Kenyan farmer Geoffrey Ndung’u adapted to a prolonged drought and now earns a living growing watermelon. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Thalif Deen
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has long warned that a quarter of the world’s farmland is “highly degraded”.

The main culprits are natural disasters, including droughts, floods and desertification. These pressures have now reached critical levels, with climate change expected to worsen the situation, according to the FAO’s annual report The State of Food and Agriculture, released here."Farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow." -- Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation

At the 38th session of FAO’s biannual conference, currently underway in Rome, three major issues on the table are the high level of undernourishment, volatile food prices and sustainable agricultural productivity.

The United Nations said up to 12 percent of Africa’s agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) is being lost due to environmental degradation, with comparable figures for countries in Latin America varying from six percent in Paraguay to about 24 percent in Guatemala.

According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), food yields in Uzbekistan have declined by 20 to 30 percent, while in East Africa nearly 3.7 million people still require food aid following the 2011 drought.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” said UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja.

“Desertification, land degradation and drought are key constraints to building social and environmental resilience, achieving global food security and delivering meaningful poverty reduction,” he added.

Mohamed Adow, global advisor on climate change at the UK-based Christian Aid, which promotes sustainable development and battles hunger and global poverty, told IPS, “Climate change remains the significant challenge facing food security.”

Extreme and less predictable weather patterns are having the first and hardest impacts on food production, which in turn affects those who are least able to protect themselves, he added.

Adow said that with just the current 0.8 C rise in global temperatures, the world is suffering from increased hunger, disease, floods and sea level rise.

“And this is predicted to worsen given the abysmally weak climate pollution targets in developed countries,” he noted.

This means that year after year, the numbers of people needing food aid and adaptation support are increasing as the effects of climate change exceed the coping limits of the poor, and as more people go hungry.

Developed countries have a responsibility and obligation to take decisive action to support adaptation and increase opportunities to develop sustainable climate-resilient livelihoods all over the world, Adow declared.

Teresa Anderson of the London-based Gaia Foundation, which advocates secure land, seed, food and water sovereignty, told IPS one of the key reasons for the existence of the U.N. climate convention is to address the inevitable impacts that climate change and increasingly erratic weather will have on food production.

Less rain, more rain, rain coming at unpredictable times – all this affects the germination and growth of crops, she pointed out.

Changing temperatures that are too high or too low can also reduce growth and pollination. And different pests and diseases are likely to emerge in different climatic conditions.

“To deal with these multiple challenges, farmers urgently need support to increase the diversity of seed varieties that they can save and grow, while improving soil health,” said Anderson.

Unfortunately, the growth of agribusiness focused on selling fertilisers and just a few types of seed, is making farming even more vulnerable to climate change, she added.

In addition, communities reliant on fishing and livestock grazing may find the ecosystems on which they rely producing less fish or grass.

Anderson said many communities will also face extreme weather events such as floods, hurricanes and droughts, as well as slow-onset impacts such as rising sea levels and salination that will make food production impossible.

Meanwhile, a report released at the climate change talks in Bonn last week by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) said the cloudy aspects of climate forecasts are no excuse for a paralysis in agriculture adaptation policies.

“Climate projections will always have a degree of uncertainty, but we need to stop using uncertainty as a rationale for inaction,” said Sonja Vermeulen, head of research at CGIAR’s research programme on climate change, agriculture and food security (CCAFS) and lead author of the study.

“Even when our knowledge is incomplete, we often have robust grounds for choosing best-bet adaptation actions and pathways, by building pragmatically on current capacities in agriculture and environmental management, and using projections to add detail and to test promising options against a range of scenarios,” she said.

The CCAFS analysis shows how decision-makers can sift through the different gradients of scientific uncertainty to understand where there is, in fact, a general degree of consensus and then move to take action.

Moreover, she said, it encourages a broader approach to agriculture adaptation that looks beyond climate models to consider the socioeconomic conditions on the ground. These conditions, such as a particular farmer’s or community’s capacity to make the necessary changes, will determine whether a particular adaptation strategy is likely to succeed.

The land by Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County, Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 10 2013 (IPS)

Africa is the main target for “land grabs” by foreign investors, according to a new report on large-scale land acquisitions around the world released Monday.

“Africa is the place for cheap land deals and most investors are from Western countries like the U.S. and UK,” said Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition (ILC).“Investors are looking for annual returns of 20 and 25 percent and many are getting it." -- ILC's Michael Taylor

Globally some 45 million hectares of land has been or is about to be signed over to foreign investors in Africa, Southern Asia and Latin America. That’s equivalent to 60 percent of Europe’s farmland.

About half of this land is for food production and half for biofuels, according to data compiled by the ILC, a global alliance of nearly 100 civil society and intergovernmental organisations, including the World Bank and United Nations Environment Program.

“Some investors aren’t actually farming and are only interested in land speculation,” Taylor told IPS.

Rural communities are being displaced from their agricultural, grazing, forests and traditional lands by international investors, Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation, the UK partner of the African Biodiversity Network, told IPS.

Most of the food-producing lands in Africa are held in common by local communities. In Asia and South America, hundreds of millions of small landholders, pastoralists and indigenous people do not hold formal land titles. And when it suits governments, they ignore this customary land holding and sell or lease the land to private companies.

Private capital from pension funds and investment firms are chasing food-producing land since they see it as the next big profitable commodity.

“Investors are looking for annual returns of 20 and 25 percent and many are getting it,” said Taylor.

Experts at the University of Georgia recently completed an assessment of 34 land acquisitions in Africa and concluded that in most cases local people lost “their land and livelihoods often in the absence of any real benefits”.

The U.S., Malaysia, United Arab Emirates and the UK are top foreign investors not only in Africa but in other countries, according to the ILC’s new Land Matrix Global Observatory. The Land Matrix is a website that provides the locations and details of nearly 1,000 land transactions all over the world.

The largest transnational land deals are in South Sudan and Papua New Guinea. The Land Matrix lists the individual land deals including the companies involved, the size of the acquisition and intended use. In Papua New Guinea, many of the land deals appear to be for palm oil production.

It is very difficult to track and detail land deals around the world and the ILC hopes that people will provide feedback and offer information, said Taylor.

“There is a huge number of land purchases going on that are not reflected in the Land Matrix,” he said.

Most of those are internal land purchases or leasing by elites within countries. Those are very difficult to document, he said.

“In the last three years, the government has sold more than 50,000 hectares of our land to companies,” said Lalji Desai, a Maldhari, a traditional shepherd in the state of Gujarat in India.

This is part of the state government’s plans for “development” but Maldhari and local farmers want to stay in agriculture. “The land is very fertile, we don’t want to give it up,” Desai told IPS from Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Up to 70 villages with 125,000 people now find themselves living in “special investment regions” and their lands are being parcelled out to foreign companies like Suzuki and Hitachi, he said.

“These are not well-educated people. They won’t get jobs working for those companies,” he said.

Most companies are getting far more land than they need and are making money off reselling the land. “Land prices have increased 20 times in last 10 years. Everyone wants to buy land, including powerful politicians,” Desai said.

Local people want to stay on their land and are working to strengthen their movement and get more public attention. “We want people to know the best use of our land is for food production,” he said.

This is the kind of situation that the ILC hopes to make public through the Land Matrix website.

The hope is that the Land Matrix becomes an important tool to address the lack of transparency that still surrounds large-scale land transactions, said Ward Anseeuw of the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD).

“The Land Matrix has evolved from a database into a public tool promoting greater transparency in decision-making over land and investment at a global level,” Anseeuw said in a statement.