Victims of "land grabbing" have joined 800 of the
world's leading environment and development groups to press the UN to establish
strong guidelines to protect communities affected by large-scale land
investments.
Countries meeting at the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation in Rome this week are due to adopt a voluntary code on 17 October
in response to growing alarm about the scale of international investments being
made in poor countries, and the alleged human rights abuses that have followed.
La Via Campesina, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth International
and more than 800 other organisations presented a petition against land
grabbing to the chair of the FAO's committee on world food security.
"Mounting evidence shows that land grabbing violates
human rights and is placing the survival of billions in peril, while
corporations and private interests reap the benefits. We urgently need
governments to oppose land grabs. They must instead enforce binding human
rights instruments and take responsibility for their companies' actions
abroad," said Friends of the Earth International's food
sovereignty co-ordinator, Kirtana Chandrasekaran. "Ensuring communities
access to land and investing in local small-scale food producers is essential
to feed the world sustainably in the future."
The EU is leading calls for human rights to be emphasised in
the guidelines, but observers said the US
was resisting attempts to place too many conditions on large-scale acquisitions.
Faliry Boly, secretary general of Sexagon, a peasant
organisation in Mali,
said: "Agribusiness projects such as the ones comprising thousands of
hectares do great harm and are profoundly illegitimate. We call on parliaments
and national governments to immediately cease all massive land grabs current or
future and return the plundered land."
The meetings to establish voluntary guidelines take place as
a new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) analysis paper shows that British
companies are the third largest investors after China
and Saudi Arabia
buying, or leasing, more than 1m
hectares of land in Ethiopia,
Angola, Ghana,
Madagascar, Mozambique,
Ukraine and Sierra
Leone. China
has acquired 6.5m hectares, and Saudi Arabia
5.5m.
The paper, from the Unep's global environmental alert
service attributes the rush for land partly to a lack of water in some
countries. "The desire to capture water resources
to irrigate farmlands has motivated the rush for land,"
it says. "Middle Eastern states are among the biggest land investors in Africa,
driven not by a lack of land, but a lack of water. Between 2004 and 2009 Saudi
Arabia leased 376,000 hectares of land in Sudan
to grow wheat and rice following declining underground domestic water. China
and India have leased thousands of hectares of farmland in Ethiopia; both
countries have well-developed irrigation systems but, in the case of China, for
example, moving water from the water-rich south to northern China is likely to
cost more than leasing land in Africa."
The paper also outlines the potential ecological
consequences of large-scale farming and growing biofuel crops.
"Monoculture has been widely accepted as the most efficient type of
large-scale agriculture," it says. "High yields may result, at least
for a time, but growing one crop, such as biofuels, over a large area for
several years has a number
of negative environmental impacts. Studies in Malaysia
and Indonesia have
shown that 80%-100% of fauna species in tropical rainforests cannot survive in
oil-palm monocultures due to increased pressures from various crop diseases and
pests, often requiring large-scale use of chemical pesticides, fungicides and
herbicides. In addition, increased fertilizer use to safeguard crop yield may
increase pollutant levels in downstream waters and nitrous oxide emissions.
"Semi-mechanised sorghum and sesame production in Sudan
illustrates the risks of large-scale farming and holds lessons for current
investors. In an agro-ecological environment comparable to Australia, where
yields are four tonnes per hectare, sorghum yields are only 0.5 tonnes per
hectare and have been stagnant or declining."
