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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]
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

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

New report: Governments must protect land, food systems as trade liberalization acceler... - 0 views

dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/...land-grabbing-by-sophia-murphy

land rights land grabs land grab

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • It’s not that investment in agriculture is a bad thing. Indeed, it’s sorely needed. But unless we have the conversation about what kind of investment, in what kind of agriculture, and in whose interests, then the investment does more harm than good. Land grabs, as the label implies, have been overwhelmingly negative. They are associated with weak institutional capacity (and sometimes corruption) in the recipient country governments, as well as authoritarian governments in the investors’ home countries, making it hard to bring pressure there for better practices. The communities whose land is leased or bought are not adequately protected.
Arabica Robusta

farmlandgrab.org | Tanzanian villagers pay for biofuel investment disaster - 1 views

farmlandgrab.org/21192

africa development international news governance land grab tenure tanzania biofuel

shared by Arabica Robusta on 28 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 28 Oct 12
     
    How multinational land grab corporations work with "independent and democratic" governments to appropriate rural property in Tanzania.
Arabica Robusta

Food | The silent tsunami | Economist.com - 0 views

www.economist.com/...displayStory.cfm

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 08 - Cached
  • In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market. For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 08
       
      The "incentive" argument, focussed on biofuel subsidies.
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

Argentina and the magic soybean: the commodity export boom that wasn't | Mark Weisbrot ... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tina-magic-soybean-export-boom

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity commodity

shared by Arabica Robusta on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • One of the great myths about the Argentine economy that is repeated nearly every day is that the rapid growth of the Argentine economy during the past decade has been a "commodity export boom". For example, the New York Times reported last week:
  • I haven't seen any economists make the claim that Argentina's remarkable economic growth over the past nine years – which has brought record levels of employment and a two-thirds reduction in poverty – has been driven by soybeans or a commodities export boom. Maybe that is because it is not true.
  • It turns out that only 12% of Argentina's real GDP growth during this period was due to any kind of exports at all. And just a fraction of this 12% was due to commodity exports, including soybeans. So Argentina's economic growth from 2002-2010 was not an export-led growth experience, by any stretch of the imagination, still less, a "commodities boom".
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  • there is no plausible story that anyone can tell from the data to support the idea that Argentina's growth over the past nine years was driven by a "commodities boom." Why does this matter? Well, as economist Paul Krugman noted yesterday, "articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone ― they are irresponsible, they are renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly." Which, he points out, "doesn't speak well for the state of economics reporting." It sure doesn't.
  • The myth of the "commodities export boom" is one way that Argentina's detractors dismiss Argentina's economic growth as just dumb luck. But the reality is that the economic expansion has been < a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-argentine-success-story-and-its-implications">led by domestic consumption and investment. And it happened because the Argentine government changed its most important macroeconomic choices: on fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies. That is what took Argentina out of its 1998-2002 depression and turned it into the fastest-growing economy in the Americas.
  • By defaulting on its debt and devaluing its currency, Argentina was freed to change its most important macroeconomic policies.
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

The Cutting Edge: Peak Food: Blaming the Victims - 0 views

nafeez.blogspot.com/...peak-food-blaming-victims.html

agribusiness agriculture development food international security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 May 08 - Cached
  • Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today's Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won't they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:"Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year...
  • Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
  • Arabica Robusta on 10 May 08
     
    Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.
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."
ximpex

MSME Status to Retailers & Wholesalers: Government - 0 views

www.ximpex.in/...tailers-wholesalers-government

food agriculture international ximpex

shared by ximpex on 14 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • ximpex on 14 Jul 21
     
    We help you Export... Effortlessly!
Arabica Robusta

IPS - Angola Slow on Drought Response as People Die of Hunger | Inter Press Service - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...sponse-as-people-die-of-hunger

angola news drought famine

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Although agriculture only accounts for a tiny part of oil-rich Angola’s GDP, it is the main source of employment in the country where millions live hand-to-mouth on rain-dependent subsistence farming. This is the second consecutive year that Angola has been affected by drought after several seasons of heavy rainfall and flooding.
  • Opposition parties have also been critical of the government’s response, claiming that communities who support the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) were receiving priority treatment and that local party branches and officials were promoting themselves through aid distribution.
  • Francisco Filomeno Vieira Lopes, secretary general of Bloco Democrático, a small party that has no seats in parliament but is vocal on social issues, told IPS that the government was too preoccupied with attacking those who were trying to publicise the problem, rather than actually helping those in need.
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  • Agriculture Minister Afonso Pedro Canga travelled to FAO headquarters in Rome earlier this month to collect the award for Angola meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
Arabica Robusta

Palm oil shows need for socially aware research - SciDev.Net - 0 views

www.scidev.net/...l-socially-aware-research.html

palm oil deforestation indigenous agriculture agribusiness international development

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • The question of exactly what kind of research is needed, and who should conduct it, was elegantly stated by Robert Guimaraes Vásquez, a leader of the Shipibo-Conibo indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon, who made an emotional statement calling European consumers to realise they are “drinking our blood” when they consume products derived from palm oil. 
  • His lament was that governments currently rely on data from palm oil companies to decide which parts of a forest to give to which firms, but this data is tinged with bias. 
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

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

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

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

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

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crisis food pambazuka security sovereignty

shared by Arabica Robusta on 28 Jun 08 - Cached
  • there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
  • The Principle of food sovereignty.
  • The Principle of priority of food over export crops produced by small farms sustained by state provision of the necessary infrastructure of financial credit, water, energy, extension service, transport, storage, marketing, and insurance against crop failures due to climate changes or other unforeseen circumstances.
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  • The Principle of self-reliance and national ownership and control over the main resources for food production.
  • The Principle of food safety reserves.
  • The Principle of a fair and equitable distribution of “reserve foods” among the population during emergencies.
  • the above quite commonsensical and, we believe, reasonable principles have not been followed by many governments in the South. They have been grossly violated through five main reasons,
  • Distorted state policies on production and trade (e.g. removal of tariffs that made local producers vulnerable to imported food
  • and grab by the rich commercial farmers
  • Effective loss of control over resources of food production,
  • Donor aid dependence
  • Disruption of the infrastructure of food production (as described above) that came as a consequence of the above four factors.
  • Just 10 corporations, including Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta, control one third of the $23 billion commercial seed market and 80% of the $28 billion global pesticide market.
  • In an increasingly liberalizing (globalizing) world, Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have increased their control over the supply of water, especially in the South. In many cases, private sector participation in water services has been one of the “aid conditionalities” of the so-called “donor assistance” (ODAs) from donor countries and the IMF and the World Bank. Just three companies, Veolia Environnement (formerly Vivendi Environnement), Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Bechtel (USA), control a majority of private water concessions globally..
  • The Social Enterprise Development (SEND) Foundation in Ghana have criticised multi-national companies that are trying, using the “opportunity” of “food crisis”, to capture African agriculture through the so-called “Green Revolution” for Africa. FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) said that peasants have been evicted in several African countries so that palm oil can be produced from forests.
  • Arabica Robusta on 28 Jun 08
     
    there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
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