Land Grabs: the Coldplay version

Monday’s post had Rob Nash arguing that the World Bank has got itself into a tangle on land grabs. Now Coldplay have decided to add their rather more harmonious voice, with the help of crowd-sourced footage from 7000 supporters in 55 countries.

The Bank has promptly responded to Coldplay (not to Rob, sorry Rob) with a tweet ‘@WorldBank: .@coldplay protecting the rights of farmers worldwide is key to ending poverty. Learn more abt work on this front: http://ow.ly/hs448‘. So at least now, we have their attention.

I’d be interested in your views on this kind of popular/cultural campaigning.

Does the World Bank speak with forked tongue on Land Grabs?

Rob Nash, Oxfam’s Private Sector policy adviser, finds a deep contradiction in the way the World Bank talks (and acts) about land

Last week I was at the World Bank’s Land and Poverty Conference in Washington DC, sitting in one of the most luxuriously appointed office buildings I have ever seen, (and I used to work for Lehman Brothers), as we discussed the land issues that so critically affect many of the poorest people on our planet.

This week, this fine setting will play host to the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group, where land issues will also be a big focus for many of the assembled policymakers, academics, NGOs and private sector investors.

Land is a big deal for Oxfam. Last year at around this time, we published Risky Business, looking at the explosion in channelling development finance to private sector businesses indirectly, using so-called Financial Intermediaries (FIs) like banks and private equity funds. In the paper we identified some worrying characteristics of this arms-length financing – opacity, complexity, focus on financial returns over development impact, focus on financial risk over environmental and social risk, lack of oversight or ability to influence the business practices of investee companies, remoteness from the projects ultimately financed and the impacts they have on poor people. We worried that such poorly governed financing was fuelling land grabs.

Since then a lot has happened. Oxfam has been asking the World Bank to freeze its large agriculture investments until it puts in place measures to tackle the threat of land grabs. Pressure on the World Bank and IFC has increased as civil society organisations around the world have drawn attention to the plight of poor rural communities whose lives are turned upside-down by deals that infringe their rights and take away their land, many of which are backed by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) like the IFC.

And it isn’t just Oxfam and the NGO community raising concerns. An audit report from the CAO (the watchdog for the IFC) of IFC’s financial sector investments was made public in early 2013. It was measured in tone but quite devastating in its implications for IFC and for FI lending.

The report found that IFC is unable to track whether or not these investments are causing harm to poor people and the environment, let alone measure whether they bring development benefits. It found serious irregularities and compliance issues within the existing policies used by IFC, with many projects persistently failing to comply with the IFC’s standards. It found inadequate transparency, with at times a near-total absence of public access to information, which can make it impossible for communities to find out if the IFC is even involved in a project, much less know that they could access grievance and redress mechanisms through the CAO.

The response by the IFC to the audit failed to acknowledge the gravity of the issues raised or to commit to properly addressing them. As a result, a large number of CSOs have written to the leadership of the World Bank Group calling for it to put its financial house in order.

Which is particularly striking given that, back at the Land and Poverty Conference, the transparency and accountability of land deals has been a major theme of presentations and discussions. Speaker after speaker stressed (to general agreement) that land acquisition deals must be subject to the consultation and consent of communities affected, must be based on a good understanding of the local context in terms of food security and existing use of resources like water and land, and must actively seek business models that contribute to improving the livelihoods of local communities and create opportunities and incentives for shared prosperity.

This welcome recognition is backed by the statement just released by World Bank President Jim Kim, acknowledging that land grabbing is a serious risk, that the World Bank has a vital role to play in tackling land grabs, and that it could look at its own practices and safeguards as well as committing to support the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure (VGs) and new principles for responsible agriculture investment, which are essential to protect communities’ rights. For more background see this post from Oxfam’s Hannah Stoddart.

But the conference discussions often overlooked the use of FI lending. And although the World Bank statement makes some broad remarks about transparency and due diligence for FI lending, it ignores the very serious issues raised by the CAO audit.

Washington, we have a problem. Looks like we have two very different World Banks on land grabs. So who do we believe, Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde?  Interms of hard cash, the IFC increasingly dominates. There has been a surge in the channelling of development finance to the private sector through FIs in recent years, from IFC and other DFIs. In 2011, 40% of IFC’s portfolio was made up of lending through FIs. That proportion continues to grow as IFC itself takes up an ever-bigger share of the World Bank Group funding pie (annual reports indicate IFC matches the IBRD at around $20 billion of commitments made in 2012).

