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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

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

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

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

Remarks to the World Food Prize Panel on "Stakeholders & synergies: Socio-economic dime... - 0 views

www.iatp.org/...ergies-socio-economic-dimensio

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels chappell

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, the power of these tools has been blunted. It has been blunted because science—which at its most basic is the careful and systematic study of the world around us, and the consistent testing of our ideas against reality—this wonderful and powerful process has been narrowed too often in discussions of food to mean technology. Technology is but one way to use science; it is only the tip of one particular tool that can be found in the powerful toolbox that is science.
  • Scientifically, these are two different things. We know that what is produced is not the same as how much actually goes to become food for people[1], but too often we forget this. Luckily, this is a place where the toolbox of science can help us, but only if we open it wider to use all of the tools—including social sciences like sociology, anthropology, ecological economics and political ecology.[2]
  • in India, as in many other places, this is tied to the legacies of monoculture, cash crops, and a lack of support for smallholder farmers, household equality, especially gender equality, and agrobiodiversity.[6]
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  • We’ve consistently seen that smallholder farmers very often produce more per unit area than larger farmers. Indeed, the observation is so common that it has been formally named the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity.
  • I think the same type of skepticism has quite often accompanied new innovations and new ideas. Skepticism, for example, about the usefulness of biotechnology, should not and has not stopped investigation of how it might be used.
  • We have to be brave enough to ask ourselves, especially about this Inverse Relationship and its implications, whether we may need to move away from large farms and invest more heavily in small farms.[7] We have to ask ourselves if our skepticism may reflect certain biases or a reluctance to engage against the current trends of agricultural consolidation—or whether it reflects the empirical reality, where this relationship is seen, again and again[8].
  • Too often, the diverse crops that smallholders rely on for stability, resilience, and nutritional diversity are defined as “women’s crops.” Traditional crops, and the fact that often they cannot easily be made into large-scale monocultures, can be both a strength and a weakness.
  • Well, estimates put the value of unmarketed ecosystem services at three times the size of the nominal world economic size.
  • And those farmers, especially larger-scale farmers, who make the rational decision to focus on producing only what they’re paid for—just making one crop, and a lot of it—are simply following a rational response in narrowing diversity, separating crops and livestock, and using energy-intensive and unsustainable levels of inputs.
  • We need to keep realizing that science does not simply mean production, and that production does not at all mean food security.
  • So if I am to conclude with one message, it is for us to remember that science is a powerful set of tools, but to use it we must learn about how to use all of its tools. Social, natural and technological—and we must expressly and purposefully use them to support small farmers, especially women farmers, and must never let “social” approaches be the second step in our conversations about feeding the world, but always—in line with the science—be at the forefront of our considerations.
Arabica Robusta

Local, conventional produce vs. imported, organic produce? - 4 views

What do you think is the lesser of two evils? Pesticides, or transporting produce all over the world?

food cooking politics

started by dave koch on 26 May 09 1 follow-up, last by Arabica Robusta on 11 Oct 09
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

Pambazuka - Oil-dependency and food: Livelihoods at risk - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...66792

petroleum industry development oil international extractive transparency curse resource food security foodsecurity agribusiness agriculture miles sovereignty

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Food sovereignty, the political project put forward by the international peasant movement Via Campesina, offers a promising road map.
  • Industrial agriculture may be more ‘efficient’ in terms of labour (output per worker), but its productivity is achieved through massive applications of fossil fuel-based inputs such as tractor fuel and agrochemicals. Small organic farms, however, are generally more efficient in terms of land (output per acre), since they grow a variety of plants and animals, taking full advantage of each ecological niche.
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

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 biofuels

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Neoliberal retrenchment has met growing resistance by those most affected by the crisis—the world’s smallholder farmers.
  • Clashes and declarations of protest at recent summits in Rome, Hokkaido, and Madrid, the growing public resistance to the industrial agrifood complex, and the rise, spread, and political convergence of movements for agroecology, land reform, food justice, and food sovereignty, all indicate that the food crisis has become the focal point in a class struggle over the future of our food systems.
  • The contradiction of increasing hunger in the midst of wealth and abundance sparked food riots, not seen for many decades. Protests in Mexico, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Egypt, Haiti, and twenty other countries were sparked by skyrocketing food prices.
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.
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