The Big Land Grab: what's at stake for biofuels, and you?
Are reports of wholesale land grabbing fact or fiction? Could it restrict freedom to operate in sun-drenched lands where plants grow fast?
A new report from PANGEA looks at the real causes and solutions.
Biofuels Digest senior editor Meghan Sapp, in her other role as Secretary-General of the Europe-based PANGEA (Partners for Euro-African Green Energy), released her organization’s breakthrough report on biofuels and land grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa, “Land Grab Refocus 2011.”
Now, most of the Digest’s readership lives a long, long ways from Sub-Saharan Africa. So, why does it matter?
Well, here’s why: Concerns over land grabbing contribute mightily towards the strangling of capital and the closure or downstream markets for biofuels. Or, as James Carville memorably put it, “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Is it a real issue?
Now, reports on this subject are generally more admired than read, if not cast into some latter-day Bonfire of the Vanities. But, consider this:
“Biofuel crops often lead to land-grabbing“, said Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.
Or, this excerpt from the new book, Earth Grab:
“Just as biofuels have gobbled up farmland that should have been growing food so the push on biomass by Monsanto, Cargill and others will see an ‘unprecedented’ grab on land, plants and biodiverse-rich forests. The world is on the brink of a new land grab, with companies like Cargill and Monsanto part of a wider attempt to ‘grab’ control of the productive capacity of the planet.”
So, what’s at stake for you?
Your freedom to operate in Asia, Africa, and South America, that’s what at stake.
“No man is an island,” intoned the poet John Donne, “everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less”
Which is a delightful way of saying, “sorry, you can’t ignore your way out of this one, bub.”
What’s going on?
Into a fray largely defined by name-calling and panic-stirring, PANGEA has published a report that offers “a jug of cool spring water to a perplexed conclave,” as Churchill once described the debating gifts of Lord Birkenhead.
By analyzing the tenure systems of three countries in distinct political regions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Ethiopia, Mali and Sierra Leone, PANGEA identified the following weaknesses that facilitate instances of land grabbing:
1. Lack of secure land rights
2. Lack of functional and consistent institutional framework
3. Lack of transparency between the various stakeholders in land deals
4. Lack of consistent community consultation
5. Lack of environmental and social impact assessments
What to do about it?
In its report, PANGEA addresses those weaknesses with nine recommendations for host governments, investors, host communities and civil society. It’s a report worth reading, by any organization that has ever put, say, “Brazil”, “Southeast Asia,” “India” or “China” on its investment or project development roadmap.
As we said, it’s your freedom to operate that is at stake, or the freedom to operate of the companies you may be investing in.
Category: Fuels