In terms of public policy, we’re starting to see a lot of good progress in acknowledging the key issues of transparency and accountability and remedy, so the contradictory shift towards FI lending is a big issue for those concerned about land grabs. But it goes deeper than that, touching on the way in which publicly-backed development finance institutions like the IFC perform their role. Is it sufficient for the World Bank and IFC to pursue a narrow agenda of growth (economic growth generally or growth in private sector investment) under the assumption that benefits will trickle down to the poorest or, should they instead pay attention to the quality of that growth and investment? That means acting in part like a public body, actively seeking to ensure its intended beneficiaries are not in fact harmed, that it supports projects and influences policy in a way that upholds peoples’ fundamental rights (including to food, land and water), and targets scarce resources to investments in projects where there will be a clear and shared benefit to local communities (especially marginalised groups and women) and national development priorities as well as financial returns for the recipients of finance.

Ultimately, when it lends public money to FIs, is the IFC just a bank, or is it a development finance institution?

After all, from where I am sitting, as a former banker myself – if it looks like a bank, walks like a bank, and talks like a bank, the chances are… it’s just a bank.

What’s the link between land grabs, trade rules and climate change? Good new briefing from Sophia Murphy

You can rely on Sophia Murphy for crisp, credible analyses of agricultural trade and food issues. Her latest paper, Land Grabs and Fragile Food Systems, is up to her usual standard. She locates the current row over land grabs in some broader debates that have rather fallen off the agenda, namely globalization and trade rules. Made me come over all nostalgic for the WTO-bashing of yesteryear.

Sophia argues that the globalization and the free trade agreements of the last 20 years have combined with fears over climate change to create the conditions for the current wave of land grabs. But the immediate trigger was the 2008 food price spike, which eroded the confidence of food-importing countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that they could rely on the trading system to feed their people (so many of them started grabbing land instead).

The problem with the WTO is that its insistence on removing import tariffs (which we campaigned on when prices were low) was not matched by any effort to discipline export controls, making it completely irrelevant when prices rose and exporting countries slapped on export taxes to try and keep the food at home, thereby compounding the price spike. Sophia also takes a swing at the WTO’s inability/unwillingness to do anything about corporate concentration in the food sector. When the price spike hit ‘the four companies that between them control an estimated 75 percent or more of the inter­national grain trade saw their profits soar.’

Failures in other areas have aggravated the problem. Food reserves have been run down, biofuels have added a new degree of uncertainty by tying food prices to those of oil and gas (when fossil fuel prices rise, more land gets turned over to biofuels, so less food is produced, so food prices rise). Climate change, both current and rapidly approaching, has only added to that sense of vulnerability on food security.

How to reduce the pressures that are driving the wave of land grabs? The report has a rather convincing policy shopping list arising from this analysis:

• Reformed trade rules that ensure export measures are subject to transparency and predictability requirements and that allow all countries policy space for food security policies. She also proposes ways to ease food price spikes by reducing biofuel production during price surges
• Publicly-managed grain reserves to dampen the effects of supply shocks
• Readily accessible funding for the poorest food importers, which would be triggered automatically when prices increase sharply in international markets
• The development of strong national and international laws to govern investment in land, respecting the principles and guidelines set out in the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure. Tanzania’s recently announced limits on how much land foreign and domestic investors can lease is a hopeful example of a national government taking the initiative to get serious about regulation.

At 12 pages, a very useful addition to the land grabs literature. And in case you missed it here’s what the fuss is about.

Bad Governance leads to bad land deals – the link between politics and land grabs

Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right) and Marloes Nicholls (left) crunch the numbers to find that big land investments sniff out countries with ‘weak governance’ – aka no accountability, no regulation, no rule of law, and a green light for corruption.

If you had bags full of money and wanted to buy land, where would you go for a good deal? If you’re only looking for ways to make a good profit and control your risk exposure, surely you would look for a place where you can influence the terms of the deal. This is the intuition behind the analysis published yesterday by Oxfam

The results of this analysis show that the global rush for land is mostly taking place in countries with weak governance.  We analysed the link between national governance and large scale agricultural land deals by combining information from two important databases – the Land Matrix[i] and the World Governance Indicator (WGI) Project. To do this, we cross referenced Information on over 200 countries and territories from the two databases. Using the Land Matrix we aggregated the total number of deals reported in each country and their average size; from the WGI, we used estimates of Voice and Accountability, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. Once the two databases were merged, we analysed the link between the countries where large-scale land deals were – or were not – taking place and the four governance indicators for the period 2000 – 2011.

The results reveal a strong and significant link between land deals and weak governance. The majority (78%) of the 56 countries where land deals are taking place have below average WGI, and on average the pool of countries where land deals take place have 30% lower indicators than those without. These results are consistent over time.

