Contemporary Landgrabs:Dispossession and Displacement in Latin America
Large-scale land and resource grabs have been and are today a prominent feature of Latin American development. While the motives and the means change, transnational and domestic capitals have aggressively acquired land throughout the region for a wide range of purposes, most notably mining, logging, plantation agriculture, tropical forest products, access to water or hydropower, ranching, illegal narcotics, precious minerals and metals, oil and natural gas. These grabs share a common set of characteristics, such as extraction for export, disregard for resource depletion, environmental degradation and labor abuses.Scholarly terms for development that relies heavily on such land and resource grabs – particularly wheninfluenced heavily by foreign capital – run the ideological spectrum from comparative advantage to dependent development, enclave economies, resource curses, disarticulated capitalism – in Alain de Janvry’s memorable words, and economic dualism.
The context in Latin America today is historically significant. The great majority of countries in the region are governed by democracies and new forms of participatory development and multi-cultural recognition provide substance to universal suffrage. Political instability in the late 1990s as a result of anger against neo-liberal economic policies that privatized natural resource markets, reduced state spending and depreciated the currency led to the election of several left-wing politicians who vowed to redistribute wealth and nationalize resources from hydrocarbons to rain water and copper reserves. Today, however, instability in the international economy threatens those assurances. Relative economic stability has accompanied the
Land grabs continue today. Between October 2008 and August 2009, approximately 3.2 million hectares of land were acquired in Latin America for commodity production. This is 21% of land acquired world wide and is located primarily in Brazil and Argentina. Most of the old mechanisms continue. 48% of prime ag land in Colombia is thought to be in the hand of drug lords
New trends today include:
The development of extractive corridors linked to IIRSA,South American Integrated Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA) project is an ambitious plan to integrate the continent through new transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure. When completed, IIRSA will directly connect South America’s natural resource zones to metropolitan areas and foreign markets. The generalized model is to create “production enclaves” that are connected by tranportation or energy corridors and often include police/military protection, which creates territorial fragmentation for existing populations, especially in the Andean zones generating conflict. In almost all cases, these new extractive programs are part of IIRSA. In fact, this has resulted in, rather than a focus on strengthening private property rights, a return to state rights/nationalization of resources. (for example the empowerment in Bolivia of the YPFB [Bolivian Fiscal Oil Fields], and the creation of a state entity for gas and energy, ENARSA, in Argentina). And also in a bunch of new legislation being passed to ease things like environmental protections (for example: a law was vetoed that would protect the Andean glaciers for the sake of mining businesses, and in particular, the exploitation of gold in Pascua Lama; in Brazil the direction is toward a “flexibi- lization” of regulation and environmental permits; in Bolivia, environmental regulations were dismembered and although recently environmental management has been organized in a new ministry, its weakness persists; and in Uruguay the FrenteAmplio government continues with its practice of awarding environmental permits to attract investments in cellulose and paper, greater benefit of the whole nation. For example, in Chavez’s Venezuela, it should be accepted that the state of Zulia has been converted into a “zone of sacrifice for petroleum exploration
the Plan Pueblo Panama. Resulted in land grabs throughout central America, including large quantities of land acquired by then Nicaraguan President Alemán for the “dry canal” that will cross Nicaragua and hook into the PPP for which Interoceanic Canal of Nicaragua and Global Intermodeal Transport System (SIT-Global) were vying for concessions. plans to build a giant hydroelectric project in La Parota, Guerrero—part of the Plan Puebla-Panama regional development scheme will displace 25,000 people (project on hold because of protest
Widespread corporate investment in food and fuel production on land concentrated in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (particularly the region referred to cynically as Soylandia).Brazil’s ministry of development, headed by Miguel Jorge sends diplomats abroad to sell land to places like Saudi Arabia.The Punjab government is exploring possibilities for land leases in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico to grow foodgrain domestic (Indian) consumption as evidenced by a delegation to these countries led by Agricultural ministeterSharadPawar from sept 3-13. Punjabi farmers are already working in Argentina, and at least one, who is cultivating over 30,000 hectares, will give a presentation to this group.
Speculative investment in land with the use of new financial instruments intended to reduce market riskUS & European pension funds, hedge funds and private equity groups, plus Indian, Japanese & Gulf agribusiness companies, buying large amounts of good farmland. Cargill’s $6 billion Black River arm is buying into dairy farms in Asia and fish breeding in LA. Black River Asset Management manages primarily third party capital. It is aiming to raise between 300-400 million dollars. According to incra between 2002 and 2008 4 million ha have been sold to foreigners.Data from the FederaciónAgraria Argentina (FAA) indicates that foreign capital controls 17 million ha in the country.
Modern forms of migration wherein wealthy “green revolution” farmers in countries like the United States and India take advantage of hemispheric differences in planting seasons, environmental protections and labor legislation to purchase vast farms.Brazilian farmers also are participating in the international land grab. For example, Gilson Pinesso, a farmer from Paraná is now producing cotton and soy in the Sudan, where he could buy land at only 50 dollars per hectare, there is good transport infrastructure etc., and the land needs much less inputs than the Brazilian land. He sent the necessary machinery etc via boat to the Sudan nd says that the Sudanese government is reserving 500,000 hectares for Brazilian investment.
