The bulletin board is a place where GRAIN staff and others post their comments, suggestions, hints and assessments of documents, places or events. Or just share information that we think is interesting.
An excellent new report from Polaris and the Oakland institute on the impact of landgrabbing on water use in Africa. 'If all the 40 million hectares of land that were acquired on the continent in 2009 come under cultivation, a staggering volume of water would be required for irrigation (…) approximately twice the volume of water that was used for agriculture in all of Africa in 2005'.
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The Aguán River Valley in the department of Colón, Honduras, is a site of both an ongoing conflict and a powerful social movement. The situation of the local farmers was further exacerbated by the 2009 military coup in Honduras. But their communities are also unfailingly resilient. A story of repression and resistance.
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In the past few months, GRAIN staff have been participating in a range of meetings and workshops in different parts of the world on land grabbing. Most of these events have been organised by small farmers' organisations, others by civil society groups. GRAIN's role has often been to provide data and analysis to feed into the debates. As a support to these initiatives, staff have put together a number of new data sets that we would now like to share publicly for everyone's use.
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Groups that are interested and organising to stop land grabs from the "home base" of the land grabbers might want to look at this very well done report from Brot für Alle, about what the Swiss energy giant Addax is doing in Sierra Leone.
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More than 250 participants, mainly representatives of farmers’ organisations, from thirty different countries gathered in Nyéléni Village, a centre for agro-ecology training built in a rural area near Sélingué, in Mali, to participate into the first International farmers’ conference to stop land grabbing.
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Grabbing Gambela is a short video documentary about a massive takeover of agricultural lands in the Gambela Region of Ethiopia. Since 2008, the Ethiopian government has signed deals with investors from India, Saudi Arabia, China and other countries for large-scale agricultural projects in the region. The deals give foreign investors control of half of Gambela's arable land. In this documentary, local people affected by the land deals speak about their experiences.
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This video report by Canadian media activist Jesse Freeston vividly illustrates the courageous struggle for land and food sovereignty that peasants in Honduras are waging against the ruthless combined force of agribusiness and national and foreign governments.
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Food activists joined the "Occupy Wall Street" march. Here they explain why.
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....but the company's hedge fund has 50,000 hectares of land in South America and is spending $400 million on factory dairy farms in Asia.
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The people living on the lands now being targetted by US-owned Dominion Farms can learn a lot from the film Good Fortune, which provides a behind-the-scenes account of the struggle of a local community in Kenya to defend their lands from this company. Here are a few clips from the film.
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