A quick comparison between two countries shows that the land availability does not appear to be a significant factor in investment decisions. Guatemala, which scores below average on all four World Bank Governance indicators, has seen an estimated 87,000 hectares of land under deals between 2000 and 2011 despite high levels of hunger and malnutrition in rural areas. This is in stark contrast with Botswana which has a similar area of arable land per person (.11 and .13 hectares per person in Guatemala and Botswana, respectively) but which scored well above the average on World Bank governance indicators and did not record a single large-scale land deal in this period.

These results are hardly surprising. Other studies have found similar results. Researchers at the IMF ( here and here), using a different database and methodology, have previously found that “countries with weak land sector governance are the ones most attractive to investors – at least as gauged by the number of land-related investments.” They suggest that investors might pick countries with weak governance because “it is easier to obtain land quickly and at low cost where the existing protection of land rights is weak, given that public protection may not matter to investors who can muster their own resources to defend their property rights.” Research by the World Bank found that deals were often formulated for the benefit of investors rather than the countries involved. They report that “in many cases the nature and location of lands transferred and the ways such transfers are implemented are rather ad hoc – based more on investor demands than on strategic considerations.”

Why Might Weak Governance be Good for Business?

The story behind land deals and weak governance is one of power imbalance and destitution. It’s a story where the interests of local communities are set aside to promote the interest of large investors.

There are usually three actors in any land deal – the investor, the local community who owns or uses the land and the government.  The national government often acts as the intermediary (in wonk parlance, the government is the agent for the local community or the citizens, who are the principals). Weak governance – which basically reflects a gap between the interest of citizens and governments – enables investors to sidestep costly and time consuming rules and regulations, which for example, might require them to consult with affected communities. In countries where people are denied voice, where business regulations are weak or non-existent, or where corruption is out of control it might be easier for investors to design the rules of the game to suit themselves.

This analysis is only the first step towards a more in depth research project. Next steps include a more in depth analysis on the determinants of the number and location of deals (a double-hurdle estimation? suggestions appreciated from econometricians out there). We will also look at the geographical distribution of deals within countries to see if there is a link between the location of land deals in countries and socioeconomic indicators in those areas.

Land is such an important element of millions of people around the world that any issue related to use, access and ownership of it should be carefully analyzed. Agricultural investment is sorely needed but it should not be at the expense of people’s rights and access to land. There are potentially catastrophic implications of bad land deals. Poor accountability and regulation only means that people affected by land deals have fewer tools to defend their livelihoods and rights.

And if this all sounds a bit abstract, here’s what we’re talking about

Why the World Bank is wrong (so far) on large land deals

You’re getting a lot of guest posts this week, not least because I’m in India – expect a spate of India posts next week. Here’s Hannah Stoddart, Oxfam’s Head of Economic Justice Policy, responding to the World Bank’s response to Oxfam’s call for a freeze on large land deals.

Oxfam’s land grabs campaign, launched on 4^th October, highlights the alarming increase in the speed and scale of large land deals in the past decade. It calls on the World Bank – as an investor in land deals, as a global standard setter and as an adviser to developing countries on their land policies – to freeze those of its agricultural investments that involve large land deals for 6 months while it reviews its policies and practices to ensure land grabs are prevented.

The World Bank has responded through official statements, blogs and interventions on panels. Here’s Oxfam’s response to some of the Bank’s main counter-arguments:

• Extent of World Bank involvement in land-grabbing

Some at the World Bank have suggested that it is not the right target – it is only involved in a ‘few cases’ that could potentially constitute land grabs and at any rate it is not as bad as most other investors. Oxfam stands by its focus on the Bank for a number of reasons. First, given the Bank’s mandate for poverty alleviation, even one land-grab case is a case too many.

Secondly, in reality we know that there are very likely more than a few controversial cases relating to land. 21 cases involving land disputes have been brought by communities since 2008 (Oxfam is involved as a complainant in a number of them). We also know that between 2000 – 2012, 56% of the complaints to the Compliance Adviser Ombudsman (CAO) have been in relation to land. The CAO also confirms that in the past 4 years there has been a growing number of complaints in relation to agri-business.

Lastly, while the World Bank may not the worst culprit when it comes to land-grabbing, it IS the only global bank with a mandate for poverty alleviation and it is a crucial institution for setting the bar high in this area. In other words, we believe that if Oxfam can’t convince the World Bank to raise its standards, we have no hope of getting other financing institutions to do so. If the Bank takes leadership, we hope we can leverage change in other institutions as a result, from regional development banks to private investors.

