Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers, irrespective of their race and colour. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MARONDERA, Zimbabwe, May 28 2019 (IPS)

For subsistence farmer Rogers Hove—who proudly brandishes a worn out letter for his five hectare piece of land he obtained from government following the chaotic land seizures from white commercial farmers over two decades ago—what matters most to him, “is to see my piece of land in my possession”.

At the age of 78, Hove has little else to show for the land he owns.

Hove has not made much money from it. Other than three thatched huts built from plain home-made brick, there is not much else on the land, let alone cattle—the ownership of which is regarded as a symbol of wealth.

“One day things will be alright and I may be able to farm productively the same way white farmers used to do here before we stepped in to take over our land,” Hove tells IPS.

But 20 years ago, Hove was 58 when former President Robert Mugabe’s government embarked upon a violent land reform programme that saw many black Zimbabweans taking ownership of huge swathes of land once occupied by white farmers—who were loathed by the now 95-year-old former Zimbabwean president.

Despite boasting of owning one of the most fertile pieces of land in Mashonaland East Province, Hove admits that many resettled farmers like himself have fallen on hard times.

“Yes, I have this land, but since I took over, I have not produced much because I have no means to do my farming properly. Other farmers who have the means often have to assist me, but that has not changed anything either,” Hove says.

Instead of tending to the farm, Hove’s wife, Agness, 70, is busy by the roadside selling trinkets and cigarettes to passersby.

“Maybe we will have food if I do this. We have nothing from our farm. Well-wishers give us handouts,” Agness tells IPS.

All their seven children have their own families living far from their aged parents, who have fixed their hope on the piece of land they invaded during the country’s chaotic land reform programme.

In Zimbabwe, it never rains, but pours for underperforming farmers like Rogers and Agness. Under President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, many of these farmers risk losing their land.

Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers irrespective of their race and colour. 

Briefing parliament at the time, Douglas Karoro, Zimbabwe’s deputy Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Culture and Rural Development, said “in the event that the government decides to distribute the land to people, it’s our policy to make sure that the distribution exercise is done fairly.”

“’The redistribution is not going to look at the colour of the farmer, the political inclination of the farmer, or the religious affiliation of the farmer,” Karoro told Parliament earlier this year.

But before struggling resettled farmers like Rogers face the boot from their land, for now the Zimbabwean government awaits completion of a land audit in order to implement the new policy.

Dispossessing resettled farmers here is not a new phenomenon. Under Mugabe’s government, unproductive resettled farmers were threatened with eviction.

At the time the then agriculture minister Douglas Mombeshora was quoted as saying, “what we are doing now is identifying farms and plots where land is not being utilised at all or not being used to its potential with a view to distributing it to others.”

Farmers like Hove pin the blame on government for their failures to successful farm the land seized from white commercial farmers.

“Government has always promised to help us with inputs to improve our farming, but only those that support the ruling Zanu-PF party benefit from the inputs while the majority like us suffer on the land we say we now own,” says Hove.

As such, the 71,000 families who resettled on farms once owned by white commercial farmers face an uncertain future.

Consequently, hunger has not spared them either as they have become victims of the country’s incessant droughts despite owning swathes of rich agricultural land.

“I have each year depended on food from donor organisations as my land hardly gives me adequate food since I settled here in 2001,” Menford Mutimbe, a 71-year old resettled subsistence farmer from Marondera, with eight children and two wives, tells IPS.

However, Zimbabwe’s resettled farmers have no guarantee of ownership to the pieces of land they repossessed from white farmers.

So for them, according to other farmers like Mutimbe, “getting capital from banks to sustain our farming activities is hard.”

“What we have are mere offer letters which banks have not taken in as collateral although government has made efforts to have our 99 year leases used as collateral to help us get loans,” Mutimbe said.

Last year, Zimbabwe’s central bank agreed to accept 99-year leases from resettled farmers as collateral after government changed the law to allow the 99-year leases to be transferable and bankable.

Despite the move, suffering continues for struggling farmers like Hove who says “banks are rejecting my lease for no clear reasons.”

Independent economists like John Robertson know the reason for this.

Soon after the government declared the state to be the owner of all land in the country, even the 99-year leases cannot be trusted.

“Government resented the influence of commercial farmers and decided that the best way to dis-empower them was to take away their property rights. They portrayed the move as a means to redress racial imbalances that were imposed by colonisation, but government also cancelled the ownership rights of black farmers,” Robertson tells IPS.

Ben Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), says the situation for resettled farmers is different as “former commercial farmers had property rights that enabled them to finance short-, medium- and long-term capital requirements.”

“Once these were undermined, the financial sector fled. Former farmers were responsible for the risk involved…if they failed, the lenders would have recourse,” Gilpin tells IPS.

Yet as resettled farmers like Hove cling to the hope of using their leases as collateral to get bank loans, Robertson has nevertheless painted a grim picture about this optimism.

“The collateral value of the land was cut to zero when the government declared all agricultural land in the country to be the property of the State. This meant that the farmers could not offer title deeds to the banks as security for loans; so ever since Land Reform, the farmers had no access to bank finance,” says Robertson.

Land experts like Professor Mandivamba Rukuni, a development analyst and strategist in the areas of agriculture, community development, business, finance, government, and education, blame Zimbabwe’s failing economy for the resettled farmers’ mounting woes.

“My main analysis is that Zimbabwe’s economy is in bad shape; it affects agriculture. It’s ridiculous to expect agriculture to do well when the country’s economy is choked. Financial markets are not doing well. Where can government get money to support them (resettled farmers)?” Rukuni tells IPS.

A programme supporting emerging women small-scale farmers has been hit hard by the drought. Here a crop of peppers and tomatoes at a school farming scheme at Risenga Primary School, in Giyani, Limpopo province, wilts in the sun. Credit: Desmond Latham/IPS

By Desmond Latham
CAPE TOWN, Jul 30 2016 (IPS)

Almost half a decade of drought across most of South Africa has led to small towns in crisis and food imports for the first time in over 20 years, as well as severely hampering the government’s planned land redistribution programme.

It’s the cost of food in an economic downturn that has been the immediate effect. But hidden from view is a growing social crisis as farmers retrench their workforce and the new class of black commercial farmers has been rocked by the drought. Also hidden from many is the effect on small towns across the north of the country in particular, which are now reporting business closures, growing unemployment and social instability."There’s no food at all, we didn’t even plant in the last season. It’s a cruel twist of fate." -- Thomas Pitso Sekhoto

According to emerging black farmers, the record high temperates and dry conditions of the last few years has led to an upsurge in bankruptcy cases and forced many off their newly redistributed farmland. While some have managed to take out loans to fund the capital-intensive commercial farming requirements, others aren’t so lucky. Even large-scale commercial farmers are now unable to service their debt.

“It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,” said African Association of Farmers business development strategist, Thomas Pitso Sekhoto.

“Now it’s going to be worse because of the winter, there’s no food at all, we didn’t even plant in the last season. It’s a cruel twist of fate, it’s affected us badly. Those who bought land for themselves as black farmers, those who took out bonds, it’s going to be tough,” he said. “It’s a serious setback to black farmers in South Africa – there’s no future if things are going to go like this.”

BFAP farming systems analyst Divan van der Westhuizen says these farmers had already been struggling with increased costs and lower production.

“The depreciation of the rand has a strong correlation on the landed price of fertiliser and oil-based products. Year-on-year there’s an increase of 11 percent on fertiliser and 10 percent on fuel,” he said.

“From the drought perspective it’s tough. The North West of the country was affected by drought conditions for the past four to five years, now production is down and costs are up,” said van der Westuizen. “Even if rains fall now, from a cash flow perspective it won’t be sufficient to cover the shortfall.”

Agriculture development specialists say support for the sector has been limited. The largest agricultural organisation in South Africa, AgriSA, has reported that its office has been inundated with calls for drought relief assistance. Over 3,000 emerging farmers (most of whom are black) and nearly 13,000 commercial farmers have received drought assistance.

“More and more highly productive and successful commercial farmers are struggling to make ends meet,” said CEO Omri van Zyl. “We appeal to government for assistance as these farmers have played a crucial role to produce food on a large scale. It’s especially farmers in parts of the Northern Cape, Free State and North West, Eastern Cape and Western Cape that face a severe crisis currently and who are in desperate need for financial assistance” he said.

Government ploughed millions of dollars into a drought relief programme early in 2016. But the support dried up in February. Now Sekhoto said his farm is in the grip of what could be a terminal cycle.

“There’s nothing. I will be honest with you. If you can’t help yourself, you can’t help your neighbour. The only income I had was when I sold my cattle. The banks have closed shop. While the white commercial farmers here have tried to help, they’ve also had to retrench, cut staff.”

Business in small towns in the North West province and parts of the Free State are shuttering with reports that up 20 percent of all small businesses closed their doors in the first quarter of 2016.

While farmers and businesses suffer, South Africa’s urban population has also felt the full effects of the drought. Some towns such as Vryheid in KwaZulu Natal province are using water tankers as their town dam dried up. Food prices have risen exponentially, said Grain SA senior economist Corne Louw.

“Normally, we’re a surplus producer and exporter of maize, but because of the drought we’ve had to import 3.7 million tonnes in the last year,” he said. “Records show that the driest year since 1904 was 2015/16 so it’s breaking records in various areas. If you compare the price of white maize to what it was a year ago, its 35 percent up year-on-year.”

In Limpopo province, an Oxfam and Earthlife Africa community gardening project has found itself facing serious headwinds as the drought continues. Limpopo is one of the provinces that was most severely affected by drought, making it difficult for smallholder farmers to grow and harvest their crops.

