Not so green: "eco" factors behind landgrabbing and food shortages

After Ethiopia (see yesterday's post), here's Friends of the Earth International on Uganda, and how land-grabbing and speculation is driven in part by high-minded attempts to find alternatives to oil, to get carbon credits and to "conserve"the environment. What a mess.

(Highlights in the excerpted text are mine.)

1.2 The demand for land

A number of different factors lie behind this phenomena. Many cash rich and land poor governments are trying to secure food supplies by buying land overseas for domestic supplies. Land and resource rich but cash poor governments are seeking foreign direct investment in land and agriculture. While many of the governments involved are seeking to expand their domestic production of food crops and crops for fuel, agribusiness is seeking to expand its operations and boost profits, growing more, more cheaply; growing new crops for new markets, particularly for agrofuels – as well as gaining access to new markets in rapidly developing economies. Investors and speculators are looking for good investment returns.

Governments and private companies are both keen to gain access to fertile land at a low cost. Rapid increases in the food prices in recent years left many governments aware of their vulnerability to the market and eager to boost domestic food supplies. Countries such as China, India and Egypt want to ensure they have access to rice and grain. Other countries such as Saudi Arabia have recognised that the changing climate and limited water supplies mean that some crops can no longer be grown at home. Instead they are looking to outsource production to areas where fertile land and water are in greater supply.

Land grabbing for food has been recorded across Africa, notably in the Sudan and Uganda; in Pakistan, in Cambodia; in Russia, the Ukraine and Georgia; and in parts of South America, including Paraguay and Brazil. Some of these are countries which struggle to feed their own populations – but which have enough fertile land to attract foreign investors.

The growing demand for vegetable oils in particular, driven by increased human consumption and the promotion of agrofuels, particularly in Europe, has led to expansion of industrial monocultures. The growing market for palm oil has seen companies buying up land in tropical areas of Africa and Asia to establish plantations. Similarly, soy has expanded in South America, and land has been grabbed for jatropha in India, Indonesia and a number of African countries.

High levels of demand for land have pushed up prices, bringing in investors and speculators. With long term forecasts predicting increasing water shortages and other climatic changes to agriculture, few expect the price of land to fall. As a result, the big investment banks have moved into farming, buying up agricultural land, livestock farms and processing plants.

Another driver of land grabbing is particular types of environmental conservation projects such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing countries (REDD) projects that generate carbon credits from plantations. The appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends has been termed as ‘green grabbing’ (Vidal, 2008). In many cases communities that have managed and conserved forests for many generations are locked out of their communal forest lands due to conservation needs. As plantations are accepted as forests in international definitions, forested land is replaced by tree plantations aimed at generating carbon credits for companies (FOEI, 2008).

John Company colonizes Ethiopia

Two recent themes on this blog have been (a) agricultural investment and (b) companies that are as powerful (and possibly as wicked) as governments.

How about the "resettlement" of 1,500,000 Ethiopians to make way for corporate agri-grab?

That story ran in January, but there's lots more on this long-running issue - just Google up "land seizure ethiopia" or similar. And it's happening across Africa.

If you need a current hook to hang it off, here's a Norwegian story reproduced on farmlandgrab.org. Google Translate will give you enough to get the gist, e.g.:

Nykolonialisering in the form of landrov may have different face from country to country. The common denominator is that topsoil has been the hottest investment item, after the housing market broke down. Money pursuit of profit. Investors know that food and topsoil is scarce. It is important to position themselves. Liberti citing an unnamed manager of a South American investment fund. He goes straight to the point at a conference for investors, "We need to stop beating around the bush.

Agroindustrielle big companies take croplands, water and markets away from farmers. We can sell our products at lower prices and undercut peasant family farms. It must make decisions which are also of political nature.The world needs an effective agricultural producing on a large scale.

But it is not possible to promote this model without any loses. "Many believe that everything is taken political decisions. Bond activist Henry Saragih from Indonesia is The Guardian hailed as one of the fifty people who can save the world. He says landrov is part of a agroindustriell model that is being promoted by the World Bank, IMF, FAO and the EU:

"On the basis of vaguely worded principles of" responsible investment in agriculture "legitimize these institutions actually broader violations of farmers' rights."