• World Bank’s role in agriculture

In reaction to our call for an investment freeze, the World Bank contends that it has increased its agricultural investments precisely in response to calls from organizations such as Oxfam for it to focus on a sector that has been neglected for too long. It argues that to suspend its agricultural investments – which overwhelmingly benefit smallholders – will only end up harming the very people that Oxfam seeks to support.

In response, we have never argued – and never will – that the World Bank should not be investing in agriculture. We welcome increased investment in agriculture by the Bank that genuinely benefits smallholders. This is why we are not arguing that the Bank should get out of agriculture altogether. And this is also why we are not calling for a freeze of all agricultural investments, but for a temporary 6 month freeze on agricultural investments that involve large-scale land acquisition – which the Bank acknowledges is not the majority of its investment portfolio. To put it another way, we’re invoking the precautionary principle – something the Bank has done itself in the past when it froze lending to the palm oil sector as a result of a controversial case in Indonesia.

As the World Bank’s investment in agriculture has increased from $2.5 billion in 2002 to $6-8 billion in 2012, the risk of some of these investments involving problematic land acquisition is heightened (for the record, this figure was misquoted by some media as being up to $8 billion in land investments, Oxfam has always been clear that the overall figure is for agriculture more broadly, some of which will involve land acquisition).

We welcome models of agricultural investment – both large-scale and small – that benefit communities and genuinely lead to shared benefits based on consultation and consent. We have recently published a paper outlining models of positive agricultural investment, and Oxfam GB CEO Barbara Stocking reiterated this message recently in the Financial Times. What we oppose is a model of agricultural investment that involves the mass transfer of land rights away from poor farmers and communities, a model that  frequently leads to conflict and for which there is very little evidence of pro-poor outcomes.

• Transparency

The Bank has suggested that it is a leader in the area of transparency. While Oxfam agrees that it has made great advances over the years, we feel that there are still some real areas of concern. First, we can’t even tell the full extent of the Bank’s investment in this area: there is no clarity on the overall size of its land portfolio. For an institution that rightly prides itself on the huge advances it has made in making  its data accessible, this is disappointing.

Second, 17 of the 21 complaints involving land raise issues relating to inadequate transparency. Third, over 50% of lending through the International Finance Corporation (the private sector lending arm of the World Bank) is channeled through financial intermediaries: these investments are far more opaque, and these bodies are also not subject to the same standards as the World Bank. And it makes it almost impossible for Oxfam to judge whether the Bank’s claim is true that ‘only 2% of IFC agribusiness loans in the past financial year involved land acquisition’. Furthermore, the trend towards new lending instruments and technical assistance makes it far more difficult to hold the World Bank accountable for cases where it might not have directly funded a project that results in controversy, but has provided the advice that made it possible.

So if the Bank wants to know #whatwillittake to end poverty, Oxfam thinks taking leadership on stopping land grabs is a great place to start.

Hannah Stoddart is Head of Economic Justice Policy at Oxfam GB

Why the World Bank should declare a freeze on big land deals

‘Buy land. They’re not making it any more.’ Around the world, a lot of investors are taking Mark Twain’s advice to heart, and the resulting

land rush is doing an awful lot of damage. A hard-hitting, killer fact-tastic Oxfam briefing written by my colleague Kate Geary published today summarizes the stats (as far as we know them).

• In the past decade, an area eight times the size of the UK (203m hectares) has been sold off or leased out globally.
• The land acquired between 2000 and 2010 has the potential to feed a billion people, equivalent to the number of people who currently go to bed hungry each night (Oxfam calculation, all explained in footnotes).
• Two-thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem.
• Two-thirds of foreign land investors in developing countries intend to export everything they produce on the land.
• According to the IMF, most of the land being sold off is in the poorest countries with the weakest protection of people’s land rights.

Once the land has been given away, it becomes a much harder and potentially nastier battle to take it back. The danger is that when the dust settles on this property rights freezing frenzy, millions of people will have l2ost access to land, countries will be saddled with bad deals, and investors will face a resentful population and a legal quagmire. So Oxfam is arguing that we need a freeze on investments involving large-scale land deals while we sort out the mess.

The organization we want to lead this is the World Bank, whose role its new president Jim Kim is currently reviewing. The Bank is the preeminent global development institution, and is ideally placed to send a big signal to governments and investors.

According to its critics, the Bank is also part of the land deal problem. Its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has an official complaints mechanism known as the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO). This has seen its case-load triple in the past two years, while in the decade to 2010 over 60 per cent of cases that it assessed related to land conflicts. Oxfam is a co-signatory to three formal land-related complaints to the Bank, one in Indonesia and two in Uganda – here and here.