“Right now we get water from two boreholes, but it’s not enough to feed the school and the garden,” said Tracy Motshabi, a community gardener at Risenga Primary School, Giyani, Limpopo.

“Because of the drought, our efforts in the gardens are not being seen because of the water scarcity. There is not enough water for irrigation,” said Nosipho Memeza, a Community Working Group (CWG) member at Founders Educare Preschool in Makhaza, Western Cape.

Heavy rainfall was reported in late July 2016 across most of South Africa, but it’s come too late to save many of these small farmers. There may be some relief, however. Meteorologists at WeatherSA believe this year’s rainy season, which begins in December, could be wetter than normal. However, that may be too late for thousands of small farmers in the country.

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Jacqui Ashby and Jennifer Twyman
PARIS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

We are lucky to live in a country that has long since abandoned the image of the damsel in distress. Even Disney princesses now save themselves and send unsuitable “saviours” packing. But despite the great strides being made in gender equality, we are still failing rural women, particularly women farmers.

We are failing them by using incomplete and inadequate data to describe their situation, and neglecting to empower them to improve it. As a consequence, we are all losing out on the wealth of knowledge this demographic can bring to boosting food supplies in a changing climate, which is a major concern for everyone on this planet.The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

Whilst it is true that women farmers have less access to training, land, and inputs than their male counterparts, we need to debunk a few myths that have long been cited as fact, that are a bad basis for policy decision-making.

New research, drawing on work done by IFPRI and others, presented in Paris this week by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security will start this process – here are four fast facts that can serve food for thought.

1. Rural women have more access to land than we think

For decades the same data has done the rounds, claiming that women own as little as 2 per cent of land. While this may be the case in some regions, these statistics are outdated and are answering the wrong questions. For example, much of this data is derived from comparing land owned by male-headed households with that owned by female-headed households. Yet, even if the man holds the license for the land, the woman may well have access to and use part of this land.

Therefore a better question to ask, and a new set of data now being collected is, how much control does the woman have over how land is used and the resultant income? How much of the land does she have access to? What farming decisions is she making? There is plenty of evidence to support the fact that women play a significant role in agricultural production. This role needs to be recognised so that women receive better access to agricultural resources, inputs and services

2. Rural women are not more vulnerable to climate change because they are women

We need to look beyond gender to determine the root causes of why individuals and communities are more vulnerable to climate change. We have found many other contributing factors, such as gender norms, social class, education, and wealth can leave people at risk.

Are more women falling into this trap because they don’t have control over important resources and can’t make advantageous choices when they farm? If so, how can we change that? We must tackle these bigger problems that hinder both men and women in different ways, and not simply blame unequal vulnerability to climate risks and shocks on gender.

3. Rural women do not automatically make better stewards of natural resources

Yes, rural women are largely responsible for collecting water and firewood, as well as a great deal of farm work. But the idea that this immediately makes them better stewards of natural resources is false. In fact, the evidence is conflicting. One study showed that out of 13 empirical studies, women were less likely to adopt climate-smart technologies in eight of them.

Yet in East Africa, research has shown women were more likely than, or just as likely as men to adopt climate-smart practices. Why is this? Because women do not have a single, unified interest. Decisions to adopt practices that will preserve natural resources depend a lot on social class, and the incentives given, whether they are made by women or men. So we need more precise targeting based on gender and social class.

4. Gender sensitive programming and policymaking is not just about helping women succeed

We all have a lot to gain from making food security, climate change innovation and gender-sensitive policies. The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

A key to successful innovation is understanding the user’s perspective. In Malawi, for example, rural women have been involved in designing a range of labour saving agri-processing tools. As they will be the primary users of such technologies, having their input is vital to ensure a viable end product.

In Nicaragua, women have been found to have completely different concerns from men when it comes to adapting to climate change, as they manage household food production, rather than growing cash crops like male farmers. Hearing these concerns and responding to them will result in more secure livelihoods, food availability and nutrition.

We hope that researchers will be encouraged to undertake the challenge of collecting better data about rural women and learning about their perspectives. By getting a clearer picture of their situation, we can equip them with what they need to farm successfully under climate change, not just for themselves, and their families, but to benefit us all.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Farmers with the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) protest the concentration of land ownership in Brazil, during a Feb. 21 demonstration in support of the occupation of part of the Agropecuaria Santa Mônica estate, 150 km from Brasilia. Credit: Courtesy of the MST

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 27 2015 (IPS)

In Brazil, one of the countries with the highest concentration of land ownership in the world, some 200,000 peasant farmers still have no plot of their own to farm – a problem that the first administration of President Dilma Rousseff did little to resolve.

In its assessment of the situation in the 2011-2014 period, the Brazilian Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) found the worst progress in that period in terms of agrarian reform in the last 20 years, one of the church-based organisation’s coordinators, Isolete Wichinieski, told IPS.

“Historically, there has been a high concentration of land in Brazil,” she said. But what is worrisome, she added, is that during the first presidency of Rousseff, whose second term started on Jan. 1, 2015, “land ownership has become even more concentrated.”

“There was a fall in the numbers of new rural settlements and of land titling in indigenous territories and ‘quilombos’ (communities of the descendants of African slaves), while on the other hand, investment in agribusiness and agro-industry grew,” said Wichinieski.

Social movements had hoped that Rousseff, who belongs to the left-wing Workers’ Party like her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), would take up the banner of democratisation of land ownership.

But her government’s economic policies have focused on incentives for agribusiness and agro-industry, mining and major infrastructure projects.

According to the CPT report, during the first Rousseff administration (2011-2014), 103,746 families were granted land under the government’s agrarian reform programme. But that figure is actually misleading, because in 73 percent of the cases, the land settlement process was already in progress before the president took office, and the families had already been counted in previous years.

If only the new families settled on plots of their own during Rousseff’s first administration are counted, the total shrinks to 28,000.

The government reported that in 2014 it regularised the situation of just 6,289 families – a number considered insignificant by the CPT.

Since 1995 agrarian reform was given a new boost, with the creation of a special ministry answering directly to the president, and other legal instruments, largely due to the intense lobbying and protests throughout the country by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).

As a result, during the presidency of Luis Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), 540,704 families were given land, and 614,088 were settled on farms during Lula’s two terms (2003-2011), according to the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), which reported that 9,128 rural settlements have been created since 2000.

The Dom Tomás Balduíno camp, along the river that crosses the Agropecuaria Santa Mônica estate, next to the first crops planted on the 400 hectares occupied by landless Brazilian peasant farmers. Credit: Courtesy of the MST

In order for land reform to be effective, the CPT argues, more settlements must be created and the concentration of rural property ownership must be reduced in this country of 202 million people. But the organisation does not believe Rousseff is moving in that direction, Wichinieski said.

Agrarian reform was not on the agenda of the campaign that led to the president’s reelection in October, and the new government includes names from the powerful rural caucus in Congress, which represents agribusiness and agro-industry.

The agriculture minister is former senator Kátia Abreu, the president of the National Confederation of Agriculture. She surprised people when she stated in a Feb. 5 interview with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo that there are no “latifundium” or large landed estates in Brazil.

“Abreu has backwards, outdated views of agriculture,” complained Wichinieski. “She denies that there is forced labour in the countryside, she isn’t worried about preserving the environment, and she argues in favour of the intensive use of agrochemicals in food production.”

The conflict over land has intensified, according to the CPT, with the expansion of livestock-raising and monoculture farming of soy, sugarcane, maize and cotton, and growing speculation by large landowners with close ties to politicians.

A typical case

One example is the case of the 20,000-hectare Agropecuaria Santa Mônica estate, 150 km from the national capital, Brasilia, in the state of Goiás, part of which has been occupied by families belonging to the MST.

The property belongs to Senator Eunício Oliveira, considered the wealthiest candidate for governor in Brazil in the last elections.

In the Senate, Oliveira heads the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, Rousseff’s main ally in Congress. He served as communications minister under Lula in 2004-2005 and last year lost the elections for governor of the state of Ceará.

The landless farmers occupying 400 hectares of the Santa Mônica estate sell their agroecological products in nearby towns, promoting chemical-free family farming. Credit: Courtesy of the MST

Valdir Misnerovicz, one of the leaders of the MST, told IPS that the estate is unproductive and that its only purpose at this time is land speculation.

Strategically located between the municipalities of Alexânia, Abadiânia and Corumbá, Santa Mônica represents the largest land occupation by the MST in the last 15 years.

It all started on Aug. 31, when 3,000 families marched on foot and in 1,800 vehicles to the estate, part of which they occupied.

Since then, more than 2,000 men, women, children and elderly persons have been living in a camp and control 400 hectares of the estate. They are determined to win a portion of the land to farm.

This is one of the MST’s strategies, said Misnerovicz. “We occupy large areas of unproductive land. In the camp we grow a variety of food like green leafy vegetables, manioc, maize, rice, beans and squash. All of the families plant healthy food in chemical-free agroecological community gardens,” he said.

The tents in the Dom Tomás Balduíno camp were set up on the bank of a river that cuts across the estate, which comprises 90 different properties that the senator purchased over the last two decades.

“The day we got there, they tried to keep us out but there were thousands of us. We are never armed. Our strength is in the number of peasants who accompany us,” said Misnerovicz.

In November, a court ruled that Oliveira has the right to recover the property. But the MST leader is confident that despite the risk that the families will be evicted, they will be successful in their bid for the Santa Mônica estate to be expropriated under the land reform programme.

Misnerovicz said the government itself has encouraged the families occupying the land to continue negotiating.

“Then it would be possible, after a year, to make the biggest rural settlement in recent times in Brazil. We were with the president in January, who committed to a plan with targets for settling (MST) families camped around the country,” he said.

