Prepared by PCFS. Presented by Gertrude Kenyangi, SWAGEN/PCFS Africa in the webinar FROM LANDGRABS TO CASH GRABS: Exposing the IMF-WB’s Role in Enabling Landgrabs held 8 May 2024.
It’s an honor to be among friends, comrades, and fellow activists in these truly truly challenging times.
As our friends here have mentioned, the World Bank, now running for 80 years, has been the bane of progress for developing countries in the Global South. It is a conduit of imperialist agenda, their hegemonic control of the global economy, and its number one facilitator of plunder.
The upcoming Land Conference of the World Bank, given its historical accountability in maldeveloping our nations, is nothing more than the Bank funding new pathways to landgrabs, rural destitution, and speculative food crises.
The World Bank’s renewed push for land tenure is as hypocritical as it is treacherous.
Historically, the Bank’s role in skewing, stalling, setting back, and, at times, reversing genuinely redistributive land reform programs in many Global South countries are well documented.
While we farmers say that land should be for the tillers, the World Bank insists that lands should be in the hands of the highest bidder. Often, as many of us know, it’s a roundabout way of denying the right to land of poor farmers in the Global South.
‘Market-assisted land reform’, as the World Bank calls it, have provided new avenues for landed elites in the Philippines, Colombia, South Africa, to name a few, to retain land monopoly while quelling agrarian unrest.
This, in turn, opened up lands for foreign investors, speculative actors, and transnational corporations to gain control, if not ownership of the lands that we have developed with our hands. Indigenous lands in Colombia, Ethiopia, Burma, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil have become open targets of landgrabbing because of the World Bank’s model of land governance.
LAND AND HUNGER
Wherever the World Bank funds its lecherous land programs, hunger worsens.
Despite the Bank boasting their model’s success, land inequality has, in fact, worsened[1] especially in countries where land markets took precedence over peasants right to land and resources.
The World Bank also saw to it that monocrop agribusinesses of TNCs, their poisonous pesticides, and land-degrading seeds and fertilizers dominate our markets. This has facilitated food instability, hunger, and escalating human rights violations in primarily agrarian countries.
Despite twenty plus years of the World Bank’s programs to supposedly end hunger through land tenure in the Global South, we’re now experiencing the worst food crisis since the World War 2. Almost a billion people go to bed hungry, most of them farmers in South Asia and Africa – the irony isn’t lost on us.
The World Bank is accountable for starving rural peoples in the Global South, be it by facilitating landgrabs, funding pro-elite policies, or negotiating imperialist plunder in exchange for conditional and often highly costed loans.
In fact, the upcoming land conference have dropped its pretenses and shifted from tackling poverty through land governance to what it’s calling now ‘land governance for climate action’. It saw a new opportunity to siphon public coffers for private pockets and it’s diving right into it.
CLIMATE ACTION?
Right off the bat, the World Bank has never been opaque (sly but not opaque) of its financial motivation for formalizing land tenure. It’s mantra of making land and rural areas more attractive to foreign and domestic large capitalist) investments to facilitate “development” is well established.
It continues to fund its agenda of creating carbon markets as opposed to phasing out coal and drastically cutting down emissions. Under the guise of catalyzing climate action, the Land Conference is calling upon new ways to encroach on our lands, our rights, and our natural resources.
According to a summary report of national commitments made by governments last year, countries have pledged a total of 1 billion hectares of land or almost a third of the world’s arable land for carbon emissions reduction.
And many rich countries like Saudi Arabia and the US are looking to use our lands to offset their level of emissions. The government of Australia explicitly stated that 94% of their land-based reductions will be done internationally.
While the rich countries continue to pollute our air, while their TNCs raze our forests, their trawlers empty our waters, their mining trade choking our rivers – while the rich countries plunder our natural resources and heat up the planet – they plan to do tree planting in our lands and territories in exchange.
And this is where the World Bank steps in.
This, despite historically, many of these large-scale reforestation projects often involve the introduction of invasive species, of ejection of indigenous peoples, of reclassifying croplands tilled by farmers, of violent militarization of forests and rural areas.
While it hides behind the rallying call for women’s right to land and Indigenous people’s right to their ancestral land, it has again and again exposed itself of lying through its teeth. Women agricultural workers, who have taken back their lands from Haciendas in Negros, Philippines are being evicted from their lands – all funded by a World Bank Project to supposedly parcelize lots.
Indigenous peoples in Indonesia are facing new threats of eviction from palm oil companies as the World Bank funded One Map project is expected to gloss over indigenous rights to land within the 77 million hectares of land under “dispute”.
This new wave of policies aimed at attracting foreign direct investments by opening lands and domestic markets to corporate and foreign plunder flies in the face of even the modest goals of ‘addressing inequality’, much less eradicate hunger. Instead, these are an extension of privatization policies of wealth transfer to a narrow global elite using public coffers, at the expense of people’s rights and welfare[2].
Today, friends, comrades, fellow activists, we must stand here and reject the World Bank’s model of land tenure, the World Bank’s neoliberal policies, the World Bank’s greenwashed conference of plunder.
Shut down the World Bank!
Fight for our land, rights, and food sovereignty!
__
[1] https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2020-11/uneven-ground-land-inequality-unequal-societies.pdf