I'm not sure what I expected, but I feel as though Liberti could have gone deeper. Perhaps, it was partly my fault for assuming that because VERSO was selling the book I was going to be met with some more critical engagement within the land grabbing development. The book serves more as an awareness piece. Giving the reader names, numbers and interviews with some of the leaders and movers within this epoch. And maybe that is the reality, namely, that there has been too much critical analysis about these issues already, too many conferences where too many come together convinced of the righteousness of their ideas... and rather than bring transformation to the world it transforms activists and leaders complacent. Often times, those who are privileged enough to engage governments and their institutions get stuck there. Rarely do they make it back from where they came from, that is, from a place grounded in reality. 224 A very important topic, great research. 224 I didn't realise this was an old book- before the influx of the Chinese and in the midst of the Zimbabwean farce. So I have a lot of questions, especially as a concerned and injusticed African. In the end, the powers that control our lives are always in a battle of their own - things we have no knowledge, little understanding and no say of. World leaders , AGAIN I call on you to think logically and protect the world and it's inhabitants in all forms. 224 Easy to read and informative, but lacks analysis and an overall framework to help the reader make sense of this phenomenon. While interesting in their own right, the three strands of food security, speculation and food security never really seem to come together to form a coherent whole.
The critical bite of the book would have really benefited from enlisting certain Marxist concepts. For instance, the expropriation of land from native populations also leads to the proletarianisation of these individuals, which find themselves lacking the means to ensure their sustainment and are therefore forced to sell their labour at the meager rate the expropriators are willing to pay.
In the section on financial speculation, the author meets agricultural investors, in an attempt to track down the bad guys behind all this. Instead he finds mostly well-intentioned individuals who believe to be working towards positive change, and the apparent lack of culprits is never fully reconciled. This is where Marx et al’s absence is most notable: if we take markets to be impersonal mechanisms of surplus-extraction, then bad guys are not needed to produce suboptimal outcomes like those observed. A related point that in my opinion is not fully developed is that of corporate whitewashing: the above-mentioned individuals often appear (or believe to be) well-intentioned by appealing to corporate social responsibility, codes of conduct etc. While the author is under no illusion as to the real impact of these (or lack thereof), they are not contextualised within the wider marketing/communications/reputation & perception management industry, the detrimental effects of same and the broader context of hegemony.
The book would have really benefited from interpretative schemes like these to move beyond the purely informative - a job which admittedly it does well.
224 Illuminante 224
Ottimo reportage in cui Liberti apre gli occhi del lettore sull'accaparramento delle terre, mostrando il fenomeno dalla prospettiva dei principali attori in giro per il mondo. Scritto con stile molto gradevole, ben documentato, il libro è altresì ricco di curiosi aneddoti e guide di comprensione, per esempio delle stock option e dei futures, termini arcani su cui poggiano speculazioni e prevaricazioni finanziarie. 224 I love reading accounts by journalists, where they sum up their investigations into a given issue. The first of these which I read was James Crabtree's The Billionaire Raj, which was based on his investigations into inequality and cronyism in India. Liberti's Land Grabbing has a similar flair. He travelled across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas searching for pieces of the Land Grabbing puzzle. In this book, he presents us the panorama. It's not replete with academic jargon or theories. It contains stories, anecdotes, views and conversations with the people who have actually been affected. The book tells you how land grabbing happens, why it happens, where it happens, how it is facilitated and how communities are uprooted. After reading the book, I realised that the road to food security and renewables in the developed countries is built on the lands of developing countries. Much like colonialism, when development in the north was based on the resources of the global south. You need Jatropha to produce renewable biofuels, you head over to African lands; you need food security, you create monocultures in Africa; you need coffee, you take over Brazilian forests; and on and on.
In fact, in the fight against climate change, developed countries have started to use African lands as their weapon. For example, the concept of carbon credits allows companies exceeding their carbon generation limit to reduce it by undertaking carbon-reducing activities: like reforestation. This has created a market for buying and selling of carbon credits, where companies do nothing but reforestation and sell their negative carbon generation ability to other companies. These companies go to Africa, buy cheap forest or farmlands in the name of investment and plant eucalyptus all over it. That's it. In this process they destroy livelihoods, they destroy futures of many generations and condemn thousands to a life of extreme poverty. The cash-strapped and corrupt governments in the south continue to remain obliging. And all the while, the elite institutions like FAO, IMF and World Bank have facilitated such practices in the name of foreign investment, capital, jobs and growth. But what is a minimum wage job in a farm to a tribal who used to secure healthy nutrition from his now razed-down forests? 224 Un libro que aborda un problema bastante interesante y que permite adentrarnos en él desde varios ángulos. Sin embargo, a veces es poco profundo y quizás necesita más fuentes e información.