"... the World Bank, IMF, FAO and the EU": as an idealistic teenager/tweenie, I liked the idea of supranational government. Now, I begin to think that it, and the money-forces to which it allies itself, pave the way for an evil worldwide oligarchy. Just wait till they have no further need for ourselves. Meanwhile, Ethiopians are being turfed off like the Chechens under Stalin.

Big Brother vs Big Company

Lovers of liberty are naturally and rightly suspicious of governments, which, as Charles Lamb said, "are as bad as they dare to be."

But corporations can be just as big and as hard to restrain, especially since they have the money to attract some of the best talent, and can shop around the globe for their preferred legal and tax jurisdictions.

Wikipedia lists 185 companies that have revenue in excess of $50 billion per annum. The CIA World Factbook lists 220 countries and dependant territories, together with their estimated GDP. Combining them into one list of major economic entities (ignoring the EU, which is not a country), we find:

1. Companies represent 40 out of the top 100 entities.
2. Only 23 countries are bigger than Exxon Mobil; and the latter's turnover is bigger than the combined GDP of the 100 smallest nations.
3. Even the smallest company listed here, Best Buy, has revenues higher than 183 nations.
4. BP has more employees than the populations of any one of the smallest 43 countries.
5. The combined revenues of the US housing quangos Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac total $264 billion, more than the GDP of Singapore.
6. The third biggest company, Walmart, is the 30th largest economic entity here and has more turnover than South Africa.
7. The 29 oil-and-gas companies on the list have a combined revenue exceeding $4.5 trillion - more than all but the three highest-GDP countries.
8. UK shoppers will be interested to see that supermarket chain Tesco ties at #100 in the list below - and its position may be strengthened if some of the banks, insurers and car companies suffer a reversal.

As multinational businesses have become larger (and often freer in their financial dealings) than many of the world's nations, our attention must turn to the growing power and potential dangers of corporate enterprises, as well as of the corrupt and tyrannical political regimes which sometimes work in partnership with them.



INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Big Brother vs Big Company

Lovers of liberty are naturally and rightly suspicious of governments, which, as Charles Lamb said, "are as bad as they dare to be."

But corporations can be just as big and as hard to restrain, especially since they have the money to attract some of the best talent, and can shop around the globe for their preferred legal and tax jurisdictions.

Wikipedia lists 185 companies that have revenue in excess of $50 billion per annum. The CIA World Factbook lists 220 countries and dependant territories, together with their estimated GDP. Combining them into one list of major economic entities (ignoring the EU, which is not a country), we find:

1. Companies represent 40 out of the top 100 entities.
2. Only 23 countries are bigger than Exxon Mobil; and the latter's turnover is bigger than the combined GDP of the 100 smallest nations.
3. Even the smallest company listed here, Best Buy, has revenues higher than 183 nations.
4. BP has more employees than the populations of any one of the smallest 43 countries.
5. The combined revenues of the US housing quangos Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac total $264 billion, more than the GDP of Singapore.
6. The third biggest company, Walmart, is the 30th largest economic entity here and has more turnover than South Africa.
7. The 29 oil-and-gas companies on the list have a combined revenue exceeding $4.5 trillion - more than all but the three highest-GDP countries.
8. UK shoppers will be interested to see that supermarket chain Tesco ties at #100 in the list below - and its position may be strengthened if some of the banks, insurers and car companies suffer a reversal.

As multinational businesses have become larger (and often freer in their financial dealings) than many of the world's nations, our attention must turn to the growing power and potential dangers of corporate enterprises, as well as of the corrupt and tyrannical political regimes which sometimes work in partnership with them.



Call to reverse farmland investment

A couple of months ago I said I had moral qualms about the trend towards agricultural investment.

Now there's an article from the same site (farmlandgrab.org), looking at proposals to regulate the process somehow.

