This is Yves. Yesterday we featured an article by Michael Hudson on how the United States used agriculture, particularly control of grain supplies, to strengthen its hegemony. Here we are witnessing another form of exploitation: wealthy interests acquiring productive land in low-income countries. Jomo cites data from 2008, but this practice was in operation well before that. I remember meeting a hedge fund manager around 2000, and his fund was buying farmland in Africa and Latin America.
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic Development. Originally published on Jomo’s website
Since 2008, acquisitions of agricultural land have doubled prices around the world, putting family farmers and other poor rural communities in a stranglehold. Such land grabs worsen inequality, poverty and food insecurity.
Squeeze the land and the farmers
A new IPES-Food report highlights land grabs (including for ostensibly “green” purposes), the financial means used and some important implications.
Powerful governments, financiers, speculators and agribusinesses are opportunistically taking control of more farmable land. The report notes that soaring food prices and the financial crash of 2007-2008 catalyzed more land acquisitions.
Quantitative easing and financialization after the 2008 global financial crisis enabled even more land grabbing. Investors, agribusinesses and even sovereign wealth funds have secured agricultural land around the world.
Agribusiness companies and other investors want land to generate more profits, urging governments to allow buyouts. Cultivable land is used for cash crops, natural resource extraction, mining, real estate and infrastructure development, and “green” projects, including biofuels.
Land scarcity has grown in unprecedented ways, with most large-scale deals diverting agricultural land from food production. Instead, environmentally damaging “industrial agriculture” has spread, worsening rural poverty and exodus.
The new rush for land has displaced small farmers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists and rural communities or eroded their access to land. This has worsened rural poverty, food insecurity and land inequality. The marginalization of local land users has made family farming less viable.
“Green grabs” involve governments and corporations taking over land for large-scale tree planting, biodiversity offsetting, carbon sequestration, conservation, biofuels and “hydrogen” projects. Green “. Demand for water and other resources also threatens food production.
The rush for land has recently slowed, but underlying pressures and trends persist. The pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the responses of governments and markets have revived alarmist talk about “food shortages”, justifying new drains.
Investing in dispossession
Agricultural investments increased tenfold between 2005 and 2018. In 2023, 960 investment funds specializing in food and agricultural assets held buildings worth more than 150 billion dollars.
Nearly 45% of all investments in farmland in 2018, worth $15 billion, were made by pension funds and insurance companies. Between 2005 and 2017, pension, insurance and endowment funds invested $45 billion worth of farmland.
Unsurprisingly, land prices have continued to rise for two decades in North America and three in Canada. During the period 2008-22, land prices have almost doubled worldwide, even tripling in Central and Eastern Europe!
Pension funds and other private investments farmland prices have doubled in the UK during the period 2010-15. More recently, investments in American farmland have doubled since the pandemic!
The largest 1 percent of farms in the world now own 70 percent of agricultural land. In Latin America, 55% of farms own only 3% of agricultural land!
More than half of the agricultural land thus obtained is intended for crops requiring water. While a fifth of large-scale land transactions claim to be “green”, 87% are in areas of high biodiversity!
Mining accounted for 14% of large-scale land transactions over the past decade.
Growing demand for rare earths and other essential minerals is driving mining on former agricultural lands, worsening environmental degradation and conflict.
Instead of protecting national, social or community interests, regulations appear to protect the guilty. The terms of these agreements often make the situation worse. For example, foreign companies successfully sued the Colombian government for trying to stop their large-scale mining project.
Grabbing green land
Some governments and large companies advocate compliance with environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. They invoke sustainability, including climate goals, to justify elitist conservation and carbon offset programs.
More than half government commitments to carbon reduction concern the lands of small farmers and indigenous peoples. “Green grabs” – aimed at carbon offsetting, biodiversity, conservation and biofuel projects – account for a fifth of large-scale land deals.
The government is committed to absorbing carbon dioxide from the land surface. 1.2 billion hectares, the equivalent of the world’s cultivated area! Despite modest climate benefits, problematic carbon offset markets are expected quadruple over the next seven yearsleading to even more land grabbing.
Carbon offset and biodiversity markets are driving such transactions, attracting major polluters to land markets. Oil giant Shell alone has committed more than $450 million to offset projects.
African lands grabbed
Land scarcity is global and affects different places differently. Land grabs have significantly affected sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, while land inequalities are widening in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Asia.
Susan Chomba and Million Belay has uncovered nearly a thousand large-scale land deals in Africa since 2000. Mozambique recorded 110, followed by Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
A few 25 million hectares involves Blue Carbon, run by a Dubai royal. The company bought rights to forests and agricultural land to sell carbon offsets. The land is owned by five English-speaking African governments, namely one-fifth Zimbabwe, one-tenth Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.
Large-scale land deals further expose indigenous and pastoral communities to increased risks. In Ethiopia, Ghana, and elsewhere, land sales have forced farmers to work on smaller, more fragmented plots, become wage earners, or migrate, compromising their ability to feed themselves and their families. communities and others.
African smallholders, pastoralists and indigenous communities have long protected their lands and biodiversity. However, most now have neither the rights nor the means to do this more effectively, let alone feed Africa and improve climate action. Thus, the climate crisis is being used against rural African communities.