Por otra parte, esos momentos donde el autor intentaba describir ciertos paisajes o personas parecía un novelista de cuarta categoría. 224 A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE 21ST CENTURY LAND GRAB
Stefano Liberti, foreign correspondent of Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, travels the world to look into the phenomena of foreign countries and companies of buying up massive amounts of land in Africa for the production of food and other cash crops.
Liberti starts in the Horn of Africa, with a visit to Ethiopia. The ruling party, the EPRDF (Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front) won the 2010 election with a percentage of the vote that would make Robert Mugabe blush (99.6%) though they manage to avoid the level of hostility that Mugabe's Zimbabwe routinely receives. Labour peer and the EU's high Representative Baroness Ashton describes the election as an important moment for the democratic process! Perhaps her previous role as Trade Representative, coupled with the fact that Ethiopia has opened its land up to foreign exploitation at bargain basement prices explains her somewhat curious statement? In fact Ethiopia is an authoritarian police state where dissent is ruthlessly cracked down on, secrecy reigns unhindered, where foreign capital is privileged at the expense of the Ethiopian peoples interests. No doubt after all the land deals GDP will rise as subsistence agriculturalists are deprived of their land, but those alienated from their land will count themselves lucky if they can earn two quid a week toiling for Saudi, Chinese, Dutch or Indian investors.
Liberti follows the money back the way to Saudi Arabia, and attends a conference along with various African countries who pimp their land to the food poor Saudis: $1 a hectare in Mozambique, 50-70 cents retort the Ethiopians, only to be trumped by the Central African Republic who are giving theirs away for free. During his stay Liberti meets other Saudis with potentially less damaging solutions to the Saudis food problems, unfortunately they are not well connected to the patronage networks which criss-cross the Wests favourite fundamentalist kleptocracy.
Next stop is Geneva, Switzerland - the parasitical tax haven par excellence - also home to the FAO (The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation) where Liberti visits a conference whose ostensible subject is food security. There the business as usual tedium (ie. Businesses blowing their own trumpets) is relieved by the Four Farmers of the Apocalypse (receiving end): namely four Via Campesina activists who bluntly make clear what the land grab means for the worlds small farmers. Minimally (many deals are secret) 45 million hectares of farmland has vanished into the hands of a motley crew of Private Equity Firms, various Investors of all sorts, cash rich/food poor foreign governments. All this is clearly at the expense of indigenous farmers and the targeted countries food supplies. The process is pushed forward by the World Bank, and other ostensibly international institutions which frequently provide guarantees to reduce the risk of the so called investors. One institution that is not entirely in the hands of the investors is the UN as Liberti's interview with Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter makes clear while talking about the World Banks (voluntary) Responsible Investment in Agriculture (RAI) initiative:
These principles assume that every government only has two options to choose from: to welcome an investor or not to welcome him. In actual fact, the real question, the real choice is: should we invest in small family farming, distributing land, building infrastructure, supplying storage facilities, or should we bank on large plantations? This question is crucial, but it is avoided, because it would imply agrarian reform and deny the government the advantage, immediate in the short term but potentially counterproductive in the long term, which comes from opening the market to big investors.
Liberti moves on to a small conference of small to medium sized private investors. Here the account is less satisfactory, he never seems to penetrate through the thickets of sweet sounding care and concern that effortlessly stream from the participants.
Next stop - Chicago, location of the largest exchange in agricultural commodity futures in the world. As far as responsibility for the rising food prices that accompanied falling stock prices during the Credit Crunch they are quite clear: It wasn't us, nor was it the surge of speculative money into the market. Hardly plausible though the argument that the prices reflect real world developments is not without some merit. It's a short leap from Chicago to Newton, Ohio where Liberti meets the Iowa Corn Growers Association at the Indy 500 race (The only race in the world that uses renewable fuel). The corn grower are as happy as the proverbial pigs in . . . and no wonder, the ethanol fuel that 25% of their corn is converted into is heavily subsidised and the increase in demand has made them money by the bushel load. Not so happy is Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute:
The transfer of corn to ethanol production is creating a problem on a world scale. This year in the American Midwest, a quarter of the 400 million tonnes of corn produced was set aside for fuel production as opposed to consumption. This has created an imbalance, given that stocks have diminished. Seven of the past eight years have registered a deficit in cereal production, and reserves worldwide have plummeted to their lowest level in the past thirty-four years. So prices have shot up. Over the last two years at the Chicago Board of Trade, corn has more than doubled in price. There is one main reason for this increase: the euphoria for ethanol that has struck producers in the Midwest, not least because of the generous subsidies provided by the federal government.
