ASIA: Land grabs threaten food security
- From: Chim <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:48:13 -0700 (PDT)
ASIA: Land grabs threaten food security
10 Jun 2009 11:42:25 GMT
Source: IRIN
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PHNOM PENH, 10 June 2009 (IRIN) - Sam Pov, a rice farmer in
Cambodia's western Battambang Province, is very worried that his land
will be taken over by a foreign investor.
"I've heard the rumours about [Kuwait and Qatar]. I heard they might
get our land because they need food," he said.
"The commune leaders haven't talked to us yet, and I don't think they
will if the time comes. This is a good time for them to get paid and
get huge benefits."
Last year, delegations from oil-rich Kuwait and Qatar visited the
impoverished nation, eyeing leases on land to export food back home -
a move that could leave many Cambodians without enough food, say
activists and NGOs.
Kuwait has reportedly offered US$546 million to the Southeast Asian
nation in loans for dams and roads, while Qatar will invest $200
million in agriculture.
And while the government has not yet announced what the Gulf States
will get in return, they have publicly expressed interest in the
country's farmland.
"Cambodia has plenty of farmland and forests but has been suffering
from land grabbing by the government as well as influential people for
years," Jin Ju, a food rights activist at the Asian Human Rights
Commission (AHRC) [see: http://www.ahrchk.net/] , told IRIN from Hong
Kong.
"I doubt that [either] government would consider the villagers and
farmers as equal decision-makers," she said.
Evictions
Forced evictions, mostly to build hotels and high-end apartments, have
been a problem in Cambodia since the UN peacekeeping force left in
1993.
Adhoc [see: http://www.adhoc-chra.org/], the Cambodian human rights
watchdog, estimates 50,000 people were evicted to make way for
development projects in 2006 and 2007 alone.
The problem arose because most land documents were destroyed under the
Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979, making it unclear who owns
what.
Yet the practice in Cambodia of leasing land to Gulf States for
farming - and the rate at which the land is being siphoned off - is
new, say food rights groups.
"The governments [Kuwait and Cambodia] should select appropriate land
through discussion with the villagers, and combine the traditional
farming in Cambodia and new technology for farming," Ju added.
Food insecurity
The problem of land grabbing by foreign investors and governments,
however, extends well beyond the confines of Cambodia.
Elsewhere in Asia similar examples can be seen, as well as in Africa
[see: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=84320. According to
the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI) [see: http://www.ifpri.org/], between 15 and 20 million
hectares of farmland in such countries have been subject to
transactions or negotiations since 2006.
IFPRI estimates the value of such deals at up to $30 billion.
Ever since high food prices in 2007 and 2008 raised the prospect of
food insecurity for countries without much farmland, Kuwait, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have scoured Asia for
land.
China, which has to feed more than one billion people, is also looking
to Southeast Asia to sustain its breakneck growth.
"Not only will it displace small farmers as such investments have done
in Indonesia," said Amitava Mukherjee, head of the UN Asian and
Pacific Centre for Agricultural Engineering and Machinery in Beijing,
"but it will also have serious environmental consequences … [and]
given that UAE and Kuwait are leasing land, not buying it, [they]
would have no interest in long-term development of the farmland they
are seeking access to".
He added that the comments were his own and did not reflect the views
of the UN.
In Kamukhaan village in the Philippines, such environmental effects
have become well documented, according to the AHRC.
Since a Filipino company took over 613ha in the village to build a
banana plantation in 1981 - to supply US-based fruit company Dole -
hundreds of villagers have suffered skin and respiratory ailments from
pesticide use, the group claims.
"The farmers had lost their farmland, their children, their natural
sources, their health and their future," Ju said.
"Now the Philippines' food sovereignty is absent and the self-
sufficiency is almost zero," she claimed.
In the Philippines this year, Bahrain secured 10,000ha for agro-
fishery, Qatar leased 100,000ha, and an unknown company from China
leased 1.24 million hectares, though the deal has been put on hold,
according to an April policy briefing by IFPRI [see:
http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/bp/bp013.asp#read].
Such deals are often done in secret, it says, stopping civil society
groups from overseeing the terms and defending the rights of local
farmers.
In Myanmar, Chinese companies have driven farmers off their land to
cultivate an oil plant, according to Welt Hunger Hilfe [see:
http://www.welthungerhilfe.de/home_eng.html], a German NGO.
The farmers already faced seasonal changes that threatened food
security, but had their last source of food taken from them by the
government, the group says.
gc/ds/mw
Land grabbing in Asia
CAMBODIA: Land being leased by Kuwait for rice (in negotiations)
100,000ha rubber plantation secured by Vietnam
LAOS: 100,000ha rubber plantation secured by Vietnam
PHILIPPINES: 10,000ha for agro-fishery secured by Bahrain 100,000ha
for Qatar 1.24 million hectares for an unknown company in China (on
hold)
INDONESIA:
500,000ha, a $4.3 billion rice investment, secured by Bin Laden Group
of Saudi Arabia (on hold)
CHINA: 10 poultry farms worth $300 million purchased by Goldman Sachs
of USA and pig farms purchased for $250-300 million (do we know by
whom?)
Source: International Food Policy Research Institute
© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis:
http://www.IRINnews.org
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