by Alex Evans | Oct 11, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Following up on recent coverage of agricultural resource access deals (so-called ‘landgrabs’) on Global Dashboard: two GD readers, Nathan Yaffe and Laura Dismore, were recently out in Ethiopia doing a two month field study of the phenomenon, and had this to say about what they saw:
The “land grab” phenomenon has brought the related security threats of rising food prices and arable land shortages to a head in Africa. The least developed continent is playing host for some of the world’s richest investors, who are trying to snatch up what land is available to meet the food and biofuel needs of capital-rich economies.
Concerns about these large commercial farming operations often focus on lack of government oversight leading to displacement and loss of livelihood for local farmers. This has led international observers to raise the question – as Alex Evans noted at the release of the World Bank’s land grabs report – of what it might look like for governments to use this investment opportunity to their advantage.
After two months of field study in Ethiopia, we have some insights about how land acquisition has been incorporated in the national development strategy there. While everyone from the World Bank to the FAO has recognized this as a goal, the conversation about it has taken place in theoretical rather than empirical terms. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Jun 4, 2010 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
Very interested to see the news today that City of London police have “arrested the director of a Merseyside-based business in connection with an alleged plan to pay Liberian officials $2.5m (£1.7m) in connection with land concessions the company hoped would earn it more than $2bn”.
The thousand-fold disparity between what the British company was planning to pay and what it hoped to earn is obviously astonishing (and that’s before we take into account allegations that the Liberian government would apparently have been liable for making up any shortfall against the project’s anticipated earnings). It all brings back to mind the case of Daewoo’s disastrous attempt to lease one half of Madagascar’s arable land back in March last year – Global Dashboard coverage of that here.
This would appear to be landgrabbing at its worst: the host country gets screwed on the terms of the deal thanks to weak negotiation capacity and/or naked corruption, and poor people get few if any benefits (as well as the risk of getting turfed off community land that they may have had access to for years, but without having the formal ownership rights).
But two things are new and interesting this time round. First, the fact that this land grab is not about staple crops, nor about biofuels, but about carbon credits – specifically, forest credits for avoided deforestation, that can then be used by EU states or other Kyoto signatories to meet their emission targets.
As the FT observes this morning, the global carbon market is now worth $144 billion annually. That’s $20 billion more than total global aid flows. As the carbon market grows, we’ll see more and more problem cases like this – as David and I predicted in our scenarios (pdf) for future climate policy last year. The fact that land grabs are now taking place for carbon sequestration as well as crops and biofuels also underlines just how many different land uses are now competing for the world’s soil – expect this one to run and run.
The other novelty here is the fact that the deal led to an arrest on bribery charges. Land access deals tend to be opaque at the best of times – I’ve been looking at them as part of work I’ve been doing on resource scarcity with the World Bank, and evaluating their implications for governance, conflict risk and poverty reduction is far from easy. It’s often suspected that bribery of host country elites is part of the picture, but extremely hard to prove – and in any case, many investor countries will turn a blind eye, given their strategic interest in improving security of supply on key commodities. So more power to the City of London police’s elbow for sending a signal on this one – it’ll be interesting to see more details of the case as they emerge.
Above all, massive credit to Global Witness, long one of the most impressive NGOs on resource security issues. They’ve been saying for a very long time that the emerging global climate regime on reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) needs to take far more account of governance and conflict risk issues (see their new report on this, out yesterday). That point has just been vindicated in spades. And on top of that, it was their information that led to yesterday’s arrest. Bravo.
by Alex Evans | Apr 28, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
We’ve been posting regularly here about the various ‘landgrab’ third party food supply deals that have been such a feature of the last year or two (see the map that Mark posted a couple of weeks ago) – particularly in Madagascar, where a particularly dubious example of such a deal is perceived to have played a part in fomenting the recent coup d’etat there.
Over at ForeignPolicy.com, though, Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe has a different and interesting take on the issue:
The purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal. Estimated on the basis of one crop per year, the land purchased represents 55 to 65 cubic kilometers of embedded freshwater, an amount equal to roughly 1½ times the water held by the Hoover Dam. And, because this water has no price, the investors can take it over virtually free. It’s not quite a scenario from a James Bond movie, but the rush to lock up scarce water resources in agricultural belts is nonetheless disturbing. It suggests another food crisis might not be too far away.
In a sense, the great water grab is only prudent: Some 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawn for human use goes into agriculture, but underground aquifers are falling—in some regions by several meters per year—and rivers are running dry due to overuse. The worst problems are in some of the world’s most important agricultural areas: eastern Spain, the U.S. Great Plains, the Middle East and North Africa, and parts of Pakistan, northwest India, and northeast China. As the former head of the International Water Management Institute warned, “We could be facing annual losses equivalent to the entire grain crops of India and the U.S. combined” if current trends hold.
