Under the initiative of the Indian Ocean Commission, Madagascar is the focus of a large project to produce and export agricultural products to ensure the food security of this regional space, raising the spectre of land grabbing.
As land is grabbed and earmarked for development, this often has implications for the water nearby, for local people's land and water rights and environmental sustainability.
Video on the struggles of the Malind of Papua to defend their lands from the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate.
Mats Widgren provides an update on a Swedish company's land grab for sugar cane production in Tanzania.
Foreign investors in the agricultural sector are under regulated in the current framework of international investment law, voluntary guidelines and fragmented national investment legislation, and over protected in regional and bilateral investment treaties and domestic regulation.
With the largely self-evident agreement that land grabbing is wrong and all efforts should be made to prevent it, debate and effort can focus more on (i) how to prevent land grabbing, and (ii) how to enable forms of land-based investments that actually bring real benefit.
“We are aggressively looking for new areas in Sulawesi, Central Kalimantan and South Sumatra that are environmentally safe to expand our oil-palm footprint,” says president-director of the company’s oil-palm plantations in Sumatra.
This roundtable on conflict sensitive water and land management assembled representatives of Swiss civil society and state agencies to debate the implications of land acquisition on their work as well as their responses.
SL Agritech Corp plans to establish a 2,000-3,000 hectare commercial rice plantation in Iloilo this year, a top company official said yesterday, in what could involve a joint venture with Hong Kong-based conglomerate First Pacific Co. Ltd.
Special issue of the journal Development and Change
Reading between the lines, the Durban BRICS resolutions will support favoured corporations' extraction and land-grab strategies and confirm the financing of both African land-grabbing and the extension of neo-colonial infrastructure through a new 'BRICS Bank'
Le projet de loi, qui est discuté à l'assemblée législative de Reykjavik, vise à empêcher les personnes qui ne sont pas citoyens de l'Islande d'acheter des propriétés qui incluent des droits d'eau ou de pêche.
