Action contre SOCFIN : Non à l'impunité d'accaparement de terres

mercredi 24 février 2016 12h15

Rue du champs de mars 2 - 1050 Bruxelles (Porte de Namur).

2 day international business forum will have sector experts and business leaders from across Africa and India.

The annual Land Forum creates and consolidates a think tank of private sector representatives, policy makers, practitioners and researchers who together search for new ways to optimize the link between land investments, food security and inclusive and sustainable development. We bring together international stakeholders to explore the potential and constraints of the private sector to contribute to inclusive and sustainable development, focusing on land governance issues. This forum focuses on a number of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are currently targeted by investors, or where foreign investment plays an important role in expanding the frontier of land investments: Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mozambique and Uganda. By creating and consolidating a network, this forum plays an important role in establishing new corridors for exchanging information (between countries, both in the areas of origin and of destination) and making investments more effective for food security, and inclusive and sustainable development. These discussions will be linked also to discussions about Corporate Social Responsibility, the development of new guidelines and principles regarding investments in land and land governance and a new post-2015 development framework.

The convergence of multiple crises: food, energy, environmental, climate change and finance – as well as the relationship of these with the rise of important global political economic players: BRICS countries and middle income countries (MICs) has, separately and combined, have triggered profound agrarian and environmental transformations in the Global South and North. There is a global rush to control natural resources: land, water, forest in order to produce food, fuel, energy; for climate change mitigation and adaptation purposes; or simply, for money to make more money in the increasing financialization of agriculture, nature, food system and farmland. Commodities are reinvented. The rise of flex crops – crops that have multiple and flexible uses that straddle not only a single value chain, but interlocking value chains; indeed, value web. Old issues requiring conventional international governance interventions have persisted. Land restitution remains a key demand for displaced people. New issues requiring different types of governance instruments and principles have emerged. How does one govern not just a ‘value chain’ – but a more complex and fluid ‘value web’? The character of nation-states and popular claim-making from below by ordinary villagers and grassroots organizations have been transformed, at least partially.

Global governance has been interpreted in various ways, competing on most occasions. Same set of international governance principles, e.g. ‘free, prior and informed consent’ (FPIC) can be invoked by fundamentally competing interests: by corporate interest or by poor villagers and their allies. All sectors and actor talk about ‘regulation’ and ‘transparency – but they interpret these in competing and even contradictory ways. Key state/non-state actors try to shape others, and/but in turn are themselves shaped in the process of these multi-actor/multi-level encounters.

How do we make sense of all these? What can the academics say that are useful to practitioners and activists – and vice versa? Yet, we are keen not just in canvassing what everyone else is saying about this complex converging issues and policy and political questions. Our interest lies mainly in the intersection of social justice and global governance – in the era of climate change and continuing global land rush. That is, if one’s starting point is to seek social justice – partisan, partial and biased in favour of the marginalized social classes and groups in various societies of the world – amidst the changing patterns of social relations partly brought about by the changes in the international political economic and ecological terrain, then where does global governance stand? What/which global governance principles, institutions, actors and instruments can be mobilized to seek, defend, strengthen or extend social justice – and how? What are the contentious debates, and why does it matter for academics, practitioners and activists to take these seriously?

Conférence avec Alain Durand-Lasserve, directeur de recherche au CNRS

A public meeting by the Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles

Commemoration of the International Human Rights Day

400 allocators, fund managers, and industry executives came together to discuss the burgeoning asset class of agriculture and its surrounding themes.

Documentaire sur la résistance à l'accaparement des terres en Afrique, projeté dans le cadre de la 9e édition du festival Alimenterre

Discussion about land grabbing and land concentration in Europe in preparation for the World Forum on Access to Land and Natural Resources.