Land grabbing emerged as one of the most important barriers to the advancement of food sovereignty in Latin America & the Caribbean at a recent meeting of social movement organisations. In advance of a United Nations conference in Buenos Aires addressing food security for the region, a new UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report claiming that land grabbing is restricted to only two major countries, drew condemnation from social movements concerned about the scale of the grabs and their the impact on the lives of millions of peasants, people of Afro-communities, indigenous peoples, family farmers, and fisherfolk.
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GRAIN is happy to announce its new book "The great food robbery: how corporations control food, grab land and destroy the climate", just published with Fahamu Books and Pambazuka Press. The book looks at the forces driving the world into the food crisis. It focuses on corporations and the ways they organise and control food production and distribution and how this destroys local food systems. It provides information and analysis that will enable and inspire people to take the food system back from corporations and put it in the hands of local communities.
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The World Bank’s policies for land privatisation and concentration have paved the way for corporations from Wall Street to Singapore to take upwards of 80 million hectares of land from rural communities across the world in the past few years, say farmers' movements and their international allies in a collective statement released today at the opening of the World Bank’s Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC.
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GRAIN launches a new data set documenting 416 recent, large-scale land grabs by foreign investors for the production of food crops. The collection of cases cover nearly 35 million hectares of land in 66 countries, providing a stark snapshot of how agribusiness is expanding across the globe and how it is taking food production out of the hands of farmers and local communities.
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India is one of several countries now being hit by what is referred to as a third wave of corporate retail expansion in the global South. Widespread protests led by India's small shopkeepers and retail workers have put a government decision to open up the retail sector to foreign control on hold for now, but corporations like Walmart and Carrefour will not easily give up on such opportunites for growth. The impacts of big retail's growing control over food markets in the South are particularly harsh for peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk because they are completely shutout of its supply chains.
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A new report by GRAIN documents the importance of milk to the livelihoods and health of the poor in many countries of the global South. Most dairy markets are supplied by small-scale vendors who collect milk from small farmers and pastoralists. But both are under threat from dairy corporations, like Nestlé, and other players, like PepsiCo and Cargill, that are trying to take over the dairy sectors in these countries, from the farms to the markets. A battle over dairy is under way that will profoundly shape the direction of the global food system and people's lives.
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Some videos of GRAIN receiving the Right Livelihood Award in the Swedish Parliament on 5 December 2011
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On 5 December 2011, GRAIN received the 2011 Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’, at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. GRAIN was awarded “for its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests”. GRAIN seized on the opportunity to demand an immediate end to land grabbing and a restitution of lands to local communities. The following speech was delivered to the Swedish Parliament by GRAIN coordinator Henk Hobbelink during the Awards Ceremony.
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Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. A new food system could be key driver of solutions to climate change. We don’t need carbon markets or techno-fixes. If measures are taken to restructure agriculture and the larger food system around food sovereignty, small scale farming, agro-ecology and local markets, we could cut global emissions in half within a few decades.
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Large scale agricultural land acquisitions are generating conflicts and controversies around the world. A growing body of reports show that these projects are bad for local communities and that they promote the wrong kind of agriculture for a world in the grips of serious food and environmental crises. Yet funds continue to flow to overseas farmland like iron to a magnet. Why? Because of the financial returns. And some of the biggest players looking to profit from farmland are pension funds, with billions of dollars invested.
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