INCRA has avoided taking a public position on this specific case. But it pointed out that, by law, “all of the occupied properties are off-limits for inspections to evaluate the situation with a view to agrarian reform.”

The administrator of Santa Mônica, Ricardo Augusto, told IPS that the occupied area is productive agricultural property where soy, maize and beans are grown.

“The purchase of the property was notarised. The MST is not telling the truth. We advocate a negotiated, peaceful solution. Productive, occupied land can’t be expropriated, and there is no interest in selling the property,” he said.

But João Pedro, who was granted a plot of land in a municipality near Santa Mônica, sees things very differently.

During a Feb. 21 demonstration in favour of the occupation, near the camp, the farmer said the families camping there were merely seeking the enforcement of Brazil’s laws: “the land has a social function, and that’s all we want – for the constitution to be applied.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Markets are critical to the success of Zimbabwe’s smallholder farmers. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 29 2015 (IPS)

With agriculture as one of the drivers of economic growth, Zimbabwe needs to invest in the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who keep the country fed, experts say.

Agriculture currently contributes nearly 20 percent to Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product (GDP), due largely to export earnings from tobacco production. More than 80,000 farmers have registered to grow the plant this season.

But, even as tobacco harvests expand, food shortages continue to plague Zimbabwe, most dramatically since 2000 when agricultural production missed targets following a controversial land reform that took land from white farmers and distributed it to black Zimbabweans.Food shortages continue to plague Zimbabwe, most dramatically since 2000 when agricultural production missed targets following a controversial land reform that took land from white farmers and distributed it to black Zimbabweans

Depressed production has been blamed on droughts, but poor support to farmers has also contributed to food deficits and the need to import the staple maize grain annually.

Last year, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported that “hunger is at a five-year high in Zimbabwe with one-quarter of the rural population, equivalent to 2.2 million people, estimated to be facing food shortages …”

The report was dismissed by Zimbabwe’s deputy agricultural minister, Paddington Zhanda, who said that “the numbers [of those in need] are exaggerated. There is no crisis. If there was a crisis, we would have appealed for help as we have in the past. We are in for one of the best harvests we have had in years.”

WFP had planned to reach 1.8 million people out of the 2.2 million hungry people during the current period, but funding shortages meant that only 1.2 million were helped.

Last year, the government stepped in with maize bought from neighbouring countries. That year, Zimbabwe topped the list of maize meal importers, with imports from South Africa at 482 metric tons between July and September 2014. Only the Democratic Republic of Congo imported more maize meal during that time.

Agricultural economist Peter Gambara, who spoke with IPS, estimated that over one billion dollars is required to reach a target of two million hectares planted with maize.

“It costs about 800 dollars to produce a hectare of maize, so two million hectares will require about 1.6 billion dollars,” he said.

“However, the government only sponsors part of the inputs required, through the Presidential Inputs Scheme, the rest of the inputs come from private contractors, the farmers themselves, as well as from remittances from children and relatives in towns and in the diaspora.”

These inputs include fertilizer and maize seed. Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers’ Union president Wonder Chabikwa said he was worried that many farmers could fail to purchase inputs on the open market due to liquidity problems. Totally free inputs were ended in 2013.

Linking agriculture to the reduction of poverty was one of the first Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with a target of cutting poverty in half by 2015. In fact, all MDGs have direct or indirect linkages with agriculture. Agriculture contributes to the first MDG through agriculture-led economic growth and through improved nutrition.

In low-income countries economic growth, which enables increased employment and rising wages, is the only means by which the poor will be able to satisfy their needs sustainably.

Smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe need adequate and appropriate inputs to improve their productivity. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“Government should invest in irrigation, infrastructure like roads and storage facilities,” Gambara told IPS. “By supplying inputs through the Presidential Inputs Scheme, Government has done more than it should for small-scale farmers. This scheme resulted in the country achieving a surplus 1.4 million tonnes of maize last year.”

The surplus was linked, explained Agriculture Minister Joseph Made, to good rainfall.

Marketing of their produce is the biggest challenge facing farmers, said Gambara, who recommended the regulation of public produce markets like Mbare Musika in Harare through the Agricultural Marketing Authority (AMA).

Gambara maintains that the government should provide free inputs to the elderly, orphaned and other disadvantaged in society and consider loaning the rest of the small-scale farmers inputs that they will repay after marketing their crops.

“That will help the country rebuild the Strategic Grain Reserve (SGR), managed by the Grain Marketing Board,” he said. “However, the government has not been able to pay farmers on time for delivered produce and this is an area that it should improve on. It does not make sense to make farmers produce maize if those farmers fail to sell the maize.”

In the Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security in Africa of 2003, African heads of state and governments pledged to improve agricultural and rural development through investments. The Maputo Declaration contained several important decisions regarding agriculture, but prominent among them was the “commitment to the allocation of at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources to agriculture and rural development policy implementation within five years”.

Only a few of the 54 African Union (AU) member states have made this investment in the last 10 years. These include Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Ethiopia, Malawi and Senegal.

According to Gambara, as a signatory to the Maputo Declaration, Zimbabwe should have done more to channel resources to agriculture since 2000 when the country embarked on the second phase of land reform.

“Most of these (new) black farmers did not have the resources and knowledge to farm like the previous white farmers and such a scenario would demand that the government invests in research and extension to impart knowledge to the new farmers as well as provide schemes that empower these farmers, for example through farm mechanisation and provision of inputs,” he said.

Everson Ndlovu, development researcher with the Institute of Development Studies at Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology, told IPS that government should invest in dam construction, research in water harvesting technologies, livestock development, education and training, land audits and restoration of infrastructure.

Ndlovu said there were signs that European and other international financial institutions were ready to assist Zimbabwe but a poor political and economic environment has kept many at a distance.

“The political environment has to change to facilitate proper business transactions, we need to create a conducive environment for business to play its part,” said Ndlovu. “Government should give farmers title deeds if farmers are to unlock resources and funding from local banks.”

Economic analyst John Robertson asked why the government should finance farmers which would be unnecessary if it had allowed land to have a market value and ordinary people to be land owners in order to use their land as bank security to finance themselves.

“Ever since the land reform, we have had to import most of our food,” Robertson told IPS. “Government should be spending money on infrastructural development that would help agriculture and other industries.”

Before the land reform, continued Robertson, Zimbabwe had nearly one million communal farmers, a number that increased by about 150,000 under Land Reform A1 and A2 allocations.

‘A1’ farms handed out about 150,000 plots of six hectares to smallholders by dividing up large white farms, while the ‘A2’ component sought to create large black commercial farms by handing over much larger areas of land to about 23,000 farmers.

“Only a few farms are being run on a scale that would encompass larger hectarage and that is basically because the farmers cannot employ the labour needed if they cannot borrow money,” Robertson said.

“Loans are needed to pay staff for the many months that work is needed but the farm has no income, so most smallholders work to the limits of their families’ labour input. That keeps them small and relatively poor.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris   

Customary land remains a vital source of food security, cash incomes and social wellbeing in Pacific Island countries, such as Vanuatu, where formal employment is only 20 percent. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
PORT VILA, Oct 14 2014 (IPS)

Stemming widespread corruption in the leasing of customary land to investors is the aim of bold land reform, introduced this year in the Southwest Pacific Island state of Vanuatu, which puts the rights of traditional landowners above the discretionary powers of politicians.

Less than one hour from the capital, Port Vila, is the village of Mangaliliu, one of many across this sprawling nation of 82 islands and more than 247,000 people where livelihoods centre on agriculture and fishing.

Here, villagers are battling the loss of their traditional land due to a lease negotiated without their consent.

“We thought the tourism business or selling our land would give us work and employ a lot of our people, but now we realise we made a mistake." -- Mangaliliu’s Chief Mormor
“Somebody from another village leased one piece of our land to an investor. I tried to stop him. When he started bulldozing the land, I went with my people and took palm leaves, which we use as a sign of [something that is] taboo [forbidden]. We hung them all along the road and the case is now in court,” Mangaliliu’s Chief Mormor recounted.

Pristine coastlines and sea views on the country’s main island of Efate have attracted foreign investors interested in property and tourism development and now an estimated 56.5 percent of coastal land on the island has been leased for periods up to 75 years.

More than 80 percent of land in Vanuatu is customary, with ownership held by extended families, who are custodians for the next generation. Rights of use for farming or commercial enterprises are decided by group consensus, as are proposals on leasing to other parties. The importance of land to the culture, identity, food security and social wellbeing of Pacific Islanders is reflected in most national laws, which only allow the lease – not sale – of customary land.

Yet today with the penetration of the cash economy land has also become a source of windfalls to villagers and politicians alike.

“People have learned that if they sell [lease] one piece of land they can buy a car, satellite dish or speedboat,” Mormor said. “It can take many years to save this sort of money, so it is just like a miracle if you sell land.”

However under group custodianship conflict can quickly arise if, for example, “I have a brother who sells a piece of land and doesn’t ask permission of me or my sister, or my children, or my sister’s children,” he added.

In the past, the lands minister could personally decide on disputed leases. The World Bank’s Justice for the Poor programme reports that 21.4 percent of all new leases since the country’s independence in 1980 have been signed under this provision. Last year alleged improper land dealings accounted for almost two-thirds of lawsuits against the government.

Now, the ambitions of land reform by indigenous leader Ralph Regenvanu, who was appointed lands minister in 2013, have become a reality.

In December last year new laws were passed making it mandatory that all members of customary landowner groups give their prior informed consent to any leases over their land. Potential investors must apply to a land management planning committee for approval to conduct negotiations with custom owners. Two customary institutions, Nakamals and Custom Area Land Tribunals, will decide the outcome of disputes, rather than the courts.

According to Regenvanu, investor confidence will increase because now when “you get a lease you can be assured that it was gained lawfully.” But he also believes that the economic and social security which land provides to his people will be strengthened.

Steve Namali of the Vanuatu National Council of Chiefs in Port Vila commented that, while consultation on the reforms had not been conducted nationwide, he believed they would help address the fraudulence of land deals in the past.

With adult literacy in the province estimated at 27.6 percent, the greater thoroughness of the approval process should also improve local awareness of the ramifications of entering into land agreements. For example, reclaiming land on a lease expiry often requires compensation to the lessee for developments, even though many villagers do not have the financial means to reimburse an investor the value of a tourist resort or luxury home.

Local communities often “don’t understand what is going to happen in the long term” and that most likely “at the end of a lease, it [land] will never come back to traditional tenure,” Joel Simo of the Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance (MILDA), a regional civil society landowner solidarity network, said in Port Vila.

“There is now a process in place that has to be followed and it will stop individuals going and doing their own thing,” he said. “It has been a good change for Vanuatu, especially because of this land boom and people selling land left, right and centre.”

International investors from Australia, Europe and Asia have largely driven growth in the real estate market, along with the nation’s tax haven status. In 2012, foreign direct investment (FDI) amounted to 37.7 million dollars or 4.8 percent of GDP, but Mormor claims local people have seen few benefits.

“We thought the tourism business or selling our land would give us work and employ a lot of our people, but now we realise we made a mistake,” he said.

Despite average GDP growth of four percent over the past decade, with a high of 8.5 percent in 2006, an estimated 40 percent of people have incomes below the poverty line.

“I think people want development, but what type of development and in whose interests?” Simo queried. He believes protecting indigenous landownership makes sense when the traditional economy, which includes subsistence and smallholder agriculture, is the biggest employer in Melanesia.

In comparison, “many [formal sector] jobs available involve cheap labour and that only gets people into more poverty,” he said. Formal employment in Vanuatu is only 20 percent and the average local wage is 316 dollars per month. So, he continued, “If you don’t have a job, you fall back to the land,” which is the only safety net.

Mormor now wants to retain his land for community-driven projects, such as fish farming and coconut oil production. He is happy that the new laws will help protect the land for his children, but also admits the more thorough land registration and approval process, if he engages with development partners, will take much longer than in the past.

“I could be dead when these projects start,” he laughs.

While Vanuatu’s new laws are popular, it remains to be seen how well they work, and if they eliminate political cronyism.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Over two million Zimbabweans are set to face food shortages in 2014, thanks largely to the failure of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land policies. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Sep 9 2013 (IPS)

Tambudzai Javangwe from Mwenezi district in southern Zimbabwe, has run out of food and each day she begs for hand-outs from well-wishers so that she can feed herself an her six orphaned grandchildren.

Javangwe, 66, had low maize yields this season, which she attributes to both a lack of farm necessities like fertiliser and seed, and inadequate rainfall during the farming season.

“We had poor yields here this year and starvation is already biting hard on us and my orphaned grandchildren often go to school with empty stomachs,” Javangwe told IPS.

She is one of the country’s two million people facing massive food shortages, thanks largely to the failure of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land policies, according to local analysts and economists.

In a statement on Sep. 2, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) projected a period of significant food shortages for 2014, as one in four of the rural population is expected to need food assistance.

Political analyst Malvern Tigere said that the fact that Zimbabwe had run out food means that Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme, where over 300,000 people were resettled on land formerly owned by 4,000 white commercial farmers, has been a failure.

“Mugabe’s unusual admission that Zimbabwe had run out of food during his election campaign testified to the failure of commercial agriculture in the country and truly contradicted claims from his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party that agriculture had peaked after the seizure of commercial farms in 2000,” Tigere told IPS.

Since the seizure of white-owned commercial farms, food production has decreased significantly in this southern African nation. A report released in July by the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency titled “National Poverty Income Consumption and Expenditure Survey” stated that commercial farmers contributed a paltry 15,6 percent to the national grain reserve in 2012. It was a significant decrease compared to 1994, when they contributed more than 50 percent to the national reserve.

Independent economist Michael Hamandishe said the Zanu-PF government was aware the country was bound to face food shortages by 2014 in the face of poor rainfall during the previous farming season, which lasted from October 2012 to February 2013. This, he said, was a problem that was compounded by poorly-equipped farmers.

“The new Zanu-PF government saw this coming [starvation] because everybody saw the poor rains here that resulted in poor farm yields, which has also been a consequence of lack of farm inputs mostly to resettled farmers under the land reform programme,” he told IPS.

“The Zimbabwean government could not adopt precautionary measures timeously to combat the looming starvation and considering that the same government we have today failed to improve the food situation in the country since independence in 1980, I see nothing new in terms of managing to combat the looming food shortages,” Hamandishe said.

Gibson Nhari, an agricultural extension officer based in rural Guruve district in Mashonaland Central Province, 150 km outside Harare, attributed the looming food shortages to high costs of supplies such as fertiliser, and grain prices that rose 15 percent since 2012.

The cost of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in Zimbabwe rose from 30 dollars in 2012 to 35 dollars this year, and Compound D fertiliser now costs 31 dollars as opposed to 26 dollars in 2012.

“Small-scale farmers’ inability to purchase such inputs as chemicals, seeds and fertilisers has resulted to poor yields in the country, causing food shortages,” Nhari told IPS.

However, officials from the ruling Zanu-PF have blamed the food shortages on sanctions imposed by Western countries.

In 2002 the European Union (EU) first imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, including travel bans and freezing bank accounts of senior Zanu-PF officials and companies linked to Mugabe.

The U.S. followed with sanctions on bilateral trade with Zimbabwe a year later.

However, in March the EU suspended its sanctions against a number of officials and companies in Zimbabwe, though they remain in force on 10 people, including Mugabe, and two companies.

The U.S. sanctions against Zimbabwe remain.

“The land reform programme is a brainchild of Zanu-PF to empower local black Zimbabweans, but sanctions imposed on our country have impacted negatively on beneficiaries of the programme to effectively produce adequate yields. But I tell you we will soldier on with the use of our own resources,” Goodson Nguni, a Zanu-PF leader, told IPS.

On Aug. 29, at Zimbabwe’s 2013 Agricultural Show, Mugabe promised to import 150,000 tonnes of maize from neighbouring Zambia, saying no Zimbabwean would die from hunger.

But this will not be enough as the WFP says that Zimbabwe will require 2.2 million tonnes of maize next year.

WFP Zimbabwe director Sory Ouane told IPS: “Many districts, mostly to the southern side of Zimbabwe, harvested very little and people are already stretching their dwindling food stocks.”

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The United States and Colombia are the leaders in mental anxiety in the Americas.

Both have good reasons: Colombia has witnessed the longest lasting violence in any contemporary country: from 1949, with some interruptions, then on again from 1964 with the notorious guerilla group, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

The U.S., with its conviction that evil is lurking around every corner, domestic and global, believes it better have the arms to handle those bad guys.

Both countries have among the highest rates of structural violence, and the most unequal distributions of economic wealth, in the world.

There is a difference, though: one country submits its problem to third party mediation, of all places in Havana, facilitated by Cuba and Norway; the other submits its problem to nobody, nor does anyone seem to offer their services.

Colombia admits openly to the world that it does not have sufficient capacity for self-regulation; from the U.S. no such admission has been forthcoming.

Recently there was news from Havana: a breakthrough in the peace negotiations about a rather basic economic issue: land, and land reform – a redistribution of land, and of better land, to small impoverished peasants.

There are four other problems on the agenda: political participation (the problem being real democracy), ceasefire, drugs, and the rights of the victims and the bereaved in a country where four million have been displaced and thousands kidnapped and killed.

Reasons to celebrate? Wait. The class differences in a country ruled by the triumvirate of landowners, the military and clerics (like three brothers in many families – the Iberian heritage) force upon us a sad prediction: there will be one more military coup in the chain of coups, supported by the Church.

Let us not pray. Let us hope for disarmament of the FARC and the other guerrillas (particularly the reactionary paramilitary) and control of the army, lest we end up with Nepal: disarmament to the left, not centre-right.

To produce food, not only land, but also water, seeds, manure and some technology are needed. Water and seeds may become privatised – by Monsanto – so where does the credit to buy these inputs come from? And at what price?

What’s needed is collective, cooperative farming on communal land with direct democracy for decisions, not corruptible multi-party national elections. And can farming compete with drug commissions when drugs change hands until finally traveling via submarines to the U.S.? Or on the long road to the Mexican border?

Small farms cannot compete; cooperatives would do better. Well, let’s hope.

Expand the zones of peace, have them intersect, and aim at all of huge Colombia.

The U.S.: On May 23, President Barack Obama concluded that he should pull back the drones, and close the Guantanamo prison. Does he have the guts to do so, by executive orders, using vetoes?

There will be no military coup in the U.S. There are permanent, structural links between the Pentagon, Congress, the military industry and the media (owned by the former, and for whom news of peace is bad news) designed to keep the war industry going.

That industry has one major purpose: to stamp out any initiative to eliminate the special status of the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency” – like by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, by Iran, now by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) – so that the U.S. can pay by printing money, and even get the naive to buy U.S. bonds, meaning lending the U.S. petro-dollars or China dollars.

Alas, the U.S.’ efforts are self-defeating. The more wars against terror for U.S. security, the more insecurity and terrorism; the more wars to save the dollar, the closer the collapse of the currency of that bankrupt country: by inflation, by stock exchange crashes, by serving debts rather than people.

The synergy of these three factors will catch up with the economy. In the meantime Monsanto is at work, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other lobbies threatening anyone whose voting is not to their liking that they will not be reelected.

The finance industry is at work forcing the administration to withdraw one step behind the other from the tiny measures introduced after the Grand Repression to control the finance industry.

The U.S. Supreme Court did its part of the job granting money to politicians under “freedom of expression.”

And Obama did his job, offering to cut Social Security entitlements in return for some compromise with Republicans, the average retirement package in the U.S. now being only 40 percent of a salary as opposed to 70 percent in developed countries.

Montesquieu’s plan of separating legislative, executive and judiciary power so that they check each other does not work. In the U.S. today all three powers are on the same course set by the finance industry, to which the dollar status is key.

Politicians are bought and cowed and the president once again betrays those who elected him. Democracy does not work. The U.S. blessing – the Occupy Movement – was itself occupied: by armies of FBI agents.

All of this and worse was Colombia’s fate; the answer was FARC, armed revolt. Will there be a similar armed revolt in the U.S., given that the guns are well distributed?

For Anglo-American global direct violence, yes. As the suspected Boston bombers said, an attack on one Muslim is an attack on all Muslims, an eye for an eye – except when it comes to domestic structural violence.

Let us hope for the revival of Montesquieu and democracy or, if not, submission to outside mediation.

Excerpt:

Granaries are half empty for farmers in southern Zimbabwe, and the country is importing maize to make up for a shortfall of at least two million tonnes. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NKAYI, Zimbabwe, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

For the past five years, farmer Melusi Mhlanga has spent nearly 200 dollars each season for inputs, but the maize yields have not matched his investment. 

“With good rains I have been able to get more than 20 bags from my two hectare field but now I barely manage 10 bags,” says Mhlanga, who spoke to IPS at his homestead where he has diversified into livestock breeding. "Our maize projections for the 2012/13 season are below three million tonnes, yet our national need is at 1.8 million tonnes." -- Economic Analyst Eric Bloch

“Good rains are important for farmers but so is knowhow, which has been a challenge for me, and I decided to focus more on cattle breeding and running a business than on growing crops.”

Mhlanga operates a general store, a bottle store and a grinding mill, which he says are the new sources of income for him and his family since the maize failed. He now grows sorghum and millet for subsistence.

Extension services, education and advisory services provided by local technical institutions,  are critical in advising farmers on best agronomic practices to boost productivity and food security. Farmers like Mhlanga are potential role models under a well-funded agriculture sector.

However, state investment in Zimbabwe’s agriculture has been hijacked by political priorities at the expense of long-term food and economic gains. Once the top contributor to GDP, farming is now second to mining. Tobacco is still the main agricultural export.

At the core of Zimbabwe’s agriculture success is its main asset – land. Reforms availed more land to more people.

But without investment, there is no cheap finance to buy equipment and inputs, and no adequately financed and resourced extension services.

“Agriculture and land has become a political football between the main national parties, and with the donors,” Ian Scoones, an agricultural ecologist and professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK who has extensively researched Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector, told IPS. 

“Neither ZANU PF [Zimbabwe’s ruling party] nor the MDC [the leading opposition party] have a coherent agricultural and rural development policy. Neither has thought through the implications of land reform.”

Scoones, co-author of the critically acclaimed book “Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities”, explains that historically, Zimbabwe has invested massively in agriculture – in the pre-Independence period with the focus on building white commercial farming, and the period immediately post-Independence smallholder farmers in the communal areas.

“Since 2000, the land reform programme took precedence, and, for a period, agricultural investment was run directly by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe,” said Scoones. “Much of this spending was inappropriate, corrupt and so poorly focused. Since 2009, with the stabilisation of the economy, there has been some limited investment, but not enough.”

Economic analyst Eric Bloch said Zimbabwe can restore its agricultural fortunes but first needs to tackle its external debt burden, convert current offer letters on land to transferable leases, and clarify the implementation of the Indigenisation Act, which is precluding potential investors.

“We are in a food insecurity situation as we are still dependent on international food aid and maize imports,” Bloch told IPS. “Our maize projections for the 2012-13 season are below three million tonnes, yet our national need is at 1.8 million tonnes. That is why we are importing 1.5 million tonnes from Zambia and other countries.”

The World Food Programme estimates that up to 1.6 million Zimbabweans will need food aid after a poor harvest by smallholder farmers who contribute about 50 percent of the national maize crop.

“The only times that the government has put a lot of resources into agriculture is during election years for obvious reasons,” agricultural economist and farmer Peter Gambara told IPS.

“This year, Minister [Tendai] Biti tried to put more resources into agriculture because it is now accepted that the performance of the agricultural sector is affecting the performance of the whole economy, and he has been criticised by fellow ministers and the president for failing to allocate adequate resources to such an important sector like agriculture.”

Unveiling Zimbabwe’s 2013 budget, Finance Minister Tendai Biti projected that agriculture will grow by 4.6 percent, up from a negative 5.8 percent in tumultuous 2008.

Land reform was the first item on the agenda of Colombia’s peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Patricia Grogg and Constanza Vieira
HAVANA/BOGOTA, May 27 2013 (IPS)

Colombian government and guerrilla delegates have announced an agreement on the question of land reform – an important step in the peace talks that began six months ago in Havana.

“This first document…is the ‘golden gate’ for the continuation of talks on the rest of the issues,” FARC negotiator Andrés París commented to IPS shortly after Sunday’s announcement.

“This is a firm step towards a final agreement to end the conflict,” he said, adding that the peace process “is being strengthened as the government’s spirit of change and reform grows stronger and as Colombians begin to see a future of peace in these talks, as well as changes that benefit them and improve their living conditions.”

A Latin American diplomat close to the talks told IPS that it was important that the positions of the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) insurgents had come closer together on the question of rural development, and that the talks could now move forward on other issues on the agenda.

Land reform is the first item on the agenda for the peace talks aimed at putting an end to the conflict that began in 1964, when the FARC emerged on the scene.

The document on “integral land reform” clarifies however that implementation depends on the talks reaching a final peace accord, as one of the principles guiding the process is that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

Accords on different points on the agenda “will only be applied once we have an overall agreement to end the conflict. In other words: there will be no partial application of the accords,” said chief government negotiator Humberto de la Calle.

FARC chief Iván Márquez said the agreement on land reform was vague on some points, “which will necessarily have to be taken up again before a final agreement is reached.”

These specific aspects apparently include the maximum permitted extension of large landed estates and foreign-owned rural property.

“Everything will be done with full respect for private property and the rule of law. Legal property owners have nothing to fear,” said de la Calle, who added that the agreement would radically transform rural Colombia and that it went beyond the traditional view of agrarian reform and was aimed at closing the gap between rural and urban Colombia.

FARC sources have told IPS that in Colombia, where no real land reform process has ever been carried out, there are estates of up to 100,000 hectares in size, while 87 percent of peasants have no land.

And according to the Gini Index, which measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, land concentration in Colombia increased in the last decade from 0.74 to 0.87 – one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world.

The joint communiqué says the agreement on land issues would mean the start of radical transformations of rural Colombia, based on equality and democracy, by granting access to land for the largest possible number of landless peasants by means of a land bank, or “Fondo de Tierras para la Paz”.

The accord also covers housing plans, the provision of tap water, technical assistance and training, access to education, formal land titling, infrastructure, and soil recovery. “The agreement seeks to reverse the effects of the conflict and restore land to the victims of dispossession and forced displacement,” the document states.

“With the future generations of Colombians in mind, the accord delimits the agricultural frontier, protecting areas of special environmental interest,” it adds.

In addition, it says a food and nutrition system would be put in place as a form of social protection, to eradicate hunger.

The next round of talks, set to begin on Jun. 11, will focus on the question of political participation – FARC’s transition to a legal political movement. Other points on the agenda are an end to the armed conflict, the drug trade, victims’ rights and reparations, and mechanisms to oversee implementation of the agreements.

President Santos called the agreement on land issues “a fundamental step towards a final accord to put an end to half a century of conflict.”

“We will continue the process in a prudent and responsible fashion,” he wrote on Twitter.

In this stage of the talks, “these accords cannot be very concrete; they are just a framework,” sociologist Alfredo Molano, an expert on the conflict over land, told IPS.

A similar process will now follow with the remaining five points on the agenda, and after that, concrete details and numbers will be hashed out.

Molano stressed that the aspects on which agreement was reached included the gradual process of issuing formal title to all of the land occupied or possessed by peasants in Colombia.

“We’re talking about two million hectares,” he told IPS. “Today there are six peasant reserve zones (ZRCs) with a total of 800,000 hectares, and another five, covering 1.2 million hectares, are in the process of being created.”

The ZRCs are areas of collectively-owned rural land. But although they were recognised by law in 1994, they continue to battle for full recognition.

They curb the constant encroachment of the agricultural frontier in forested areas, and are considered a good formula to curtail the steady growth of latifundios or large landed estates.

Road in Pará's Amazonian region shows only pasture where once there was rainforest. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, May 2 2013 (IPS)

A fresh outbreak of violence between large landowners and landless peasants is looming in the Amazonian state of Pará, in northern Brazil.

The large estate of Itacaiúnas, in the southeast of Pará, in the municipality of Marabá, 684 kilometres from the state capital, Belém, is owned by Agro Santa Bárbara (AGRO-SB), a company that possesses at least 600,000 hectares of land in the state of Pará.

Since 2002 the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Pará (FETAGRI) has demanded that the property be confiscated and the land redistributed under Brazil’s land reform laws. More than 300 families are living on the land, in an encampment.

