The fight against “new wave” landgrabs

💡 The current global food crisis is turning out to be a double-whammy for farmers and rural peoples—pushing landlessness and hunger crises at the forefront.

💡 The same conditions where the 2008 land rush arose are back, with “new” impetus from greenwashing schemes touted by the corporate-led UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) last year.

💡 Green grabs happen in direct and indirect ways, but all lead to peasant dispossession and rural destitution.

💡 The onslaught of the COVID-era land rush is tied with the rise in militarism and fascism in the Global South.

💡 Imperialism, neocolonialism, and vestiges of feudalism remain the greatest challenge to the radical transformation of food systems.

 

We are amid a nexus of global food, climate, and humanitarian crises, and transnational corporations (TNCs) are sieging peasant communities for their land, dignity, and future.

Food prices have been hitting all-time highs month after month in the past two years. In fact, recent estimates suggest that the real prices—actual price compared to people’s capacity to buy them—are at their highest now than at any other time in modern history.

And the fallout is catastrophic, especially for the rural poor. People today are more likely to die from hunger than from the coronavirus.

Hunger has been on the rise even before the pandemic, with one in nine people globally experiencing going to bed on an empty stomach. The current neoliberal food system has not only failed to eradicate hunger but has worked against the food producers and the most vulnerable.

Ironically, most of those who experience hunger are the food producers themselves—landless peasants, rural women, smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, agricultural workers, Dalits, and pastoralists.

The global rise in land inequality, land concentration in the hands of the wealthy, and landlessness have made rural food producers the most vulnerable to hunger, food price shocks, conflict, and poverty. Over two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor are small farmers, agricultural workers, and landless peasants.

Smallholder farmers account for 84% of all farms worldwide yet operate only around 12% of all agricultural land. Meanwhile, landlords—owning the largest 1% of farms in size—operate over 70% of the global farmland. This increasing inequality results in rural demise and a rise in landlessness among farmers.

Land in the hands of TNCs and landlords is not only a threat to the lives and livelihood of farmers but is also a threat to biodiversity and climate adaptation. Yet, “new” land-based solutions touted by the policymakers facilitate if not encourage more land acquisition and land inequality.

Worse, these landgrabs and forced evictions often come with militarism, culture of impunity, draconian laws, and rampant human rights violations.

The Perfect Storm for Landgrabs

Today, we are in the midst of a perfect storm brewing the “new wave” of landgrabs—ongoing and looming, directly dispossessing peasant communities of their lands, rights, and dignity.

Landgrabbing has been on the rise in the past few years, facilitating the greater concentration of land in the hands of a few elites, especially in the Global South.

As it stands, there are seven important factors or impetuses that are facilitating this “new wave” of landgrabs redolent to the 2008-2012 land rush.

First, the rise in food prices is not only a direct assault on the capacity of poor people to eat thrice a day but is pushing land meant for food to become more valuable. In fact, in the past two years alone when food prices reached a 10-year record high and are rising, rich countries are snapping up food futures and making preferential deals with food-producing countries.

By the end of 2021, China through its grain trade TNC COFCO has hoarded over half the world’s grain reserve—up to 69% of the global maize supply in the first half of 2022.

Considering that over two-thirds of those in extreme poverty are landless farmers, smallholder farmers, and agricultural workers, the untenable rise in food prices is a double whammy for the rural poor.

Second, the runaway rise in oil and gas prices that started last year was exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The impact of oil prices works against rural food producers in a myriad of ways. The most important of these are the increase in the price of fertilizers and the reliance of the global food supply chain on fossil fuels.

Fertilizer prices have tripled from their price at the end of 2020, prompted by rising fuel prices and potash hoarding of China. This year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the biggest producers of potash in the West, has deprived agrochemical TNCs.

One key knock-on effect of high oil prices, however, is the increased demand for biofuels. Biofuels have been a key driver of deforestation and large-scale land acquisitions from 2008 to 2012, especially in Indonesia and Malaysia.

It gets worse. The food price spike in March 2020 directly resulted from an increasing demand for biofuel, pushing edible oil prices by 16.9%. This leap in food prices has not only made the rural poor hungrier and more precarious but more vulnerable to the onslaught of land grabbing and land inequality.

Third, the financialization of land increased. In fact, in the last two years, the price of farmland as an asset class rose faster than it had in the past two decades. The rise in the financialization of land saw the land-as-an-asset class grow on the average annual return, with some platforms suggesting it has consistently surpassed bonds and stocks while offering stability.

Financialization of land—a logical extension of the decade-long financialization of food and agriculture that has driven food prices up—is also pushing land prices up, driving farmers out of their farmlands and reshaping agriculture in the Global South.