From Chicago Liberti heads south to Brazil. The main focus of his visit is on the two contrasting models of agriculture large scale corporate and indigenous/small scale farming. Liberti speaks to indigenous Indians: Here, until the 1970s, it was all forest, there were trees, there were animals. It was another world. They've taken our world away; large farmers: there's all this talk about this [work on his plantation] being back-breaking work. Of course its backbreaking, but it's no worse than that of a miner going down into a mine to extract coal. Everybody has got their own economic potential: people earn according to their culture and what service they provide. Somebody has to work. Otherwise, if we all laze about in air-conditioned rooms, there'll be no more wheat, no more sugarcane, no nothing. It boils down to this: if we want the TV, the air conditioning, somebody's got to do the dirty work, though it's not to long before this farmer confesses that he would prefer to do without his dirty workers, I have to take on a certain number to satisfy the agreement I made with the local government. But the land here is flat: all the harvesting and sowing could be done by machines.; the patron saint of Bio-fuels Roberto Rodrigues, Lula da Silva's agriculture minister who revived the ethanol industry and later on, in cahoots with Jeb Bush, promotes ethanol production in Central America where the implications for local farmers and peasants are even more disastrous than in Brazil; and finally Joao Pedro Stedile, spokesman for the movement of landless workers who views Bio-fuels as another step towards driving small farmers from their land. The Brazilian chapter is the least satisfactory in the book. Liberti doesn't really seem to push hard with his questioning, in particular with the large farmer and the patron saint of Bio-Fuels Rodrigues, though the background information on the rise and fall of Brazils Bio-fuel industry was definitely of interest.
Liberti's last stop is Tanzania, where the tale would be familiar to say students of the settling of the American west, un-fulfilled agreements, false promises, playing village off against village in order to remove resistance to outside investors primarily concerned with growing crops for the European Bio-fuels industry, or in one case stripping the land of its primary forest, selling the hardwoods, and buggering off with the profits. He speaks with Abdallah Mkindi, one of the Directors of Envirocare, and NGO focusing on the environment and human rights that has been following the questions of foreign investment in agriculture, who has interesting insights into the crisis of agriculture prior to foreign investment as well as the attractions of large scale investment, primarily as a source of hard currency to the government. At the Ministry of Energy and Minerals, the vacuous Styden Rwebangila of the ministries Bio-fuels unit gives an idea of the total lack of resources that governments in targeted countries have for dealing with large well-resourced investors. Perhaps, giving the opportunities for government personnel getting their hands on hard currency, there is also a lack of will?
Overall I'd consider Land Grabbing to be an excellent, accessible and readable introduction to the subject, if you like a 5-star book, though Liberti's apparent interest in the girth of those he interviews and how well they fit into their clothing was of zero interest to this reader, and the publishers puff about it being in part a travel book hardly lives up to the contents of the book. I suspect that readers who have already followed the story, its origins as newspaper articles (albeit lengthy ones), likely to lack the systematic and comprehensive out-look to make it a necessary book. 224 Come mai l'Etiopia, un paese che dipende dagli aiuti internazionali per sfamare la propria popolazione, affitta i terreni a prezzi stracciati a investitori stranieri che non producono per il mercato locale?
È davvero possibile sostenere che gli investimenti stranieri sui terreni africani generino una win-win situation?
Che relazione esiste tra la produzione di agrocarburanti e l'aumento dei prezzi dei beni alimentari a livello globale?
Questo reportage sulla corsa all'accaparramento della terra affronta questi e tanti altri interrogativi, fornendo un punto di vista chiaro sul ruolo giocato dai diversi attori in campo e sui meccanismi alla base di questo complesso fenomeno. 224
To the governments and corporations buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is ‘land leasing’; to its critics, it is nothing better than ‘land grabbing’ – the engine powering a new era of colonialism.
In this arresting account of how millions of hectares of fertile soil are stolen to feed wealthy westerners thousands of miles away, journalist Stefano Liberti takes readers on a tour of contemporary exploitation. It is a journey encompassing a Dutch-owned model farm in Ethiopia; a conference in Riyadh, where representatives of Third World governments compete to attract Saudi investors; meetings in Rome where the fate of nations is decided; and the headquarters of the Movement of Landless Workers in São Paulo.
Since the food crisis of 2007–8, when the cost of staples such as rice and corn went through the roof, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become more intense than ever. Land Grabbing is the shocking story of how one half of the world is starved to feed the other. Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism