Transcription
[Music] [Music] thank you everyone for attending the national Farmers unions webinar series NF University our presenter today is Sophia mon Suarez and the topic is green grabbing and the recent land squeeze report by ipes food.
Unprecedented pressures on global Farmland from green initiatives like carbon offsets, tree plantations, and biofuel crops are accelerating and converging in a land squeeze that is driving a surge in land inequality, rural poverty, and food insecurity, and risking a tipping point for small holder agriculture. The land squeeze report, published by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), details ongoing land dispossession as new forms of land grabs proliferate. Sophia Monol Suarez will highlight the problems and discuss the solutions that IPES-Food proposes, and we will also hear how countries like Colombia are currently working towards such solutions.
Our presenter today, Sophia Monel Suarez, uh, Sophia is a member of the IPES-Food Panel and was until very recently Secretary of FIAN International, an international human rights organization working for the right to food and nutrition. Before becoming Secretary General in 2016, she coordinated Finance's program on land and natural resources for more than 15 years. This work included close collaboration with peasants, family farmers, landless people, fisher folks, indigenous peoples, and rural workers' organizations. Sophia, I will turn it over to you and you can take it away as soon as I have your presentation up on the screen.
Yes, thank you very much, James, and a very good afternoon to you all. I greet you from Neun, which is a village in Germany. I am Colombian by origin, but I've been living in the diaspora for for many years now. So it's a pleasure for me to be with you today, um, sharing, um, the report, uh, one of our latest reports that we did on, on the land squeeze. Um, this report comes from the concern. I think you can put the first slide, please. Um, comes from the concern, um, about, uh, we noticed that, um, there is a lot of talk about how to transform food systems, how to make them sustainable, um, and, uh, what we notice is that one important part of the puzzle is, uh, related to land, especially and particularly the discussion around land inequality.
Because what we are seeing today is, um, a huge trend towards land concentration in all regions of the world, including regions which used to have a more egalitarian distribution of land resources. So, um, therefore, our report, um, wanted to really shed light on, on what is the status of land today, because of course, it is a central part of our food systems. And, um, we are very concerned with the trends, uh, to of this land squeeze, which is making, um, small-scale farming basically unviable and is threatening, uh, the food sovereignty, uh, of our countries.
Well, in this first slide, you see that we are referring to the existing, the available, um, data that we have in terms of land concentration. It is, it is outrageous to think that only 1% of farms control, uh, more than 70% of Farmland, um, and that the small, uh, that farmers, small-scale farmers control only 12% of the Farmland, um, part. And this is particularly unjust because, um, as we know, uh, small-scale farmers are the ones feeding populations. Big farms, um, are, um, more important for trading and for long supply chains and all these globalized structures, uh, of trade, but not necessarily for feeding the population. So it's remarkable that even though, um, small-scale farmers control only such a small percentage of land, they are able to do so. But the problem is that they are being squeezed, and this is precisely, uh, what was the main concern of our report.
You see that across regions, this, um, inequality, land inequality, uh, varies. The region I come from, uh, Latin America and the Caribbean, is the most unequal region, as you can see. Whereas, um, but as I said, the trend towards concentration, um, is actually going, uh, into all regions of the world. Um, I also want to say that this data is probably a little bit, that the concentration may be, may be higher, because the data that we have available has, uh, several different biases. For instance, it is very, um, it is not possible, um, according to agricultural or the national census, uh, upon which these statistics are based, don't record, for instance, uh, whether land is controlled by corporations or not. So therefore, um, we may see, uh, that, um, the concentration could be, uh, much higher. The FAO is currently working, the UN Organization for Food and Agriculture is, is actually, um, working on an update, uh, of these figures, and they will be launching, uh, a report on land concentration in October, um, this year.
Next slide, please. Um, yes, so in our report, then, uh, we wanted to look into what are the causes, where are the driving factors of this, uh, land concentration and this inequality, um, and, um, we look, uh, basically at four trends, um, which is driving this development today. So you see that, first of all, we will be looking at issues of, uh, deregulation, uh, and financialization, uh, of land. The second driver that we identify is, uh, green grabbing, um, and all the policies that are supposed, uh, to reduce, um, emissions, but are actually causing, uh, land grabbing or more, um, land, um, dispossession. The third point is the expansion and encroachment. Here we refer to issues related to urbanization, for instance, but also to mining, which is a huge factor of land grabbing and land destruction because of the environmental destruction that mining usually causes. And the third factor, the last factor, the fourth factor, uh, is the reconfiguration of the food system towards more industrialization and corporate control.
So you see in our, that in our graphic, uh, we, uh, also relate to factors which are, um, very important and also shape this inequality, and they are related, um, to issues of racism, patriarchy, um, and class-based power. Historic issues are very important, and I think James referred to in the case of Canada and of, um, settler colonies, that current patterns of ownership are very much related to historic, uh, disposition processes. And I think this continues to be, uh, a major issue today. Um, and other factors like, um, well, uh, macroeconomics, what are the main, uh, narratives today in in agriculture, but also, uh, in, uh, environmental protection. So let's have a look, then, at these four drivers and let's start.
Next slide, please. Let's start, uh, with, um, the first driver out that we identify, which, well, we label the land grabbing 2.0. And here, mainly, um, we want to point, uh, to this phenomenon called financialization of land, which is the control, um, of land, uh, assets by financial actors, mainly, um, pension funds, asset, uh, management companies, and other, um, um, ways of controlling land, uh, from the financial sector. So this phenomenon has been, um, has been, uh, going on probably since the, uh, deregulation of land markets. So this is, um, these are World Bank policies that were introduced in different countries at different moments, but mainly, uh, after the structural, uh, adjustment crisis back in the '80s. And these deregulated land markets made it possible that many actors have been investing in, in buying land, um, in different parts of the world.
So you see that, um, these large-scale land transfers that we saw, particularly in the year 2007 and 2008, after the financial crisis, have become rampant in all regions of the world. And then, um, they have been fueled by a renewed push to secure land for export commodity production, uh, but also they are very much related, uh, to large investment initiatives and growth corridors, like, for instance, the Belt and Road Initiative, or, uh, the special economic zones, uh, in parts of Asia. So we see that, uh, these are figures from, uh, the, the year 2023, agricultural funds managed. So we have identified over 900, um, active agricultural funds, which are managing over, uh, $150 billion. These funds are really on the rise, and these are, also possible through a very, very complex structure of investing in, I mean, many of the, of the corporations controlling these lands are based in, uh, tax havens. So therefore, tracking this speculative investment is very, very complex, because this is really a web of holding that is owned by another holding, and so on and so forth. So it is very complicated to track.
So land has been turned into a financial asset, and as I was saying, um, since 2008, there are more 10 times more agricultural investment funds, and since the pandemic, American investors have doubled their stakes in Farmland. Many of you have heard, probably, um, of this US-based Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, which pioneered investment in Farmland as a speculative asset. It is calculated in our report, we said that this, um, uh, insurance association, control around 930,000 hectares of Farmland worldwide. The figure could be higher. And here I would like to share also an insight from a report that my own organization has been doing, and that it is going to be launched, uh, next April, because this, um, US-based Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association may not be the largest, uh, let's say, transnational landlord.
We have identified in this report that will be upcoming in April, the 10 biggest, according to, it is a very methodologically, it is very difficult to calculate, well, how, uh, land can is being accumulated transnationally. But with the available information and sources, we could identify also a Canadian company, which is called, just let me see, one second, it is called the Manulife Investment Management. So we calculated that they control 2.4 million hectares worldwide. And this is basically, uh, in, they control, well, nature-based assets such as timber, but also agriculture, and they have forestry properties in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Brazil, and Canada, and agricultural properties in the United States, Australia, Chile, and Canada as well. So, yeah, there are some initiatives right now trying to, um, look more into in detail into the concentration of land by financial actors. And as I said, one very worrying phenomenon is the accumulation transnationally. I think, um, we are not aware that this phenomenon is is transnational, and this is putting, of course, a lot of, uh, questions, not only in terms of, uh, food sovereignty, but also in terms of democracy, because if very powerful actors control such vast amounts of land, you can imagine what it means for the population in these countries.
Another impact that we, uh, also record in our report of the financialization of land is the increase speculation, uh, and the rising prices for land. So this is extremely concerning, because for this makes, extremely, I mean, more or less impossible for new, for young farmers to access Farmland, because the prices, for instance, for the UK have doubled from 2010-2015, and I think, well, in North America, in the US, the prices have increased, uh, for 20 consecutive years, and in Canada, I understand it's a similar situation.
Next slide, please. Yes, so this is a graphic showing, um, concluded land deals with only agriculture as their purpose. So there are different initiatives. I think this is probably quoted from the, um, Land Matrix Initiative, and it shows how many of these deals are transnational, which is really a figure which is on the rise.
