and "a list of displaced families is drawn up" to be rehabilitated. A communication plan for awareness creation is to be formulated and executed in the affected area with the onus and cost of the communication of the rehabilitation to be borne by the Project Authorities. So the only communication which a family may receive, is a report testifying to the fact that they have been surveyed, will be displaced, and that their name is on a list indicating this.
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  • Thirdly, this policy applied to only those people who had lost their homestead land. Given that of the 4,004 acres required by POSCO, 3,566 acres are government land, housing over four thousand families working on betel vine plantations, in forests, and as cashew farmers, it is clear that an overwhelming majority of agricultural workers are not landowners with homestead or agricultural land.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - A new Philanthro-Capitalist Alliance in Africa? - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...47017

food security international crisis development pambazuka agribusiness foodsecurity agriculture philanthro-capitalism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Elegantly simple in its proposal and presentation, AGRA is the global face of a renewed international effort to revive Africa’s sagging agricultural research institutions and introduce new Green Revolution products across the sub-Sahara. The complex array of institutional and financial interests lining up behind Gates and Rockefeller include multilateral and bilateral aid organizations, national and international research institutes, and the handful of powerful multinational seed, chemical, and fertilizer monopolies upon which the entire financial future of the new Green Revolution ultimately rests.
  • That same week in Davos, the soon-to-retire president of Microsoft put his money where his mouth was by giving another $306 million to AGRA. That’s a lot of recognition, by anyone’s standards. Clearly, the “halo effect” created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ altruism will benefit everyone associated with AGRA—from the CGIAR to Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.
  • as a creative capitalist, what—or for whom—is AGRA’s market-based reward? Recognition for Microsoft? Undeniable, but not significant or necessary for a company who already has all the recognition it wants. Gates’ financial interests in genetic engineering? These investments pale behind AGRA itself. The answer is; there is no market-based reward. Rather, the prize is political. AGRA, backed by Gates’ enormous philanthropic power, bolstered by the best world-renown diplomats and CEOs money can buy, and driven by the sheer financial and institutional momentum of the industrial players within the Green Revolution, is a political machine of immense proportions. AGRA allows the Gates foundation unprecedented influence not only in setting the national food and agricultural policies of many African governments, but in the agenda-setting of continental agreements (like NEPAD), multilateral development institutions (e.g. FAO), the strategies of agricultural research centers (e.g. WARDA), and the political economic re-structuring of Africa’s food systems in general. The Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa is the Gates’ Foundations bold foray into big philanthropy’s latest incarnation: philanthro-capitalism.
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  • A logical extension of current of neo-liberal hegemony, philanthro-capitalism sees unregulated markets not only as engines for creating wealth, but as the ultimate drivers of social change. In this view, governments are too bureaucratic and corrupt, and social movements too unruly and inefficient. Only the market can save us from… well, the market.
Arabica Robusta

What's the new global source for fresh, shiny produce? Famine-ridden Ethiopia - 0 views

farmlandgrab.org/14917

food security international development crisis agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity ethiopia middle east