Conservation is “The Great Green Land Grab” as John Vidal says and Carbon cap and trade programs like REDD promise the legal/organizational infrastructure and the money to do this on a much larger scale.
Such large-scale land deals reinforce the region’s orientation towards export production and concomitant dependence on primary commodities. They also aggravate environmental problems such as deforestation, soil degradation and water contamination. Competition for land directly raises prices and increases over the past few years are stalling hard-won promises of land reform and agrarian development. The rush to claim land foments the twin processes of dispossession and displacement among the most vulnerable people in the region: the rural poor, indigenous peoples or people with customary or “alternative” rights to the land, and women and children who often have no recognized rights. All of this, in turn, increases poverty, violence, inequality, hunger and urban informality.
Displacement and dispossession are two of the critical battlefronts in the modern war of accumulation. If you do not believe that, go to Bagua,Peru, where 33 people died in June 2008 during mobilizations to protest the president’s attempts to facilitate third party access to communally held indigenous and peasant lands. Or go to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where a state of emergency was declared when protests broke out over World Bank-led attempts to privatizewater. Or go to El Dorado das Carajas, Brazilwhen 19 landless farmers were executed as they marched to the state capital demanding access to land. Or go to Chiapas, Mexico, where residents were pushed to form a guerrilla army to gain control over indigenous resources. There needs to be a Geneva Accords for new Land and Resource Wars. Battles such as these will continue if third party hedge funds are allowed to purchase millions of hectares of land and water without oversight or accountability.
Countering these trends, social movements and local community organizations have come together toprovide productive counter-points to the autocratic and invisible nature of large-scale land transactions. Activists agitate for ongoing attention to land reform initiatives, a focus on local, short, fair and community-oriented markets, sustainable farming and policies that prioritize people. Hundreds – if not thousands – of demonstrations are being planned, meetings held, and ideas exchanged at any given moment of every day. These movements have the potential (though not unlimited) to negotiate, block, or capture new land deals. At the same time, the rise of left-leaning governments (the so-called Pink Tide) has generated new spaces for dialogue and intervention. President Lula approved an “immediately binding” rule that restricts the sale of farmland to foreign investors or a local company with more than a 50% stake controlled by foreign investors, the government said in an August 23rd press release. Considerable uncertainty surrounds the force of the new rule and how it may be applied.Argentina is considering a law to limit foreign hodings and also to limit the size of holdings. This would include an amendment to the leasing act, especially because this law was made under the dictatorship.All of this works to create alternative forms of governance and resource access such as extractive reserves, participatory budgets, state-led land reforms, and more. These are productive counter-points to the autocratic and invisible nature of large-scale land transactions.
Their actions highlight the need for international governance tools such as the Voluntary Guidelines (VG) on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land and Other Natural Resources.
In many cases, the problems associated with large-scale land and resource grabs are exacerbated because there is a gap between the State’s mandate and the Means to intervene. In a paper that I wrote with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet published in a book on Access to Land and Policy sponsored by the United Nations, we laid out the mechanisms by which civil society organizations and social movements could and should contribute to not just crafting policy but implementing it. We identified interventions that could be useful applied to new land grabs: social movement actors can identify appropriate land for investment or sale; they can develop localized instruments and institutions for land governance; they can help to tie investments in land to broader gains in health, development and welfare; they can tap into transnational networks to mobilize information that would make the process of off-shore and long distance investing more transparent; they can also act as the government’s or the FAO’s watchdog on the ground.
Civil society-State participation is no longer just the wishful thinking of Italian revolutionaries from the 1920s. There has never been a time in Latin American history when so many social movements and grassroots organizations have had the competency, commitment and capacity to assist in determining how people should be fed and housed. The World Bank is a Bank; it is concerned with managing money. Students say to me all the time that the bank has done this or that bad thing but it is perhaps unfair to expect otherwise – it is a bank. The FAO is different. The FAO from the beginning has been a multilateral organization charged with improving access to food and supporting national agriculture on the principle that one people ought not go hungry while another eats. If there is a difference between the World Bank and the FAO, it is embodied in the spirit of the Voluntary Guidelines.
Concern about dispossession and displacement in the Latin American context raises several key points. First, guidelines for land deals should assume misconduct rather than ethical intent because regional history suggests that transgressions and wrongdoing will be the norm not the exception in these markets. Second, in addition to preventing misconduct, the international community should recognize and celebrate alternative and localized land uses by small farmers, landless movements, indigenous peoples, marginalized communities, and more. Third, in many cases, civil society is as – if not more – capable, knowledgeable and effective than government; civil society groups need to be included in the oversight process as equal partners. Fourth, multilateral institutions like the FAO should use their influence to monitor and re-shape global imperialism rather than abet it.
The VG are better equipped to mediate land transactions than the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment because the former take people, livelihoods and environments as their starting point rather than investments, profit and resources.