Brown Soul

The Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamamalakaya) and the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE) last month wanted lawmakers to investigate the lease of 400,000 hectares of land in Northern Luzon to Pacific Bio-Fields Corp. of Japan, a company based in the United Kingdom, for the production of coco-biodiesel for 50 years.

“While the government is begging for some 400 nursing and caregiving jobs in Japan, it is prostituting the patrimonial and sovereign rights of all Filipinos by offering the country’s 400,000 hectares of lands to Japanese transnational giants,” Pamalakaya national chairman Fernando Hicap lamented.
“This is very, very ridiculous, preposterous and totally insulting to the collective sentiment and national interest of the Filipino public,” he added.

Environment Secretary Lito Atienza on Saturday confirmed the existence of the agremeent, saying the government will lease over 400,000 hectares of land in Northern Luzon to Pacific Bio-Fields Corp. of Japan at “very, very affordable prices.”

One of the lingering effects of the food price crisis of 2007–08 on the world food system is the proliferating acquisition of farmland in developing countries by other countries seeking to ensure their food supplies. Increased pressures on natural resources, water scarcity, export restrictions imposed by major producers when food prices were high, and growing distrust in the functioning of regional and global markets have pushed countries short in land and water to find alternative means of producing food.

Rising Land Acquisition in Developing Countries

Food-importing countries with land and water constraints but rich in capital, such as the Gulf States, are at the forefront of new investments in farmland abroad. In addition, countries with large populations and food security concerns such as China, South Korea, and India are seeking opportunities to produce food overseas. These investments are targeted toward developing countries where production costs are much lower and where land and water are more abundant. Other factors that influence investments include geographic proximity and climatic conditions for preferred staple crops. In addition to acquiring land for food, many countries are seeking land for the production of biofuel crops.

Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

Global trends including high prices for oil and commodities, the biofuel boom and now the sweeping downturn are spurring import-reliant countries to take action to protect their sources of food.
China and South Korea, which are both short on arable land, and Middle Eastern nations flush with petrodollars, are driving the trend to sign up rights to swathes of territory in Asia and Africa.

In the Philippines, a series of high-profile deals has clashed with long-running demands for agrarian reform, including land redistribution.The Department of Agrarian Reform said in 2007 it was looking at large tracts of land for agribusiness development under a memorandum of understanding signed with China. The memo calls for the development of land to grow hybrid corn, rice and sorghum.

Because of protests, the Department of Agriculture suspended plans to allow China to use 1.24 million hectares of Philippine agricultural land.
“It will aggravate the problem of landlessness, the insufficiency of land for Filipino peasants,” Anakpawis party-list Rep. Rafael Mariano said of the land deals.

Qatar lease of RP land

However, the Philippine government is undeterred and during President Macapagal-Arroyo’s visit to Qatar in December, officials opened talks over the lease of at least 100,000 hectares of agricultural land to the emirate.

“Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab,” the Spain-based agricultural rights group Grain said in a recent report.
The group said that some deals were targeted at boosting food security by producing crops that would be sent back home for consumption, while others were to establish money-making plantations like palm oil and rubber.
“As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatized and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries,” it said.

Daewoo deal in Madagascar

In one of the biggest deals, South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics said in November it would invest about $6 billion to develop 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar—almost half the size of Belgium.
Daewoo plans to produce 4 million tons of corn and 500,000 tons of palm oil a year, most of which will be shipped out of impoverished Madagascar—where the World Food Program (WFP) still provides food relief.
Walden Bello of the Bangkok-based advocacy group Focus on the Global South said the looming global recession was not likely to halt the trend which he fears will worsen the lot of landless peasants.
Bello said that many of the deals were struck in dysfunctional and corruption-ridden nations.
“What we’re talking about is private parties using state contracts to enrich themselves,” he said. “It’s an intersection of corrupt governments and land-hungry nations.”

Kuwait loan for Cambodia
In Cambodia, where the WFP also supplies aid, oil-rich Kuwait in August granted a $546-million loan in return for crop production. Undersecretary of State Suos Yara said Cambodia was also in talks with Qatar, South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia over agricultural investments, including land concessions. But opposition lawmaker Son Chhay said he was suspicious about why a wealthy nation like Kuwait needed to lease land to grow rice rather than just import the grain.
“Cambodian farmers need the land,” he said, urging the government to limit the area under lease and ensure Cambodia was not plundered by foreign nations.

Serious danger

These land acquisitions have the potential to inject much needed investment into agriculture and rural areas in poor developing countries, but they also raise concerns about the impacts on poor local people, who risk losing access to and control over land on which they depend. Resource-hungry nations are snapping up huge tracts of agricultural land in poor Asian nations, in what activists say is a “land grab” that will worsen poverty and malnutrition.

It is crucial to ensure that these land deals, and the environment within which they take place, are designed in ways that will reduce the threats and facilitate the opportunities for all parties involved.
“Even though some of the land-lease agreements make provisions for investments in rural development, these deals may not be made on equal terms between the investors and local communities.

The bargaining power in negotiating these agreements is on the side of the foreign firm, especially when its aspirations are supported by the host state or local elites. Smallholders who are being displaced from their land cannot effectively negotiate terms favorable to them when dealing with such powerful national and international actors, nor can they enforce agreements if the foreign investor fails to provide promised jobs or local facilities. Thus, unequal power relations in the land acquisition deals can put the livelihoods of the poor at risk. This inequality in bargaining power is exacerbated when the smallholders whose land is being acquired for foreign investment projects have no formal title to the land, but have been using it under customary tenure arrangements. Since the state often formally owns the land, the poor run the risk of being pushed off the plot in favor of the investor, without consultation or compensation. Land is an inherently political issue across the globe, with land reform and land rights issues often leading to violent conflict. The addition of another actor competing for this scarce and contested resource can add to socio-political instability in developing countries.” According to INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Bello said he expected these sorts of deals to increase, forcing peasants from rural areas and into cities where together with the global downturn they will add to the ranks of the unemployed.
“It’s particularly explosive in those countries where you have a high degree of landlessness, like the Philippines where 7 out of every 10 rural people do not have access to land,” he said.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has sounded alarm over the loss of land in a country where in rural areas, every second child is malnourished and access to land for foraging of natural resources is critical.

source:

International Food Policy Research Institute
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Business Mirror

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