shared by Arabica Robusta on 21 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Every day, a workforce of 1,000 locals pick, pack and load hundreds of tons of fresh produce onto waiting trucks, including 30 tons of tomatoes alone. After reaching the capital, Addis Ababa, the produce is flown to a handful of Middle Eastern cities, entirely bypassing Ethiopia, one of the hungriest places on the planet. The trip from vine to store shelf takes less than 24 hours. It’s the latest project by Saudi oil and mining billionaire, Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. And it may be the future of farming.
  • The controversial trend has been dubbed “outsourcing’s third wave”—following manufacturing and information technology (IT) in the ’80s and ’90s. The high cost of installing irrigation systems, and importing fertilizers, combines and tractors is no deterrent. Defenders of the new projects say they’re bringing desperately needed new technologies, seeds and investment to Africa. But opponents see the trend as a “land grab” that is forcing poor farmers off their land, and benefiting only the governments inking the deals.
  • The new scramble for Africa was triggered by a convergence of events: surging demand for biofuels, rising consumption patterns in China and India and the 2008 global food crisis, when the price of corn and wheat tripled, almost overnight. Responding to sudden hyperinflation, rioting and panic buying, at least 30 countries, including Argentina, Vietnam, Brazil, Cambodia and India, banned or sharply reduced food exports. In short order, Japan and South Korea, who import 70 per cent of their grains, joined a parade of countries turning to Africa to lock in means of production beyond their borders.
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  • When it emerged that Daewoo, the South Korean giant, had signed a 99-year lease granting it close to half of Madagascar’s arable land, protests broke out in Antananarivo, the country’s capital, eventually sinking both the deal, and the president.
  • as Heilberg told the German magazine Der Spiegel after closing the deal in Darfur, “When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules.” Sudan, a dictatorship ranked among the five most corrupt countries on the planet, certainly qualifies. Heilberg’s deal was approved by the deputy commander of Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the official army of semi-autonomous southern Sudan. “This is Africa,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head. That’s the way it works.”
  • Some African intellectuals bridle at Western criticism of the play on Africa. “They’re here because we want them here,” says Teshome Gabre-Mariam, one of Ethiopia’s top lawyers. “We can’t ignore the development potential of this venture. We have everything to gain, nothing to lose.”
  • Arabica Robusta on 21 Aug 10
     
    Every day, a workforce of 1,000 locals pick, pack and load hundreds of tons of fresh produce onto waiting trucks, including 30 tons of tomatoes alone. After reaching the capital, Addis Ababa, the produce is flown to a handful of Middle Eastern cities, entirely bypassing Ethiopia, one of the hungriest places on the planet. The trip from vine to store shelf takes less than 24 hours. It's the latest project by Saudi oil and mining billionaire, Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. And it may be the future of farming.
Arabica Robusta

Manufacturing a Food Crisis - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...bello

bello crisis development food international neoliberalism security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 May 08 - Cached
  • an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
  • The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency. Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers. This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
  • Arabica Robusta on 26 May 08
     
    an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place? * Related * Also By * Haiti on the 'Death Plan' Subscribe Globalization Reed Lindsay: Protesters decry high food prices--and the savage cost of "free trade" agreements. * Manufacturing a Food Crisis Agriculture Walden Bello: How "free trade" is destroying Third World agriculture--and who's fighting back. * The World Food Crisis Globalization John Nichols: We must rein in the global food giants who reap profits at the expense of the planet and the poor. * Democratizing Capital Globalization Sherle R. Schwenninger: New Deal progressives believed the economy should exist to serve society, not the other way around. * Milk Wars Agriculture David E. Gumpert: As struggling dairy farmers seek profits by responding to rising consumer demand for raw milk, regulators are taking a hard line. * Banana Kings Agriculture Emily Biuso: The history of banana cultivation is rife with labor and environmental abuse, corporate skulduggery and genetic experiments gone awry. * The Big Yam China John Feffer: Chinese hearts, minds and pocketbooks get a lot of attention from the Eastern and Western consumer markets. » More * Manufacturing a Food Crisis Agriculture Walden Bello: How "free trade" is destroying Third World agriculture--and who's fighting back. * Microcredit, Macro Issues Peace Activism Walden Bello: The Swedish Academy bestowed this year's Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit. It's easy to believe Yunus's low-interest loans to the poor are a silver bullet against global economic injustice. But it's not that simple. * Letter From the Philippines Su
Arabica Robusta

From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements | Books | AlterNet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...challenge_of_social_movements_

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity agroecology

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs implementing sustain- able agriculture projects and the peasant organizations that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political terrain of civil society.
  • Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members, this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its settlements.
  • Like its predecessor, the new Green Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the expansion of capitalist agriculture.
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  • The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture, ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the Global South. To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.
Arabica Robusta

Press Release: The Great Land Grab - 0 views

www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/526

land reform food security corporate agriculture agribusiness oakland institute

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 11 Oct 09
     
    The Great Land Grab critically examines the role of the private sector in agricultural development and exposes implications of private sector control over food resources. The report concludes that those who promote the benefits of private sector growth in agriculture fail to recognize that acquisition of crucial food-producing lands by foreign private entities poses a threat to rural economies and livelihoods, land reform agendas, and other efforts aimed at making access to food more equitable.
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