Moreover, through its advisory services, the IFC encourages governments to streamline and consolidate investment-related policies and activities – in essence to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for investors. Recently, the Bank’s Investment Climate Advisory Services helped to create or support investment promotion agencies (IPAs) in Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, Senegal, Zambia and Tanzania, among others. In

Tanzania’s case, its IPA is mandated to identify and provide ‘available’ land to investors and to set up a ‘land bank’ of some 2.5 million hectares considered suitable for investment. That might all make sense in a well-governed land market, but is not helping if it smoothes the path of the current land rush.

But whatever the views on ‘Bank as problem’, it can most definitely be part of the solution. Its influence is huge, not just through its own actions, but its role in setting standards for other donors and investors. So Oxfam is asking it to declare a 6 month freeze, a time out during which it should review the World Bank Group’s investments, publicly support and help implement the catchily-titled ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Land Tenure’ and lobby other investors to follow suit, overhaul its investment procedures and revise the kinds of advice it is giving to developing country governments.

Over to you Jim Kim

P.S. If you’re in Oxford this evening with nothing better to do, come to Blackwells for 7pm, grab a glass of cheap wine and help me launch the second edition of From Poverty to Power. Details here.

The Hunger Grains: new research shows EU biofuel policies drive food prices and land grabs

Oxfam economic policy adviser Ruth Kelly (right) unveils her new paper, published today, on a really simple, bad policy that rich countries can fix – biofuels.

The past five years have seen two record spikes in the price of food; and prices are rising again, with corn and soy hitting record highs in summer 2012. There is intense disagreement about what causes food price spikes and how to address them, and this often gives rise to confusion and inaction. But, unusually, there is one thing most experts agree on: scrapping biofuel policies would make a real difference. In June 2011, ten international organisations were so convinced of this fact that they made an unprecedented call for G20 governments to scrap biofuel policies. Last week, the European Commission and the French government finally woke up to the fact that it is simply unacceptable to burn food while millions around the world go hungry.

In 2009 EU governments agreed that by 2020 all ground transport fuel sold in the EU would contain about 9 parts biofuel to every 91 parts petrol or diesel. In a new report published in advance of today’s meeting of EU Energy Ministers to discuss renewable energy, Oxfam shows that EU biofuel mandates are inextricably connected to hunger and land grabs in developing countries. Modelling by the UK government suggests that suspending the EU biofuel mandate in 2018 could reduce international price spikes by up to 35 percent. And that is just the impact that is relatively easy to model. A drop in local or regional food production has a much greater impact than international commodity prices on retail prices, especially in regions that are relatively isolated from international markets, like sub-Saharan Africa. As biofuel production displaces local, national and regional food production, not only do people have to buy the food they would otherwise have grown, but there is less for sale; increased demand and reduced supply push up local prices.

The leaked European Commission proposal is welcome in so far as it recognises, for the first time, that EU biofuel mandates exacerbate both climate change and hunger. But, as the proposal stands, it is no solution and could in fact make matters worse. At the moment about 4.5 percent of ground transport fuel used in the EU is made up of biofuels, of which about 90 percent comes from food crops. Not only would the Commission proposal increase that amount to 5 percent, but it would allow biofuel made from non-food crops to make up the difference – which uses up scarce resources of land, water and soil when they should be used to produce much-needed food.

According to Oxfam’s calculations, the land used to produce the biofuels used in the EU in 2008 has the potential to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 127 million people. As the proportion of biofuel in our petrol and diesel rises, so does the amount of land it gobbles up. Most land deals happen in the poorest countries with the weakest protection of people’s land rights, according to the IMF and World Bank; economic regressions show that other variables, like availability of land and ranking on the Doing Business indicators, are simply irrelevant. Affected communities rarely have a say, and women are the least likely to be consulted even though they are often the most seriously affected. The overwhelming consensus from research on the welfare impact of large-scale biofuel production shows that benefits are reaped by a small elite. As research from Indonesia concludes, ‘there are some winners but many losers’.

EU governments have it within their power to make a difference to the lives of millions of hungry people. It is completely unacceptable that we are burning food in our petrol tanks while poor families go hungry and millions are being pushed off their land. Fighting hunger has never been so simple: it’s time to scrap the mandates.