Fourth, the growing financial instability of major financial markets is driving institutional investors to seek land as a “safe haven” of investment. Especially with projects that are linked to sustainability, which are increasingly hedged by public coffers, investing in land has become a viable investment strategy for Wall Street rentiers.

A recent report from a global asset manager for farmlands revealed that farmland prices have consistently risen in the past decade, with 2020 seeing the fastest growth.

Fifth, the wealth of the rich is soaring amid the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, the enabling environment of low-interest rates for the elite and corporate bailouts are essentially free money for the ultrarich. The ultrarich billionaire class saw their fortunes grow by $5 trillion in 2021 alone—wealth accumulation unprecedented in human history.

Recent reports note that rich countries have access to little to no interest rate lending from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF-WB)—funding that poorer and more in-need countries did not have access to. With quantitative easing schemes in rich countries like the US and EU, TNCs were not just able to bounce back, but also mint new billionaires amid the global health crisis.

Cargill, a US grain trade monopoly, saw its profit reaching a 156-year high last year at $5 billion. Amid untenable grain price hikes, the private company minted three more billionaires as they entered the world’s 500 richest people.

With all the free money that the US and other financial institutions like the WB and central banks of rich countries fed to investors, it’s no wonder many are flocking to land investments and evicting farmers and indigenous peoples out of their lands.

On the other end of the spectrum is the ballooning debt of the Global South. These countries have little to no leverage left against predatory policy advice of institutions like the IMF-WB and development finance institutions.

Before the Russian invasion of its borders and heartland, the IMF was coercing Ukraine to open its lands, including productive lands such as farms, to foreign ownership.

An Oxfam report shows that 87% of negotiated COVID-19 recovery loans from the IMF to Global South countries include austerity measures that would take down food and fuel subsidies.

Last, the corporate-led pressures of blended finance are increasing, as touted by recent policy floors including but not limited to the UNFSS and the COP26. Blended finance, a financial framework of bleeding the public coffers dry to de-risk investments for private profit, is a huge disincentive against public support to farmers and re-distributive schemes like genuine agrarian reform.

The confluence of these pressures is brewing the most dangerous winds of land grabbing torpedoing towards the countryside, bringing with it untenable threats to the livelihood and lives of rural food producers.

Carbon offsets, green landgrabs, and the myth of Net Zero

”New impetus” from the UNFSS

In September 2021, the United Nations convened what it proclaimed as a “People’s Summit on Food Systems”—the UN Food Systems Summit. With corporations through the billionaire club World Economic Forum at the helm, the UNFSS “unveiled” solutions to the failing and fragile food system.

In it, the largest TNCs and billionaires together with their handpicked NGOs have put together “multistakeholder alliances” to supposedly implement action tracks for fairer, more nature-positive, and healthy food systems. Needless to say, TNCs such as Nestle and Pepsi overwhelmingly dominate these alliances.

In the same week, the New York Stock Exchange quietly introduced a new investment vehicle: the nature as an asset class or NACs. This new financial instrument reflects what the UNFSS has sold as a solution: profiting from the climate crisis.

With a looming climate crisis on the horizon, climate inaction and greenwashing are increasingly becoming the bane of pursuing meaningful solutions. Furthermore, major actors that are responsible for the climate crisis are co-opting and dominating the spaces meant to develop “official” solutions. This is especially true for spaces involving food and agriculture.

Central to this is the 2021 UNFSS, where big corporations not only took a foothold but are at the helm of the events. While the impacts and influence of the UNFSS are yet to be seen, being a huge rubber stamp process to WEF-machinated climate mitigation solutions gives them at the very least credence, and at the worst official endorsement of these schemes.

Overarching themes to the unveiled solutions in the UNFSS include land-based nature positive solutions, carbon offsets, “de-risking” schemes, and biofuel expansion—all of which pose a direct threat to the lands of small farmers and what’s remaining of food sovereignty in developing countries.

“New” Sustainable Landgrab Schemes

While land grabbing is, unfortunately, nothing new, the renewed interest in land in the past few years and the coming decade is brought about by the so-called land-based and nature-based climate solutions.

Greenwashing, while also nothing new, found a new face with the current corporate takeover of policy floors. Following the trail of greenwashing projects in the past few years, there are

First, the so-called transition to green energy is reshaping land use and land management in the Global South. Renewable energy sources that include dams and geothermal plants have long been a major driver of displacement and land grabbing, especially in South and Southeast Asia. In the Philippines and India, governments are railroading dams despite overwhelming protests from farmers and rural peoples.