In late April, the landless rural workers announced that they would carry out “definitive occupation” of the estate and on Monday Apr. 29 they started dividing it into lots in order to “build the settlement themselves,” according to a FETAGRI communiqué.

AGRO-SB regards the landless farmers as criminals and says it has reported their actions to the military police, in order to keep the peace and avoid conflict.

“This group of land invaders is planning to divide the property into lots. Its goal is to expand the illegal occupation. This is a new criminal action by the invaders, who have the estate under their control and are blocking access by other people,” AGRO-SB said in a communiqué.

There is a real possibility of imminent violent conflict, because heavily armed groups hired by the estate owners have been reported in the area.

José Batista, a lawyer for the Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who is following developments closely, told IPS the conflict in Itacaiúnas is “quite serious.”

“These families have been waiting to be settled (with legal distribution of land under the land reform process) for a long time. The company has hired armed guards and we have received information that it has poisoned the pastures in order to force the families to leave. This has added to the tension, and now (the peasants) have decided to occupy a larger area,” he said.

Although the police were called in to prevent a direct clash between the rural workers and the armed guards, sometimes the police presence itself generates conflict.

According to Batista, the government decided to expropriate the estate in 2010, but AGRO-SB obtained a court injunction suspending the issuing of property titles to the settlers by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The encamped families will not give way, but they want a peaceful solution to the problem,” Batista said.

Meanwhile, there is a dispute over the value of the indemnity that the government should pay AGRO-SB for expropriating the estate. The company had negotiated with INCRA to accept the equivalent of 11.5 million dollars.

But the cost of the environmental damage caused by the company, which deforested the jungle area of the estate, estimated at three million dollars, was deducted from that sum. The company then presented a report valuing the property at 21 million dollars.
According to Batista, the estate has an area of 10,600 hectares. There are reports that over 60 percent of the land was publicly owned, and that the estate is unproductive.

A large proportion of the conflicts and deaths caused by land disputes have occurred in the Amazonian region, where the agricultural frontier is expanding and infrastructure and mining projects have intruded.

This is one of the main causes of violence in the south and southeast of Pará, the second largest state in the country and the national leader for human rights violations and murders over land conflicts.

According to the CPT, between 1964 and 2010 there were 914 murders of rural workers, trade unionists, lawyers and members of religious orders in Pará, of which 654 were perpetrated in the south and southeast of the state.

The figures are not precise, because many cases do not even make it to the light of day, according to the report “Violação de direitos humanos sul e sudeste do Pará” (Human Rights Violations in the South and Southeast of Pará) published by the CPT, FETAGRI, and other organisations in March 2013.

“Action by the justice system is also a distance of light-years away from the crimes committed and the punishment of offenders,” Batista said.

Of the 914 murders in Pará mentioned above, only 18 have come to trial.

Between 1980 and 2003, 35 massacres were committed in the south and southeast of Pará, with a death toll of 212 rural workers. Some of the trials in the courts have dragged on for more than 25 years.

Death threats are common currency. The report says that between 2000 and 2011, 165 people in the country received death threats, including 71 in Pará. Of those threatened, 42 have been murdered, 18 of them in Pará state.

“Land reform is a Utopia. Violence in Pará is increasing, impunity hinders any advance in the investigation of cases, and the targets of the murders are leaders of social organisations,” Adebral Lima Júnior, the representative in Pará of the human rights commission of the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, the Brazilian bar association, told IPS.

According to Marianne Andersson, a member of the board of trustees of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation who was part of a delegation that visited the area in April in solidarity with Brazilian activists, “internationalising” the issue is a way of pressuring for its solution.

“We should never keep silent about these injustices and deaths. Nowhere in the world are so many murders related to land and the environment committed as in Brazil. Half of the worldwide murders related to land conflicts take place in this country. This is unacceptable,” Andersson, a former member of the Swedish parliament, told IPS.

The Foundation, which awards what is known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” will encourage its global network to write letters of complaint to Brazilian embassies the world over. “We are calling on the Brazilian government to urgently implement land reform for the sake of justice,” Andersson said.

Dead trees mark the site of the 1996 massacre in Eldorado dos Carajás. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
ELDORADO DOS CARAJÁS, Brazil , Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

The order came from the office of the governor of the northern Brazilian state of Pará, Almir Gabriel, at 5:00 PM on Apr. 17, 1996: clear route PA-150, the epicentre of social protests for land reform, at any cost.

Route PA-150 joined the city of Marabá and the town of Parauapebas, in the southeast of the Amazonian state of Pará, the location of some of the country’s largest mining and ranching projects.

On that day in 1996, at a spot known as the “S” curve on route PA-150 in Eldorado dos Carajás municipality, 800 kilometres from the state capital Belém, 150 police officers opened fire on some 1,000 demonstrators belonging to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) who were blocking the road.

Nineteen people were killed and 70 were wounded. The demonstrators were on their way to Belém to demand the expropriation of the Macaxeira estate in Curionópolis, close to Eldorado, already under occupation by 1,500 families, and the distribution of its land under the land reform laws.

The tragedy placed land reform on the political agenda of this South American country, and Apr. 17 was named International Day of Peasant Struggle.

This year is the 17th anniversary of the massacre, and the 15th anniversary of the creation of Assentamento 17 de Abril, the peasant settlement founded in response to the demonstrators’ demands.

The settlement was created nearly two years after the massacre, when the National Institute for Colonisation and Land Reform (INCRA) declared the Macaxeira estate unproductive, a necessary condition for expropriation according to the land reform laws.

Some 700 previously landless families are now settled on 37,000 hectares of the estate which the MST activists occupied in 1996. Today they are struggling to survive, without sources of employment or support to make their plots of land productive.

Ivagno Brito, the son of peasants, was 13 years old when he witnessed the massacre. Today he is 30, and dedicated to the MST cause.

“People were desperate, it was sheer madness. Imagine the scene, a whole bunch of people in the crossfire. What affected me most was seeing women and children taking cover in a small chapel that no longer exists,” said Brito, pointing out the exact spot of the massacre on the “S” curve.

“I can’t forget it. I lost my head. I couldn’t find my father and I began to run…Later on I found myself in the bushes,” he told IPS.

Maria Zelzuita, 48, was also there. “They wanted us to clear the road but we were on foot. So the police decided to open fire to clear it. What I can’t forget was the people screaming and the children crying for their mothers,” she said.

“There were already people dead on the asphalt. I took four little children by the hand to rescue them. I ran off the road towards the bushes, and we also carried a boy who had been shot.”

Zelzuita has a plot of 25 hectares of land where she grows rice, cassava, maize and pumpkins.

But experience has shown that it is not enough to distribute land without providing the instruments and knowledge to develop sustainable agriculture.

Zelzuita works in partnership with the people in the settlement. She earns a living as an assistant cook at the local school, and she is also a student and a single mother of three. At home she has piped water and electricity.

“I am happy to be a settler; I have somewhere to live and raise my children. Before I did not have this, and I can’t imagine myself in a city. But there is no employment here, and many people have to go to the cities to find work,” she told IPS.

In the face of these difficulties, many INCRA settlers have sold their lots and left. The sale of plots in the land reform settlements is a frequent occurrence in Pará.

Forty-nine-year-old “Dona” Rosa Costa Miranda has no plans to leave the rural area, but she was overwhelmed by the effort it took to cultivate a vegetable garden in such poor soil, so she decided to rent her land for grazing cattle.

“Today I have a plot of land and a house. I produce hardly anything because I am on my own, but I rent it out. Life in the settlement is hard because there is no work. Some people owe money to the bank and have no way of making payments,” she told IPS.

Dona Rosa was born in Maranhão, in the arid Northeast, the poorest part of Brazil. At the age of 16 she came to Pará with her husband, a farmer. She took part in the occupation of the Macaxeira estate, and on the day of the massacre she was one of the women who hid in the small chapel.

Recently, Dona Rosa got funds to plant “cupuaçu”, an Amazonian fruit. But a slash-and-burn fire lit by her neighbours – a common practice to clean and prepare the land for cultivation – spread out of control and burned her fruit trees.

In spite of the difficulties, “this is better than living on the outskirts of cities or in the favelas (shanty towns). Having a plot of land nowadays means security. I don’t plan to move. City streets are very dangerous,” she said.

Expropriating unproductive portions of estates and redistributing the land is a slow process that can take up to a decade.

The creation of the 17 de Abril settlement was achieved “two years after the massacre because of the blood that was spilt. People in some encampments have been waiting for 12 years and land reform has still not arrived for them,” Dona Rosa said.

The Amazon region is no longer what it was when she first arrived from the Northeast. To reach Assentamento 17 de Abril, you drive through small villages and urban areas that have sprung up along the side of the road, like Sororó, Eldorado dos Carajás and Curionópolis, places where there is heavy traffic of trucks loaded with minerals.

The former route PA-150, now paved federal highway BR-155, passes close by the industrial district of Marabá which has 12 steelmaking plants and large ranching properties, all of them in the middle of Amazonia.

The view from Marabá is a landscape of pasture, without a single tree. “It’s changing a lot, that’s why we’re dying of drought. In a few years’ time there won’t be any rain, because there aren’t any trees,” Dona Rosa complained.

Children at the MST’s Frei Henri des Roziers Camp in Pará, Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Toiling beneath a blazing sun in the humid heat of the Amazon, Waldemar dos Santos, 60, tends the community garden he shares with other landless peasant farmers in the Brazilian state of Pará, as they wait for agrarian reform to provide them with the opportunity for a better life.