Ruth Kelly is an economic policy adviser for Oxfam

Cambodia: community forestry v land grabs is more complicated than I thought

An edited version of this post appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters blog yesterday

Last week in Cambodia, some questions on forestry and development came into sharp relief. I visited a region where Oxfam’s local partners are helping local indigenous people develop community forestry and resist the encroachment of foreign companies (as well as Cambodian ones, and the odd party or army boss) intent on logging the native forest and replacing it with rubber plantations. I expected a black-and-white case but, as so often happens, found a much more complex picture. If you prefer your discussion of development restricted to goodies v baddies, better stop reading now.

First the community forestry: the village of O Preah in Kratie province (northeastern Cambodia) is home to 67 families of the Phnong

Hea Samoeun and family

indigenous group who have set up a rather successful Community Resin Association. They tap resin from 3 species of local trees and sell it to varnish and paint producers in Cambodia and neighbouring countries, and since they formed a producer association to market collectively, things have been going well.

Until now. We met Hea Samoeun, chief of the resin collectors, on the veranda of his well-built wooden house on stilts (see pic), above a jumble of 5 gallon drums emitting the pungent perfume of the resin. His account of the conflict was quietly angry:

‘Dong Nai/Dong Pu (a Vietnamese company) has been trying to invade our land since June 2009. We tried to talk to the Commune Council, but they just told us to get jobs on the plantations. I think someone’s bribed them – why else would they support the company? We don’t want to work for the company – resin collecting is what we have done for years. The company tried to negotiate by offering us $3 a tree, but if we agree they will cut down everything, so the community said no. They came back and offered us $200 per family and some land for 2 years for 7 families, or jobs on the rubber plantation, but we still said no.  Why?  Because in one day we can earn maybe $12 from collecting resin and still have time for fishing. The company pays you $3.50 and you work from morning to night.’

Dong Nai/Dong Pu was granted the land under the Cambodian government’s recent ‘Economic Land Concessions’ law – large parcels of land are handed out to investors, usually foreign, for logging and industrial agriculture. The problem here is that the ELC overlaps with the community forest, whose resin trees are also protected by law. But land titles have only been introduced in Cambodia in the last decade (previously all land belonged to the government), so the land rights of Mr Samoeun (as with most Cambodian farmers) are legally murky.

And here’s where the politics and power kick in. The law is only part of the story, and sometimes it seems a fairly minor part (although Mr Samoeun shows us his carefully filed legal complaint, adorned by 67 red ink thumbprints from the largely illiterate villagers). Mr Samoeun again:

‘We’ve met them a few times – they have a Khmer-speaking Vietnamese rep – and they said nicely, but with a warning tone, that this is company land and they will continue logging. But it is illegal under the land law to log resin trees – the Forestry Administration tells us it should be up to 5 years in jail for cutting down a single tree. The government claims the community agreed to give up the land, but has never shown us any document (and the law says it should be published).’

The two sides are currently at a stand-off: when the community went to the forest to protest, the company stopped logging, but only after it had cut down 1,400 of their 3,400 resin trees. The concern now is that they and their allies in government are just waiting for the 2013 elections to be over and the nursery rubber trees to be ready for planting, and then the logging will resume.

Next Mr Samoeun summoned a local car and we headed out down the dirt track to the ELC, past a rudimentary road block and even more rudimentary security. We got to the ELC and the contrast couldn’t be clearer (see pics) – blackened stumps of logged resin trees on a grass plain awaiting planting right next to the tumultuous diversity of the remaining forest, with a single forlorn ‘protect the forest’ sign nailed to one of the trees. I dip my fingers in a resin hole of one of the remaining trees and the intense perfume accompanies me for hours.

So far, so black and white. But wait. On the way back, we pass dozens of neat rows of worker housing and a clinic, all built by the company. The rubber plantation will provide jobs for 20 times (maybe more) as many people as currently make a living from resin collecting – poor Cambodians migrating into the forest from the lowlands. After all, rubber tapping is just a form of organized resin collection. Provided wages and conditions are acceptable, isn’t that development too? The compensation that Dong Nai/Dong Pu offered was better than in many similar situations elsewhere in Cambodia and the company stopped logging at the first protest – that’s not what we’ve seen in far bloodier land grabs in Uganda and elsewhere. One local NGO even holds them out as a model of good practice.

Cambodian activists counter that the plantation jobs are badly paid, and will go to incomers from the lowlands rather than locals (so what?); that the loss of biodiversity and other ‘environmental services’ (don’t you hate that term?) is an issue; that indigenous people do badly when they migrate from their home village. Apples and pears – culture and economics; economic rights v indigenous rights v human rights (all supposedly indivisible). If the process was fair and transparent, it might be possible to argue out the pros and cons, but politics, power and corruption obscure and skew every decision.

