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KUALA LUMPUR: 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.
Global trends including high
prices for oil and commodities, the biofuels 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.
“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.
It 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.
Korean mega-project
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 in
Madagascar—almost half the size of Belgium.
Daewoo plans to produce four
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.
“We will build everything from
ports and railways to markets on a barren and untouched area,”
said Shin Dong-Hyun, general manager of the World Food Program’s
financing and strategic planning department.
Although commodity prices have
fallen from their highs earlier this year, resource-poor and heavily
populated countries are still concerned about securing long-term
supplies.
Bad for landless
Walden Bello, from Bangkok-based
advocacy group Focus on the Global South, said the looming global
recession is not likely to halt the trend which he fears would
worsen the lot of landless peasants.
“In a situation where global
agricultural production has become so volatile and unpredictable, I
would not be surprised if the Middle Eastern countries that are
engaged in this would continue to push on,” he told Agence France-Presse.
Bello said that many of the deals
were struck in dysfunctional and corruption-ridden nations, and
rejected claims the land being signed away is of poor quality, and
that the projects would bring jobs and improve infrastructure.
“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.”
Land concessions
In Cambodia, where the World Food
Program 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.
“If we do this work
successfully, we can get at least $3 billion from these agricultural
investments,” he said.
“With the [global financial]
crisis, this is a chance for Cambodia to look to the future by
pushing agriculture in order to attract foreign investments.”
But opposition lawmaker Son Chhay
said he was suspicious about why a wealthy nation like Kuwait needed
to lease land to grow rice rather then 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.
Philippine situation
In the Philippines, another
land-lease hotspot, a series of high-profile deals has clashed with
long-running demands for agrarian reform, including land
redistribution.
“It will aggravate the problem
of landlessness, the insufficiency of land for Filipino peasants,”
said congressman Rafael Mariano, who also heads the Peasants’
Movement of the Philippines (KMP).
But the Philippine government is
undeterred and during President Gloria 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.
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 seven out of 10 rural people do not have
access to land,” he said.
UN warning
In the impoverished and corrupt
dictatorship of Laos, some experts estimate that between two million
and three million hectares have been parceled off in a rampant and
uncontrolled process that has now been suspended by the government.
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.
“If the environment is changed,
with the trees cut and replaced with industrial crops,” said FAO
representative in Laos, Serge Verniau. “They can face serious
danger.”
--AFP
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