“My dream is a small plot of land. Our goal is to bring an end to hunger in this country, which is falling off the precipice of need,” he told Tierramérica*. As a child, Santos fled the drought-stricken northeast Brazilian state of Bahia and migrated to the northern state of Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region.

His family is one of the 280 families living in the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp, established by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Aug. 8, 2010. The camp is named after a Dominican friar and lawyer from the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission who continues to fight in defence of human rights in the region at the age of 82.

The landless peasants are occupying a 400-hectare estate known as Fazendinha, located off federal highway BR-155 roughly 100 kilometres from the city of Marabá. They say that the purported owners of the estate, formerly a cattle ranch, created it by invading and illegally deforesting public land, and that at the time of the occupation, it had been left idle and unproductive.

This is the justification for almost all of the land occupations by social movements demanding agrarian reform in Brazil.

In the southeast of Pará, where the struggle over land is most violent, over 500 settlements of small farmers have been legalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). But there are still more than 100 camps of families living in tents and straw huts waiting for the federal government to grant them legal ownership of the land.

It takes an average of five years to get the government to confiscate a property and allocate the land to agrarian reform.

To reach the Frei Henri camp, you need to drive along a long stretch of the dusty BR-155, full of potholes and trucks loaded with minerals that block the road day and night.

The region was once rich in cashew trees, which were razed to make way for cattle pastures. Right in the heart of the Amazon, the towering green canopies and exuberant vegetation of the rainforest were replaced with the flat monotony of grassland years ago.

The occupation of Fazendinha has led to bitter conflicts with local ranch owners, who have joined forces and hired private armed guards to intimidate the landless farmers and destroy their crops.

“We plant crops to grow healthy food. The ranch owners don’t produce anything and claim that their lands are productive. We face constant threats. Justice in Pará is very slow. We wait and despair,” said Dos Santos.

“Here, land is power,” declared Maria Raimunda César, 39, a member of the MST coordinating committee in Pará. “The conflict is never-ending. In Pará, people are gunned down like animals. A side of beef for export is worth more than a human life. There is tremendous injustice, and growing oppression and violence.”

According to César, agrarian reform is ignored in national policies. Both the current government of Dilma Rousseff and that of her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “removed the issue from the agenda.”

Changes in land use tend to follow a similar perverse pattern, said César. First the rainforest is opened up to make way for mining and logging for charcoal production. This is followed by the invasion of public lands by private landholders, who destroy the forest and plant grasses for cattle grazing.

On average, there is one head of cattle per hectare, she noted.

Also along highway BR-155, but close to Marabá, there is another camp of landless peasant farmers, the Helenira Resende Camp, which was set up on Mar. 1, 2010 and is now home to 150 families. In addition to intimidation by armed men, these farmers also face airborne threats: toxic agricultural products sprayed over their homes and fields.

Raúl Montenegro, an Argentine activist who participated in an international mission in solidarity with the landless peasants of Pará, told Tierramérica that “the combined use of bullets and poisons is tantamount to chemical warfare against these communities.”

“The large landholders claim that they are spraying these chemicals on their own lands, but this is a way of evading responsibility,” said Montenegro, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and a recipient in 2004 of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

“We were not only able to confirm that groups of armed men laid siege to an entire community and subjected them to a nightly hail of gunfire and loud bombs at the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp. We also witnessed how companies like Santa Barbara conduct aerial spraying of pesticides,” he denounced.

“This poison reaches children, adolescents and adults, with total impunity, with no government control, and no epidemiological or environmental testing,” he added.

“Our motto is to occupy and resist, but they are an extremely powerful group. The men at the ranch are heavily armed and they shoot,” said Aldemir Monteiro de Souza, 28, a resident of the Helenira Resende Camp, which occupies 50 hectares within the Cedro ranch, an estate covering a total area of almost 15,000 hectares.

The “powerful group” he is referring to are the owners of the cattle company Agropecuária Santa Barbara. One of the company’s biggest shareholders is banker Daniel Dantas, who was arrested in 2008 for financial crimes and money laundering.

According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission, in the last 10 years alone, the Santa Barbara Group has bought up 800,000 hectares of land in six municipalities in Pará.

“The group appropriates public lands, uses slave labour, and commits environmental crimes,” said Charles Trocate, an MST coordinator in Pará.

The landless peasants are waiting for INCRA technicians to inspect the Cedro ranch to determine if it is productive and legal. If irregularities are detected, the process for its expropriation will begin, and the land will subsequently be allocated in parcels to the farmers.

A hearing with the INCRA agrarian oversight committee has been scheduled for May 22 at the Justice Forum in Marabá. This will be the first step, after years of occupation and the establishment of the landless farmers’ camp.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

The execution-style killing of a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement in a sugarcane plantation in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, where bodies of opponents of the dictatorship were incinerated in the 1970s, recalls one of the most tragic chapters in this country’s history.

Cícero Guedes, murdered Jan. 26 in the north of Rio de Janeiro.

In the book “Memórias de uma Guerra Suja” (Memoirs of a Dirty War), Cláudio Guerra, formerly an agent of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), the 1964-1985 military regime’s political police, tells how the bodies of 10 leftwing activists were burned, in order to leave no trace, in the oven of the Usina Cambahyba sugarcane plant in Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Forty years later, the name of this agroindustrial complex of seven plantations with a total area of 3,500 hectares is again linked to the silencing of a bothersome voice, but this time under a full democracy.

Fifty-four-year-old Cícero Guedes was an outstanding leader in the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). He led the land occupation of the Usina Cambahyba plant which gave rise to the Luiz Maranhão encampment.

“He was a real symbol, and (his murder) sends a powerful message to the MST, which is organising the land claims of rural workers in the area,” one of the MST national directors, Marcelo Durão, told IPS.

“We are in conflict with the forces of oppression in the region,” he said, and he described Guedes as “a staunch activist, consistent and very focused on the struggle for land, as well as an authority on agroecological production.”

Marcos Pedlowski, a professor at the State University of North Fluminense who has studied land reform issues there since 1998, said the murder “is clearly an attempt to break up the organisation, rather than a petty dispute.” Guedes was “an icon of efforts in the struggle for land”, he said.

The MST leader was cut down by at least 10 bullets in an ambush in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 26, near the sugarcane industrial complex. He was cycling home from a meeting to negotiate the legalisation of the situation of the 100 landless families in the encampment.

The dispute over land ownership with agribusiness owners in the region “has been exacerbated by the delay in legal procedures involving properties regarded as unproductive, and therefore subject to expropriation for agrarian reform purposes,” said Maria do Rosário Nunes, the human rights secretary for the Brazilian Presidency. The Cambahyba case is an example, she said in a communiqué.

Legal authorisation for the expropriation, which effectively allows it to go ahead, was granted in August 2012, 14 years after the ruling by the Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The backdrop (to the murder) is the slowness of federal justice,” Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator for the Socialism and Freedom Party and chair of the Human Rights Commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature, told IPS in an interview.

“The large plantations in the sugarcane processing region are bankrupt and are in debt to the state, in an area where there is a great concentration of poor and landless people. This is where INCRA really has to ensure land reform,” he said.

The large estates belonged to the late Heli Ribeiro Gomes, a former deputy governor of Rio de Janeiro, and were passed on to his heirs.

In the book, Guerra says he took advantage of his friendship with Ribeiro Gomes to “disappear” the bodies of the leftwing activists, using the factory oven.

The story is “absurd”, according to Ribeiro Gomes’s relatives, but other equally macabre tales have been borne out in reality, even in the present day, like the killing of Guedes and other rural activists whose deaths did not receive as much publicity.

“They say 10 activists were cremated. But we can well believe there were many more,” said Durão. The area is notorious for its history of violence against rural workers on the part of the “sugar kings” and their hired killers.

Durão drew attention to the “brutality” of the killing, and its “premeditated nature”, with four shots to the head and six to the left side of the chest.

Freixo said it was “a murder by several killers, an ambush… and nothing was taken. Clearly it was an execution.”

The northern part of the Fluminense flats has not changed much – at least in terms of fundamental issues like land ownership, human exploitation and violence – since the dictatorship era, nor since previous centuries, when the first forms of slavery in Brazil were introduced on sugarcane plantations.

In 2009, a Labour Ministry report said Campos dos Goytacazes was the area with the highest number of workers labouring in slave-like conditions, a shocking situation in the 21st century, Freixo said. However, it is not surprising, since this region was the last in the country to abolish slavery.

Pedlowski, author of the book “Desconstruindo o Latifúndio – a Saga da Reforma Agrária no Norte Fluminense” (Dismantling the Large Estates – the Saga of Land Reform in North Fluminense), stressed the concentration of land ownership, linked to sugarcane monoculture and violence.

The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality on a rising scale from 0 to 1, is 0.8 for land ownership in Campos dos Goytacazes, the highest inequality coefficient in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

“The same families always rule the roost in Campos,” a region that is “the traditional cradle of the extreme right, like Tradition, Family and Property (TFP, a traditional Catholic civic organisation, now-dissolved),” and a place where political corruption scandals have erupted in modern times, the book says.

Guedes fought tirelessly against the use of toxic pesticides in agriculture, in addition to fighting injustice. He was a sugarcane cutter in the northern state of Alagoas before joining MST in 1996 and obtaining a plot of land in the Zumbi dos Palmares settlement.

A father of five, Guedes ran an agroecological farm and was regularly to be found at organic produce markets, as well as participating in local coordination with the government food purchasing programme, which buys produce from family farms to provide school meals.

“He did not learn at the university. The rest of us learned from him,” Pedlowski said.

“The MST was his life. He made great sacrifices to form marketing groups for producers…and he was not satisfied with having his own land. He led from the front at other land occupations. He was the animator,” he said.