As for Mr Samoeun and his people, it’s incredibly hard to see a successful outcome other than dogged resistance + fingers crossed. Formal laws and politics are often a shadow play, while the decisions come from informal and unaccountable power and money.

Can we make a convincing business case for a different approach, and would investors even listen? Could a pro-poor investor make a decent profit and pay decent wages (e.g. for rubber), or buy their products from smallholders (with government or NGO support, as we are currently doing in several countries with Unilever)? And would officials support such an effort (especially if it extended to not paying bribes)? Our outgoing country director thinks this is (one) way forward. NGOs have made some progress on other value chains, e.g. pharmaceuticals, garments or supermarkets, by being propositional and working with progressive businesses to develop the business case. Might it work for forests too?

Like I said, a much more complicated picture than I was expecting – what have I missed?

The latest (big) numbers on land grabs, and some powerful case studies

Oxfam adds its voice to the growing clamour about land grabs with two new reports out today. Land and Power: The Growing Scandal Surrounding the New Wave of Investments in Land pulls together some fascinating (and sometimes shocking) case studies from South Sudan, Uganda, Indonesia, Honduras and Guatemala, and adds up some big new global numbers. The New Forests Company and its Uganda Plantations goes into more detail on one of the case studies.

First the big number: the Land Matrix Partnership, a coalition of NGOs, academics and donors, has come up with a ceiling figure of 227m hectares (the size of Western Europe, 10x the UK) for the total area affected over the last 10 years. Big pinch of salt required – finding out exactly how much land has changed hands is incredibly difficult due to the lack of transparency and secrecy that often surrounds the deals. The 227 million figure is based on information on land deals from a whole range of different sources including government reports, academic research, company websites, international finance institutions media reports and the few contracts that are publicly available. My understanding is that this builds on the methodology used by other players like the World Bank, which came up with a 56m hectare figure in 2009, for deals over the 11 months to August 2009.

Due to all the different sources, with different company names and subsidiaries used, and different levels of information provided, there is bound to be some double counting or proposals that never materialised, (but also, no doubt, a bunch of deals we didn’t catch). So we are working through it all and cross-checking the data, but with over 2000 land deals this takes time. We’re up to 67 million hectares so far. I’ll keep you posted on where we get to.…

The case studies each contain different experiences and lessons. In Uganda, over 20,000 people have been evicted, many (and we talked to several hundred of them) claiming it was done violently, to make way for a forestry project of the UK-based New Forests Company.  The evictions were carried out by the government (although locals claimed they recognized NFC employees). NFC is saying the villagers were illegally on the land, they have received no reports of the use of violence, and take refuge in two independent endorsements of one of the plantations – certification by the Forestry Stewardship Council and a field assessment by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

This raises important issues for even the best-intentioned investors – in many developing countries systems of formal and customary law coexist, and both need to be taken seriously – some of those evicted say they have been living on the land for 40 years or more. And the huge edifice constructed around sustainability, climate change and carbon sequestration (in this case involving both the FSC and the Clean Development Mechanism) really needs to be overhauled to make sure that if they are displaced, the people already living on the land exercise their right to Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), get proper compensation, and are found alternative livelihoods. None of that seems to be happening in the case in Uganda.

Palm oil-based biofuels is emerging as a driver of some nasty land grabs, and the Indonesia case looks at the role of a Malaysian/Indonesian joint venture company named PT MAS (subsidiary of palm oil giant Sime Darby), which is alleged to have backtracked on promises of land and investments to displaced communities. We found similar things going on in South Sudan, Honduras and Guatemala (eviction pictured here).

Overall, what emerges is a mess. Dodgy authorities, whether local or national, out for a quick buck; investors all too willing to turn a blind eye and be content with box-ticking and legalistic excuses; land lying idle despite promises to turn into a productive marvel; land tenure systems that are murky and offer little defense to poor communities; legal systems that are inaccessible to poor farmers. But in a few cases, civil society protest and/or action by the authorities seems to be correcting some of the worst excesses, which at least gives grounds for hope.

Agricultural investment can be a real boon to poor farmers, but not if it’s done like this. The balance of power has to be shifted to local communities, who need a much greater say (through FPIC) in what happens to their land. Host country governments need to clean up their act and be much more transparent about the deals being negotiated; the home country governments of the investors need to do more on regulation and disclosure and drop their daft biofuels mandates, which are contributing to the scramble; investors need to stop looking for excuses and follow the example of other sectors such as garments or supermarkets in accepting responsibility for the whole supply chain, not just the bit they directly own (we used to hear these kinds of denials from the shoe and clothing companies ten years ago – not any more).