Moreover, new technologies that underpin the transition, including better batteries for storing green energy harvested from the sun, water, and wind, need new materials like cobalt. In particular, the increase in investments in electric vehicles that need cobalt to run longer has opened up more mining in vulnerable countries of Africa. In fact, a recent human rights report from Verisk confirmed that cobalt along with palm oil is among the commodities most at risk of land grabs worldwide.

The Democratic Republic of Congo saw a dramatic rise in landgrabs and rural displacement, slave-like working conditions, and an upsurge in child labor, coinciding with the increase in cobalt mines. Virtually 80% of the world’s cobalt supply comes from the 19 mines in DRC.

On the other hand, palm oil and other so-called flex crops, which are used for both human consumption and biofuel, are on the other side of this transition to green energy. Despite all the evidence that biofuel production uses a lot more energy than it produces, policymakers and large agri-TNCs are increasing its production.

Over the last decade, the craze for biofuels, including the speculative activities that come with it, has increased the price of food. In 2012, even the United Nations stepped in to demand that the US amend its biofuel subsidies to “halt a global food crisis.”

Not only that—biofuels and flex crops such as palm oil, corn, and soybeans are notorious for using massive tracts of land to produce just a quarter of the energy that other renewables make. Over a quarter of disputes in landgrabbing in the past decade in Indonesia and Malaysia, especially peat lands, are due to oil palm expansion.

While the transition from green energy to a fossil-free future is important, insisting on using land-intensive and land risk strategies despite the overwhelming evidence is just plain greenwashing.

Second, aggressive conservation schemes have displaced indigenous peoples and small farmers en masse in the past few years. Mostly under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) program REDD+ (reduction in emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), some forest enclaves, no fishing zones, and forest hubs have closed off communities from their cultural roots.

For the sake of conservation, policies that are an offshoot of REDD+ have boxed out if not criminalized traditional practices like shifting cultivation, pastoralism, and some forms of artisanal fishing.

One of the worst offshoots of these conservation initiatives is the ones led by the World Bank, which couples the scheme to carbon markets. For large corporations and financial institutions, carbon offsets are an obvious solution to arrive at so-called net zero.

A report from Verra, one of the main standard-setting bodies for the voluntary markets, revealed that nature-based solutions represented 72% of its total issuances in 2019, compared with 38% in 2016. To date, conservation projects from REDD+ represent the majority of these issuances.

Carbon offsets from conservation, at best, are corporate greenwashing tools that lock the world into fossil-dependency while shifting the emissions reduction to cheaper territories (aka the Global South). But at worst, it’s a continuing scheme of colonialism—a scheme that hinges on foreign landgrabs that enables imperialist TNCs to continue destroying the planet.

In Kenya, the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility funded the violent displacement of ethnic Maasai and Marakwet peoples from their homes, with the government labeling them squatters before throwing them out. In Nepal, the giant conservation NGO World Wildlife Fund has been proven to fund guards that harass, torture, and kill forest peoples and farmers in Nepal. A huge portion of these REDD+-induced landgrabs often come with militarization to quell the protest of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities—the actual cost of net zero on the ground.

Worse, new “solutions” from the recent UNFSS and, to some extent, the new IPCC report heavily rely on carbon offsets and carbon sequestration to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Last, on the other side of this bid for conservation is the return and promotion of the long-debunked strategy of “sustainable intensification” that advocates for fossil-fuel hungry agriculture. The verdict has been out for a while: excessive use of chemical fertilizers acidifies the soil and contributes to the lion’s share of carbon emissions in agriculture. Socially, fossil fuel-hungry agriculture has facilitated the worsening peasant debt cycle, predatory lending, and, in worst cases, debt-induced landgrabs.

Land in the hands of small farmers and indigenous peoples in the Global South is, in essence, nature-positive and can cradle a far more diverse biosphere than those run by corporations or industrial farm operators.

However, recent developments like the new goal of “halving of agricultural land” for conservation give way for land-based solutions that are threatening to reintroduce and amplify the model of “sustainable intensification.”

Some experts argue that intensifying yields through “climate-smart agriculture” is necessary to “compensate” for enclosing large tracts of land for conservation. Modeled primarily today by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), climate-smart agriculture is a fancy rebranding of the TNC-controlled fossil fuel-hungry agriculture that relies on synthetic fertilizers and patented seeds.

Despite AGRA yielding little to no results to show for its billions in funding, the US government have doubled down on its faulty premise—launching a wider version of the program AIM4Climate in the UNFSS.

While lopsided conservation schemes label traditional forms of farming as “environmentally destructive,” their champions turn around only to promote fossil fuel-reliant agriculture!