“The elimination of such a dynamic leader shows the degree of impunity and the state of paralysis of land reform, especially since (Brazilian President) Dilma (Rousseff) took office,” he said.

According to the MST, the current administration not only has not solved the problem of 150,000 families camped by the roadside waiting for land, but has increased the concentration of land ownership, some of it in the hands of foreign companies.

An INCRA report says that in 2012 the agency invested 1.05 billion dollars and benefited 23,000 families in 117 settlements.

Last year, it says, the agency obtained declarations of public interest on 31 properties for the purposes of land reform.

The issue of land ownership is at the centre of Colombia's peace talks. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

Colombia’s large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.

The exchange of views took place at a three-day forum held in Bogota at the request of the negotiators taking part in the peace talks between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which began a month ago in Havana.

The left-wing FARC emerged in 1964 from a group of peasant farmers who were forced in 1948 by violence waged by large landowners and the government to colonise land abandoned by the state, which they defended with guns since 1950.

Six decades and hundreds of thousands of victims later, there is little public information about how the peace talks are going. But it is clear that the different sides see the question of land ownership as lying at the centre of the hostilities.

It is the first point on the agenda for the talks, which were unexpectedly announced in late August, after two years of secret preliminary negotiations.

The forum on “integral agrarian development”, which ended Wednesday Dec. 19, was organised by the United Nations Development Programme and the Centre of Thinking and Follow-up on the Peace Talks, an ad-hoc body set up by the National University of Colombia.

The organisers brought together 1,314 delegados – 33 percent of whom were women – from 522 social and business organisations representing 15 productive sectors from around the country. The debates of the commissions, made up of 20 groups of 60 to 90 people on average, were closed to the press. The conclusions of the debates were sent to a final plenary session.

The delegates discussed the different issues contained in the first point of the peace talks agenda: access to and use of land; unproductive areas; the formalisation of property ownership and of rural labour; the agricultural frontier and protection of nature reserves and communally owned indigenous and black territories; rural development programmes; and infrastructure.

Other issues debated were the social development model; incentives for agricultural production, cooperatives and a solidarity economy; technical assistance, subsidies, credit and marketing; and food security.

The conclusions compiled by the commissions included all of the contrasting positions, as well as the areas where agreement was reached. The final document will be presented to the negotiators on Jan. 8 in Havana.

The statistics from the Colombian countryside speak for themselves: 1.15 percent of rural property owners hold 52 percent of the agricultural land. The country’s Gini coefficient, which is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth, stood at 0.87 in rural areas – one of the highest levels of inequality in the world given that a score of 1.00 would represent a single person or body owning all of the farmland.

Currently, 38 million hectares are used for large-scale cattle-ranching. But if that total was cut in half, neither productivity nor profitability would be affected, said Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo. Meanwhile, just five million hectares are dedicated to agriculture, when at least 22 million are needed.

Optimising land use would bring greater prosperity and profits, Restrepo said in late November. But he added that this cannot be imposed by decree.

Rafael Mejía, the president of the rural association of Colombia, which represents large landowners and agribusiness interests, punctually attended the forum. “I came to listen to you, and for us to be listened to with respect and civility. We managed to do this, and I am satisfied,” he said in his brief closing message.

“I listened to you attentively. I have learned from all of you….We have to learn to turn the page if we want to build, all together…a rural sector like the one we all want, where we all have a place,” he added.

IPS was informed that Mejía commented in the hallways that this was the first time that he had the opportunity to listen to the peasant farmers, and that he realised that they had proposals “that can be discussed.”

On the first day of the forum, Mejía stressed that the poverty and poor conditions in rural areas could not be eradicated if the violence continued. He also said that “private property and productive activities, in the framework of a market economy, are non-negotiable.”

But Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, provincial of the Society of Jesus’s Colombia Province, stated in his own closing remarks that “What Colombia is doing is discussing the model to be applied, even if some say it is not negotiable.

“The model that we have had until now has produced inequity; it is at the heart of the conflict; it has to do with the mass migration caused by forced displacement; and it has not produced the expected economic growth in the rural sector,” said the priest, who is an economist known for his work on behalf of the country’s poor farmers.

For his part, Andrés Gil, the head of the Asociación Campesina del Valle del Cimitarra, an association of small farmers from the central Cimitarra valley, said the forum “has created an atmosphere in which it is possible to try to bring about a closer alignment of positions in the world of agriculture – the positions of the rural associations and peasant organisations.”

The best aspect of the forum was “the debate of ideas and proposals through political channels rather than war,” he told IPS. “That is the stride forward made by this event…Opportunities like this should be fomented around the country. This should be the way politics and strategic decisions are built in Colombia.”

But the Colombian federation of cattle ranchers refused to attend the forum because the resulting conclusions would go to the peace talks with the FARC, the federation’s spokesman, José Félix Lafaurie, told the press.

Lafaurie, who has been accused of ties to the far-right paramilitary militias, argued that many cattle ranchers have been the victims of the rebel group over the past decades.

Just five percent of the population own 80 percent of the farmland in Guatemala. Credit: Wallygrom CC BY-SA 2.0

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

An “integral rural development law” to promote access to land, employment and other rights for small farmers is bogged down in the Guatemalan Congress due to opposition from large landowners, who see it as an attempt at land reform.

“The bill contains 10 proposals that would contribute particularly to development for women and indigenous rural communities,” activist Irene Barrientos, of the Committee of Campesino (small farmer) Unity, told IPS.

“The rights to land and clean water, and the promotion of economic, social and labour policies and food security” are addressed in the bill, which was defeated once again on Nov. 29 when it failed to win at least 105 votes in the 158-member single-chamber parliament, as required to pass legislation of “national urgency.”

Campesinos in Guatemala are especially worried, because that day was the last day of ordinary sessions, and Congress will have to hold a special session to debate the bill before year-end, which they fear will be “an uphill struggle,” Barrientos said.

The vote in Congress left a sour taste in the mouth of campesinos, who need land for their family to farm.

“The legislators have mocked the people, because in March the president of Congress and the heads of the parliamentary blocs promised to approve it, but when it came to the crunch it was apparent their votes had been bought by the Chamber of Agriculture,” which is against the bill, she said.

This Central American country of 15 million people has some of the worst social and economic indicators in Latin America. And the indigenous majority living in the country’s rural areas are the most vulnerable.

Fifty-four percent of the population lives in poverty and 13 percent in extreme poverty, according to the 2011 National Survey of Living Conditions, while half of the children under five suffer chronic malnutrition, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

There is also enormous inequality: 80 percent of Guatemala’s fertile land is in the hands of barely five percent of the population, while 80 percent of the overwhelmingly indigenous rural dwellers, equivalent to 61 percent of the total population, are poor, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Barrientos regretted the position taken by the Chamber of Agriculture, which represents large landowners. She said “the bill itself does not implement land reform measures, or the confiscation of lands…They are really defending their interests in the extractive and monoculture model that hurts small farmers.”

The integral rural development bill promotes policies in 10 areas: economic, agricultural and social, and related to labour, food and nutritional security and sovereignty.

It also creates programmes for production of basic grains and soil conservation for sustainable farming, and gives a boost to the campesino economy and to financial services.

According to Álvaro Caballeros of the Guatemalan Coordinating Committee of NGOs and Cooperatives (CONGCOOP), the bill “would guarantee the formulation of public policies with an emphasis on the campesino family economy,” which has gone downhill as a result of the strong support given to the agroexport model.

“The expansion of monoculture production and extractive industries has been promoted in the last 22 years, and this has been disastrous for many rural families, who have been forced to sell their plots of land, hemmed in on all sides by African palm plantations, or whose water sources have been polluted,” he said.

“The law is important because it responds to significant longstanding demands, such as food sovereignty, sustainable agricultural production, health, housing and employment,” Caballeros said.

The president of Guatemala, rightwing retired general Otto Pérez Molina, and Vice President Roxana Baldetti have also expressed support for the bill.

“We are committed to the rural population in the matter of the approval of this law, as it is one of the five main pillars of the National Agenda for Change,” said Pérez Molina, who stressed that it is in no way a “land reform” strategy.

The bill is also backed by the United Nations office in Guatemala, which called it a task that has remained pending since the 1996 peace agreement put an end to 36 years of armed conflict between leftwing guerrillas and state security forces, in which 200,000 people – mainly rural indigenous campesinos – were killed and disappeared, primarily by the army and its paramilitary allies.

Approval of the bill is complicated for the time being, said Cynthia Fernández of the Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES), a local NGO. She described the bill as a stride forward in terms of rural development.

“The model that holds sway at present is extremely prejudicial to state intervention for the benefit of the rural population, because it does not facilitate access to land or credit, and it does not give them any assistance,” she complained.

“We believe the bill itself contains a series of general principles that provide a framework for regulation of rural development, backed up by constitutional provisions,” she said.

But the owners of large landed estates remain fiercely opposed to the bill. Carla Caballeros (no relation) of the Chamber of Agriculture told IPS that, if passed into law, “it would result in increased poverty for rural people, more children suffering from malnutrition, and higher unemployment.”

She said the law “would create more disorder and ineffectiveness among state agencies, and would create a super-ministry that would cost more than 200 million dollars to set up, only to perpetuate the same ineffectiveness and corruption.”

The bill also “violates the right to private property, the freedom of industry, commerce and labour, and the supremacy of the individual enshrined by the constitution,” she said, adding that it would “create chaos in the country’s institutions.”

The Chamber of Agriculture presented an appeal to prevent Congress from debating the bill. But it was thrown out by the Constitutional Court.