Yes, please. Next slide. Yeah, well, this is another graphic, um, showing the same. Yeah, thank you. We can move, then, to the next driver, uh, which are, is the green grabs. The green grabbing, so it's emerging as a type of land grabbing. It is not entirely new, but of course, um, it is taking land away from communities and redirecting resources from the South, uh, to the North. So green grabbing occurs when governments and powerful corporations appropriate communal or smallholders' land for large-scale tree planting, for instance, carbon sequestration, and top-down conservation projects, or even clean fuels. So green grabs already account for 20% of these documented large-scale land deals.
I already referred to the case of Blue Carbon. It is a company based in the United Arab Emirates. According to some estimations, they, they are probably the biggest transnational landlord, because these estimations go that they, um, probably control about 25 million hectares, um, in government, in in different countries like Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia, and Liberia. So they're investing in, in carbon, in different types of offsets, carbon offsets, um, and, well, these carbon removals are a type of carbon offset based on, well, removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it away so that it doesn't contribute to increasing global temperatures. The key mechanism for removing carbon is through reforestation schemes. Therefore, many of these companies are, um, have interest in, in forest, uh, property, and it's based on the premise that planting new trees offsets emissions or compensates for deforestation elsewhere. Even though the science shows that they are not really equivalent, despite the scant evidence in their favor, governments' pledges for land-based carbon removals add up to almost 1.2 billion hectares of land, which is the equivalent of total global cropland. And half of all these pledges interfere with indigenous lands. So the carbon offsets market, public and private, are expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and by 2023, carbon offsets markets were valued at $414 billion globally, a figure that is projected to rise to $1,800 billion by 2030.
Next slide, please. So this is taking land away from communities, especially smaller-scale food producers, indigenous peoples, peasants, and pastoralists. My organization has also, in fact, it was this week, uh, we launched a report on, I don't know if you have heard of the case of the Maasai in Tanzania. The Maasai people is a mobile people, and they have been threatened precisely by this, uh, carbon offsetting schemes. And, um, but, but the very same company that we are referring here, the, uh, Blue Carbon company, and they are, well, heavily affected by these projects.
Okay, so yes, please. Next slide. We move now to the third driver, uh, which is, uh, related to, uh, expansion and encroachment. We have titled that driver, and these are, uh, this relates to issues of urbanization and mining. So when we talk about encroachment, we are really referring to the huge swaths of land being taken out of agriculture or repurposed for extractive industries and mega developments. The green transition in the Global North and the ongoing economic expansion of China are rapidly driving up the demand for critical minerals like lithium, zinc, cobalt, and copper. So approximately 6 million hectares, uh, of land is currently used for mining the world over. Mining projects actually accounted for about 14% of the recorded large-scale land deals over the past 10 years, soiling some, some 7.7 million hectares of Farmland.
So we are seeing really a real competition, and in Colombia, this has been really a major issue, a competition of, uh, mining, uh, against agriculture. And we see how these mining projects have affected mainly, uh, indigenous people's lands, but also Afro-Colombian, uh, lands. In our report, well, we cite some, uh, of these examples and cases, and particularly in a country like Colombia, but I think it's also a widespread phenomenon in other South American countries. Not only the legal mining is a problem, which is a, is a huge problem, but illegal mining, uh, has been spreading also quite fast. This is also backed by, um, armed groups, illegal armed groups, and therefore for peasant communities and Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples, illegal mining has become also a major problem.
So, um, prime Farmland continues to be lost also to rising urbanization and mega infrastructure developments. The UN estimates that by 2030, up to 3.3 million hectares of the world's Farmland will have been swallowed by expanding mega cities. 80% of these land loss will happen in Africa, Asia, and especially in India. So this, as you can imagine, these land conversions are particularly damaging for food producers and communities, regularly sparking mass displacement, land conflicts, and wholesale degradation of surrounding environments. More than 90% of the corporations mining for so-called clean renewable energy sources have been associated with hundreds of human rights violations, including use of child labor and land theft.
Good. Next slide, please. So now we come to the fourth driver, four and last driver that we have, uh, called the food systems reconfiguration. So we wanted to point out here that it is not just about land grabbing, but it's also about, um, what is grown and how farming is being done, where control of land is effectively handed over to the global industrial food system by still. So what we, and this is what we called the food system reconfiguration. Industrial agriculture is spreading globally, and this business model, premise on input and intensive feed crop monocultures and factory farms, is squeezing out smallholders. This is so because as agriculture becomes more mechanized, specialized, and reliant on expensive digital and genomic technologies, the less smallholder farmers can afford to farm.
