Activities 2012 Agrarian Justice

The concept of ‘land grabs’ – acquisitions of vast areas of land in poorer nations and regions – came to prominence during the global food price spike of 2007/8. tni has critically analysed mainstream formulations of the problem, from the angle of who controls the land itself and who has the power to decide how it is used and for what purposes – issues that tie into a broader and deeper questioning of the underlying development model. our research and analysis show that the phenomenon is not just about land as such, but who is on the land and what they do with it, what is produced on or extracted from the land, and the speculative value of land and the natural resources it contains.

Supporting an end to land grabs

TNI produced a raft of publications on land grabs over the year. These have strengthened TNI’s goal to be a bridge between scholars and movement activists and strengthen a ‘radical pole’ within the debate on land grabs. Central to the work was The Global Land Grab: A Primer. This popular primer is the culmination of two years’ work, building in particular on the research of TNI Fellow Dr Saturnino ‘Jun’ Borras Jr and research associate Dr Jenny Franco. The primer stands in contrast to narratives that tend to focus on the grabbers, legal procedures, and scale of grabs rather than how they have dispossessed communities of control over their own resources and development pathways.

The main policy response to land grabbing has been to accept large-scale land deals as a necessary component of attracting foreign investment into agriculture, and to suggest regulation and guidelines to address its negative impacts. TNI instead supports social movements in their calls for regulation to stop new grabs and roll back existing ones, and to ensure and promote local farmers’ own investments, agroecological farming systems, and human rights. In this, TNI works with movements of peasant farmers, including organisations such as La Via Campesina, and the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty. TNI supports their campaigns by providing information and analysis. This also includes proposing alternatives, as TNI outlined in a well-received briefing on positive investment options.

The land grab primer and eight other briefings have filled an important knowledge gap. For example, Burmese social activists now facing the challenges of an economy opening up to international capital (see page 30) translated the primer and several other related TNI publications into Burmese, in support of evolving civil society efforts to challenge new land and investment policies there.

TNI also co-ordinates the Hands off the Land network, which seeks to raise public awareness in Europe of the land grabbing phenomenon and the role of European investors and European Commission policy (see bit.ly/ tnilandeu). Together this brought Mozambican farmers to Europe to expose the impact of European pension funds’ investments on their food security, generating media coverage in the Netherlands.

TNI has also provided ongoing technical support to organisations in their engagement with international institutions, such as during the negotiations on the Tenure Guidelines within the Committee on Food Security at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Partly because of the efforts of civil society organisations in these negotiations, the Guidelines contain many concepts and elements that social movement groups consider useful for their struggles.

TNI is working with the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty as its focus shifts to how the Guidelines can be implemented on the ground.

Beyond land: putting all the 'grabbing’ on the agenda

A key part of extending the critique of land grabs is to look at the overall impact on control over natural resources. This was the reasoning behind the primer The Global Water Grab. It exposes how powerful actors have been able to wrest control of water from local populations, whether it is for use in large-scale industrial agriculture (particularly to grow biofuels), hydroelectricity or simply to sell the water back to the public.

The report notes that there is already a ‘global water crisis’, with 700 million people in 43 countries having insufficient access to water, and the global water grab will only exacerbate this problem.

The water grab primer gained the attention of activist networks, including some TNI had not worked with before, as well as in policy and academic fields. This led to TNI being invited to be one of the guest editors of a special issue on the subject of the journal Water Alternatives. This, in turn, has opened more avenues for collaboration and debate.

There is also cross-over with TNI’s work on water as a public service, particularly in relation to the ideas of water justice and remunicipalisation, and this has contributed to the building of links between the networks TNI has in these different areas.