Land grabs and fragile food systems
Farmers around the world are having land they’ve worked for generations taken from under their feet. IATP has worked on trade and agriculture for more than 25 years. In all that time, consistently arguing that trade agreements need to respect and promote human rights, not drive a process of globalization that privileges commercial interests and pushes public interests aside. Globalisation enshrined in thefreetrade and investment agreements of the 1990s and 2000s have led to yet another manifestation of commercial interests trampling human rights: land grabs. ‘Land grabs’ is a term coined by the media to describe large-scale purchases or leases of agricultural or forest land on terms that do not serve those already living on the land. There is a large and growing body of literature-academic and more popular-on land grabs. Two forces have contributed significantly to the problem: First, globalisation-more specifically, the deregulation of trade and foreign investment laws, which has greatly eased cross-border capital flows, relaxed the limits on foreign land ownership, and opened markets to agricultural imports. And second, the failures of the international trading system during the food price crisis of 2007-08, which eroded the confidence of food import dependent countries in international markets as a reliable source of food and fed both speculative investment and investment in actual food production. This loss of confidence is compounded by climate change and the resulting destabilisation of weather patterns, which has resulted in less predictable agricultural production. Between 1995 and 2005,Ê90 percent of natural disasters were weather related (floods and droughts as opposed to earthquakes and volcanoes). Climate change is making domestic food supplies less certain and affecting major producers for export, too. The United States lost 40 percent of a record large number of acres planted with maize to drought in 2012. That loss of confidence has […]