Land deals squeezing world’s poorest, Oxfam says
Laura Stone; Toronto Star
In Uganda, a farmer and mother of eight are among 22,500 people who have been reported beaten, threatened and evicted from their homes to make way for a British timber company.
In South Sudan, 10 per cent of the land in the newly independent country, is said to have already been bought up, much of it by foreign companies, posing a threat to its fragile stability, which depends on small-scale farming.
And in Honduras, 36 farmers have reported been killed since October 2010, spurred by violence over land occupations.
All these allegations are contained in a new report released Wednesday from Oxfam, a non-profit agency with 15 organizations worldwide, which delves into the “growing scandal” of land grabs in the most vulnerable nations.
“For poor people in many parts of Africa and other parts of the world, where their cash income is almost nothing, that access to the trees, to the plants, to the berries, is absolutely critical to their livelihoods,” said Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada.
The report, “Land and Power,” suggests that since 2001 as many as 227 million hectares of land has been sold, leased or licensed in large-scale land deals, mostly by international investors.
The agency said it has cross-checked 1,100 of these deals, and accounted for at least 67 million hectares of sold land — an area nearly the size of British Columbia.
“The fear is growing that this new wave of investment will do more harm than good if land grabbing is not stopped,” the report says. “There are few documented examples of large-scale land acquisitions that have resulted in positive impacts for local communities.”
Fox told the Star that over the past three years, beginning with the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been a “huge acceleration” in large-scale land purchases by foreign investors who want to harvest food or create biofuel.
“This isn’t about buying a farm somewhere. This is about buying the better part of a province,” he said.
The result is fewer jobs and less food and industry for impoverished locals.
The report calls on governments and international organizations to fix current policies that allow for land grabs to go through without consultation or compensation or fair treatment for local people.
In many cases, women are most affected because they produce up to 80 per cent of the food in some countries but have weaker land rights.
While no Canadian companies were named in the report, Fox said Oxfam Canada is looking into the role played by mining companies in purchasing land rights in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
The report names purchasing by British-based New Forests Co. as an example of the damage that foreign investment can do.
Oxfam accuses the timber company of evicting some 22,500 people in the Kiboga district of Uganda, leaving families without enough food or money to send their children to school.
“In Oxfam’s view, NFC’s operations highlight how the current system of international standards — designed to ensure that people are not adversely affected as a result of large-scale transfers of land use rights — does not work,” says the report.
New Forests said in a statement it will investigate Oxfam’s allegations but denied wrongdoing.
“Our understanding of these resettlements is that they were legal, voluntary and peaceful and our first-hand observations of them confirmed this,” it said.
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