Public campaigning played a big role in shifting the clothes companies and needs to get behind campaigns on land grabs too. That example does at least offer hope – the land deals are a short-term response, but high prices are probably here to stay, so the more we can do to civilize big agriculture investments  and turn them into drivers of development, rather than misery, the better.

Maasai v investors in Ngorongoro, Tanzania: guest post by Jane Lonsdale

Ngorongoro district in Tanzania, home to the famous Ngorongoro crater and bordering the Serengeti national park, must surely be one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. Maybe this explains its hotly contested land disputes.  Everyone seems to want a piece of it, but those in danger of being left without are the indigenous Maasai tribe, often used as a lucrative Tanzanian tourism symbol. For now, they are just about hanging onto their land amidst numerous attempted land grabs. The question is, are they ready and able to defend it?

In the midst of current global debates on land grabs by biofuels and agribusiness corporations, driven by record food and fuel prices, it’s easy to overlook the more run of the mill land grabs by hunting companies and mining corporations.  In the name of investment, these can leave thousands without homes and livelihoods, and with no alternative on offer. In this one district, home to about 170,000 people, there are currently no less than six natural resource conflicts and three ongoing court cases. 

During a peak in the land crises, an eviction took place in July 2009 leaving nearly 2000 people homeless. Two of the most infamous land conflicts are with Emirates hunting company Ortello Business Corporation and American-owned Thomson Safaris Ltd.  Ngorongoro resources are further complicated by the needs of the natural wildlife and ecosystems, including the iconic annual wildebeest migration, with which the Maasai have been co-existing for centuries in the often harsh and drought-prone lands. 

Aside from the land grabs by companies, proposed legislation to introduce a wildlife corridor in Ngorongoro district could result in around 20,000 people being evicted from 8 villages and massive cuts to the prime cattle grazing lands together with reduced access to water resources. If the plans go ahead, only one sixth of the district’s land will remain for the pastoralists, who make up 80% of the Ngorongoro population, and this land would be in the particularly drought-prone plains, where the wildebeest deliver and raise their young from December to March, thus preventing pastoralists’ access for this period and leaving behind bare pastures for the livestock. Excellent briefs by local NGO Tanzania Natural Resource Forum provide the full low-down on the recent history, current situation and possible policy options.

You might think that in the face of such seemingly insurmountable pressures from so many directions, the people would just give up and accept eviction. Instead, the Maasai are beginning to stand up for their rights and seek the support of their fellow (non-pastoralist) Tanzanians. Women are at the forefront, even though they are traditionally marginalised and silent in pastoralist cultures.  Following the evictions in July 2009, 600 Maasai women marched to the local government offices to hand in over 1800 political party membership cards – theirs and their neighbours’ – in protest.  Communities recently came out in their thousands to attend village assembly meetings where they voiced their views in no uncertain terms – check out this powerful 7 minute clip of the pastoralists in action.

The clearest sign that things are changing is the behaviour of the local councillors. Previously acting against the wishes of the communities they were elected to serve, they are now supporting communities, speaking out in favour of protecting the rights of the residents, and acting as a united body, together with local civil society organisations, to withstand significant pressure from above.

This hasn’t been easy; the people have had to fight hard for the opportunity to hold village meetings and express their views. Local CSOs have been harassed and arrested for their role in helping residents raise their voices. When the councillors first attempted to give their views in public through a press conference, they received so much pressure and intimidation to keep the issues quiet that they abandoned the idea. Yet with the support and backing of their communities the councillors tried again a couple of months later and succeeded.

The people remain in limbo over their future; according to one elder from Ololosokwan village, known as Yohana: ‘how can we think of

Village Assembly Meeting in Arash village lobbying officials on proposed Land Use Plans

bettering ourselves when we are too worried about the proposed wildlife corridor, if we lose our land we will give up on life’.

Activism has triggered wider change. The plea by local CSOs for support has led to regional and national CSOs starting to work together.  The communities are now actively seeking knowledge and information on the laws and policies affecting them in an effort to take control of their situation. And the Ngorongoro women, encouraged by their actions to speak out, have started to stand for leadership positions, with the first woman councillor elected in her own right in 2010.

These actions may not seem particularly remarkable to those used to the levels of active citizenship to be found in regions such as Latin America. But in Tanzania, coming from a recent history of state socialism and a culture of deference to authority, these small acts of courage represent one example of people beginning to realise their rights and standing firm to defend them. Time will tell whether the people can protect their land and continue to earn their livelihoods on their own terms.

Jane Lonsdale is Governance Programme Co-ordinator for Oxfam in Tanzania