The situation is getting worse because agribusiness mergers are creating giant dominant firms, and these firms are pursuing highly monopolistic practices. By 2020, China's Syngenta Group controlled one quarter of the global pesticide market, while four firms, Syngenta Group, Bayer, BASF, and Corteva, control 50% of the world's commercial seeds and 62% of the pesticide market, with similar levels of consolidation along the chain. So market control and price gouging are now common. Leading firms hiked fertilizer prices well beyond the rise in production costs, increasing their operational profits to 36%, even as they sold less product. Since the '90s, input costs have risen substantially, outstripping increases in farmgate prices. So these dynamics are creating systemic economic precarity for farmers, effectively forcing them to "get big or get out." In the US, for example, farmers experienced record debt levels in 2023 on the back of rising input prices, including soaring land prices, forcing many farmers to sell their land to get, to larger players, to afford to live.
Okay, now, as I said, so these are the four drivers that we have identified, uh, that are responsible for this, uh, land inequality, extreme land inequality, and are responsible for the land squeeze, which is degrading, uh, the existing lands, and it is also, um, threatening, um, our food systems and our food sovereignty.
Now, next slide, please. Let's look, then, at what could be, uh, responses, uh, to address these drivers and to really ensure that, um, farmers, communities, indigenous peoples, um, and traditional communities control their lands and can, and can continue producing, uh, uh, food. So, and here, um, we are proposing, I mean, based, uh, on the struggles of many, uh, of the farmers' organizations and all the organizations, uh, rallying for agrarian reform and for, um, the control, uh, over their lands. So based on on that experiences, we are proposing in, um, several things.
The first one is the need to integrate the governance of land, uh, in order to really ensure respect for the right to land, uh, as it is recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but also in the Declaration, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. So communities, farming communities have a right to land. In many countries, this right is enshrined in their constitution, and it is important now that this, um, right, it is, um, integrated in the environmental and agricultural policies of the countries. So this is our one, this is our first proposal.
And I would like now to illustrate a little bit with what Colombia is doing, uh, because Colombia, the current government of Colombia, which, well, if you are a little bit familiar with, um, Colombian politics, is the first, uh, leftist government in the entire Colombian history. And, um, much of the problems, um, in terms of the war that Colombia has faced for several decades, are related to the extreme land inequality in the country. So this is the first government, um, which is trying to really seriously address, um, the land question in Colombia. It is also a government that it is trying to implement the Peace Accords that, um, that Colombia, as a state, have, uh, committed to, uh, in the course of these Peace Accords. The first Accord was precisely to address the land question. So Colombia has been distributing, um, land in the past, uh, two and a half years. It is, um, the calculations are roughly that they have, um, given access to land to about, about, uh, one, 500,000 hectares, to peasant, uh, communities. And it is also interesting that peasants have been demanding for a long time the creation of peasant, what it is called in Colombia, peasant reserve zones. It sounds, in English, I think that's probably not the correct translation, in the sense that "reserve" sounds a little bit, um, strange, but the idea is to create really territories controlled by, uh, small-scale farmers, that they can really manage these territories, that they can develop, I mean, make in a self-determined way their own development plans. So they are more protected. It's a collective way of managing these territories. And this government has approved, so it is probably around 10 of these peasant reserve zones, and 28 more are in the pipeline. And, um, so this is the first time in history that so many of these reserves are being approved. And the interesting part of that is also that for the first time, these, um, peasant reserve zones can be allocated in, um, forest reserves. So this shows that the new policies for environmental protection are also changing the understanding, um, in a way that don't see the peasant population as those destroying, uh, forests, or, uh, zones of particular ecological importance, but rather, uh, guardians of these ecosystems. And I think this is a major change, um, in the history of Colombia and of also of understanding how environmental protection needs to be done.
Another important change, um, has been also the recognition of areas of protection for food production. So let's say, in a sense, food production has been now recognized also as an important function of land and natural resources, and therefore, areas of food production are being identified as well and will be protected. I mean, the whole planning around these areas will be to protect farmland and to protect farming communities so that they can continue farming land. So this goes in line with our second recommendation in the report, which is about, uh, new land governance mechanisms that make possible, um, to put at the heart of these mechanisms, uh, the human rights, uh, of the holding of the farming communities, and to now, uh, create processes for democratic spatial planning and accountable land agencies. So I think that this example of Colombia, of creating protection of, of food-producing zones or areas, is an example, um, of these new forms of managing in a democratic and participatory way, ecosystems and natural resources.
