Below is the synthesis of Landless Voices: Land Struggles vs International Finance Institutions held April 2024. LANDLESS VOICES is a series of online consultative forums where rural people’s groups can share their land issues and struggles amid the global food crisis. The outcomes of the consultation series were shared during the May 13 Speakout of the Landless and served as reference to the Rural People’s Development Agenda of the Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land and Climate Justice.
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Warm greetings! Social and climate justice, along with the right to land and other economic rights, are only possible today if we reject IMF-World Bank economic dictates.
Around the world, the World Bank along with the International Monetary Fund are imposing programs and policies of land dispossession, as almost 1 billion people suffer from hunger. Consolidation of elite land monopolies are at the expense of peasants and rural peoples’ landlessness, hunger, and poverty. Market-assisted land reform and facilitation of hydropower and agribusiness interests are being implemented across the Global South. IFI loans and private investment have been some of the means of financing dispossession.
The Bank’s policy on “land governance” has been geared to facilitating private sector interventions, creating land markets together with financial markets. Greater corporate and landlord encroachment of land and resources now hide behind false climate solutions, under the banner of supposed climate action, financing, and response.
In Kenya, amid a global demand for sugar exports, the World Bank has been supporting the privatization of sugar milling companies. Similarly, in Zambia and Congo, the Bank has been encouraging investment in agriculture and mining. In Asia, mining interests benefit in Indonesia’s ongoing and proposed corporate mining projects. In the Philippines, the Bank-funded Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT) program individualizes and parcelizes collective land titles to facilitate land re-sale and re-monopolization. Similarly, in Nepal, land laws contradict farmers’ and Indigenous Peoples’ rights, land rights, and food sovereignty. In Asia’s particular context, the Asian Development Bank works with the World Bank to reinforce neoliberal policies in funding agribusiness.
Increasing land dispossession, fueled by debt, lead to peasants’ hunger, loss of livelihoods, and loss of access to social services. Militarization, state violence, and repression are implemented with continuing massive land dispossession. Existing systems of land tenure are replaced by the dictates of land and financial markets, with speculation fueling unstable food prices. At the same time, traditional and Indigenous knowledge are undermined due to land loss, while ecosystems are being destroyed. Taken together, these all serve as obstacles to food sovereignty, while constituting violations of land rights along with economic, social, and cultural rights, as well as civil, political, and other people’s rights.
Towards building peasant power, peoples’ resistance and collective action have taken the form of arousing, organizing, and mobilizing landless and poor peasants, including unities on calls of land redistribution. Peasant organizations’ own knowledge-building on the new face of IMF-World Bank dictates have been part of raising consciousness. Cooperativization has also been a form of building cooperation and collective action among farmers. These assertions have been supported by lobbying with state actors (e.g., to cancel certain projects) and seeking legal redress.
Moving forward, there is always room to further expand farmers’ organizing and educational initiatives on rights and contemporary forms of IFI dictates. This could be further supported by strengthened international solidarity–such as across the global South–to assert that land should be controlled by the tillers, and against IFIs, the corporate interests they facilitate, and the local elites whom they work with. Once again, let us continue to resist IMF-WB interventions in agriculture and win victories in our countries against the current agenda of US imperialist institutions. #