Asia: Land grabs threaten food security
- IRIN
- 10 June 2009
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.
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.
Civil society, including African farmers unions, need to educate local people that such land deals are not in their interests, however couched in 'win-win' terminology they appear to be.
A New York company managing the retirement savings of workers in Sweden, the US and Canada is evading Brazilian laws on foreign investment to acquire farmlands from a businessman accused of violently displacing local communities.
CRR’s sustainability analysis shows that deforestation and fires have taken place on TIAA’s farmland portfolio in Brazil, enabling negative social impacts on local communities.
ILC is actually trying to promote some sort of dialogue between the different proposals for principles for responsible farmland investment
FIDP has launched a Cambodia and Laos fund, “an extended China play” that will focus largely on agriculture, seeking to benefit from China’s desire for food security.
The social consequences of these land grabs are significant.
In this excerpt from her book, ‘Will Africa Feed China?’, Deborah Brautigam discusses China-Cameroon agricultural development and investment.
The grazing lands of the Maasai community in East Africa are being viewed as the next frontier for land grabbing.
Eritrean law blocking foreign investors from owning land and the country's desire for self-reliance makes it highly unlikely that it will fall for the neocolonial phenomenon of land grabbing.
South Korea has just leased half of all the arable land in Madagascar according to the Financial Times. This has stirred quite a debate in the Malagasy blogosphere about land sovereignty and economic development.
Logging companies in PNG are using special agricultural leases to clear vast tracts of rainforest timber, on the promise of roads and economic development for remote villages. Jemima Garrett investigates.
Wilmar says it plans to expand its oil palm plantations holdings in West Africa and to start producing sugar in Burma.
Mozambique’s rural communities remain on high alert, even as they successfully repel many of the largest land grabs.
Is land-grabbing over, in Mozambique and across Africa and the rest of the developing world? Now that crop and food prices have returned to their usual punishingly low levels, is the pressure off from foreign buyers looking to acquire large tracts of agricultural lands?
Ethiopia's potential can be maximized only if we Ethiopians are the producers and sellers of our own agricultural products. What Meles Zenawi is doing now is putting this upside down. He made our potential buyers the sellers of our commodity.
Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.
A new report published this week claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their traditional lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by European hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food.
The Bunong people's land struggle with Socfin
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