The third, um, new policy that Colombia is also, um, has introduced is what it is called the Agrarian Jurisdiction. And this is, is about creating, um, a new, let's say, a new judicial system. I, I don't know what are the right words for these legal expressions in English, but it is creating, um, a jurisdiction, an agrarian jurisdiction, which will be specialized in dealing, um, with conflicts over land ownership, but also will be specialized in recovering land, public land, lands that were illegally appropriated. So this is the case in Colombia, on the shores of rivers, for instance, but also in areas like the Amazon region. Um, and, um, this is, I think, also very important, because we had in the past, um, a judicial system which was totally biased against peasants. I mean, they don't, I mean, for, for the judicial system, peasants would even exist, or, well, I mean, worth, or or deserved any special legal protection by the state. So this has changed also because the Colombian, um, there is also a constitutional reform now. The peasantry has been recognized as a political subject of rights and deserves special constitutional protection. So this unleashes this series of legal reforms, including, for instance, the creation of this agrarian jurisdiction, which is supposed to protect the social and ecological function of property, and at the same time, take into account and protect the rights of indigenous peoples, of Afro-Colombian communities, and now of the Colombian peasantry as well. So this is going to be also an important reform in this, um, integrated governance, as we, we, um, say in the report, including, uh, new forms of democratic spatial planning for the protection, uh, of, of food production.
The third, um, the third recommendation that we do in the report is to remove speculative capital and financial actors from land markets and to get land back into the hands of farmers. In Colombia, um, Congress is also promoting, um, um, a law to, um, control what in Colombia is called the foreignization of land, because many of these transnational actors are foreigners, and therefore, the idea is to not allow foreigners to take control, um, of Colombian lands. So this is a bill. It, I don't think that it has made a lot of progress, but at least just to show that this senator from Colombia was following actually the example of Argentina. Argentina used to have a regulation putting a cap on the amount of land that foreigners were able to control, and unfortunately, the new government in Argentina, uh, government, one of the first measures that he took when he was in power was to abolish that regulation, capping the control, I mean, the amount of land that foreigners were allowed to control in Argentina.
So there are different ways, and in our report, we cite, um, different examples. Via Campesina and Europe, for instance, is proposing a similar, a similar cap on the land. It is not that foreigners are able to control, but any individual or corporation can control. So this is, uh, work in progress, here in Europe. Another way is to make free, prior, and informed consent and preemptive rights to buy land for affected communities a mandatory condition of every land transfer. It is as, as it is the case, um, now in France or in Scotland. And lastly, there is also a conversation about carbon credits, which are the fastest growing derivatives markets out there, and one highly reliant on land. So carbon market mechanisms should be replaced by non-market mechanisms to reduce emissions, to avoid the flooding of our land markets with further transnational capital. In the case of the Maasai in Tanzania, as I was, um, telling you, they are calling for a moratorium on carbon markets in Tanzania until the carbon markets are properly regulated in Tanzania in a way that free, prior, and informed consent is secured, and that, of course, the rights of mobile indigenous peoples, as the Maasai are, are fully protected. So there is also this, this call for a moratorium, for instance, in Tanzania.
Well, the last, another recommendation of the report is to support alternative forms of land ownership and access. And here we are referring to an example in the US. An association called Climate Land Leaders provides a platform for non-farming landowners to donate their inherited land to entrant farmers. And another example is the African Climate Foundation, which is transferring land owned by absentee landlords to local rural communities. And the last recommendation is, of course, a new deal for farmers and rural communities to secure their livelihoods and their control over land with fair prices, adequate social security and pensions, and incentives to adopt agroecological practices. Examples out there, we call, we refer to one in Minnesota's revenue protection policy, which is already protecting farmers' revenues from bad harvests, and minimum support prices, as implemented in India or in China.
Good. And then, um, the last recommendation is, um, to give, uh, priority, um, to community-managed land conservation systems, which is actually one of the main instruments agreed in the Global Biodiversity Framework to meet global biodiversity goals while protecting local food production. I think that this old idea of conservationism that we will conserve nature without people is totally outdated and needs to be really challenged and and called out. So it is clear that the new, that the Global Biodiversity Framework understands, um, um, co-managing, community-managed lands for biodiversity conservation is the way ahead. And here we have also many examples in different parts of the world, and we refer to one from Uganda, which is the Batwa people in West Uganda are using mapping to collectively reclaim their traditional knowledge and practices and protect their land resources.
Okay, I think I'm more or less in time. Yeah, so I thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to our conversation now with your questions. Thank you.
That was excellent. Thank you, Sophia. It was, uh, really great to hear from you about the report. It was a great report to read, and I'm looking forward to questions that everybody has.