The writer doesn't buy it:

... the rules are always about making the project work for the investor. Local communities, soils, watersheds, local labour markets and even the domestic food security situation in the host country are treated as risk factors that need to be mitigated. The objective is to manage costs, including those connected to reputational risks, to ensure an acceptable return. The rules for responsible farmland investment are thus for the investor, for whom taking care of the fallout for local people becomes another cost of doing business -- and one that companies can make profits from to boot.

... Other sectors where this has been tried out -- sustainable cotton, sustainable soy, responsible palm oil, timber, banking and whatnot -- have a profoundly blotted track record.

... What we need is not responsible farmland investment, but divestment. By this we mean that rather than trying to make this new trend of financialising farmland work, these deals need to be stopped and undone, with the lands restituted to the communities that lived from them. And instead of promoting the growth of industrial agriculture, we need to strengthen family- and community-based food sovereignty approaches, across the world. Initiatives are being taken in these directions, aiming to choke capital flows into firms with a history of land grabbing or into funds specifically set up to peddle rights to farmland, bolstered by advocacy and political pressure to support small-scale family-based farming systems and local markets. While it is a huge and uphill battle, it's clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.

Again and again, I feel that Big Corporation is not an alternative to Big Brother. For example, it's not so very long since Monsanto was trying for a scheme that would have economically enslaved farmers across the world: the "terminator gene" project, finally halted (or is it finally?) in 1999.

Lovers of liberty need to look over their right shoulder as well as their left.

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Call to reverse farmland investment

A couple of months ago I said I had moral qualms about the trend towards agricultural investment.

Now there's an article from the same site (farmlandgrab.org), looking at proposals to regulate the process somehow.

The writer doesn't buy it:

... the rules are always about making the project work for the investor. Local communities, soils, watersheds, local labour markets and even the domestic food security situation in the host country are treated as risk factors that need to be mitigated. The objective is to manage costs, including those connected to reputational risks, to ensure an acceptable return. The rules for responsible farmland investment are thus for the investor, for whom taking care of the fallout for local people becomes another cost of doing business -- and one that companies can make profits from to boot.

... Other sectors where this has been tried out -- sustainable cotton, sustainable soy, responsible palm oil, timber, banking and whatnot -- have a profoundly blotted track record.

... What we need is not responsible farmland investment, but divestment. By this we mean that rather than trying to make this new trend of financialising farmland work, these deals need to be stopped and undone, with the lands restituted to the communities that lived from them. And instead of promoting the growth of industrial agriculture, we need to strengthen family- and community-based food sovereignty approaches, across the world. Initiatives are being taken in these directions, aiming to choke capital flows into firms with a history of land grabbing or into funds specifically set up to peddle rights to farmland, bolstered by advocacy and political pressure to support small-scale family-based farming systems and local markets. While it is a huge and uphill battle, it's clear that we need to stop the financing of land grabs, not make it responsible.

Again and again, I feel that Big Corporation is not an alternative to Big Brother. For example, it's not so very long since Monsanto was trying for a scheme that would have economically enslaved farmers across the world: the "terminator gene" project, finally halted (or is it finally?) in 1999.

Lovers of liberty need to look over their right shoulder as well as their left.

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Hair funnies (NSFW, also don't drink or operate machinery)

This one (for women) I first saw a long time ago, but the memory lingers on:

Waxing

All methods have tricked me with their promises of easy, painless removal - the Epilady, the standard razor, the scissors, the Nair, the EpilStop, and now ...The Wax.

My night began as any other normal weekday night. I came home from work, fixed dinner for my son and we played for a while. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next couple hours: maybe I should use that wax in my medicine cabinet. I set up my boy with a video and head to the site of my demise, um, I mean bathroom.

It was one of those cold wax kits. No melting a clump of hot wax, you just rub the clear strips in your hand, peel them apart, press it on your leg (or wherever) and ignore the frantically rising crescendo of string instruments in the background. No muss, no fuss. How hard can this be? I mean, I'm not the girly-est of girls but I'm mechanically inclined so maybe I can figure out how this works. You'd think. So I pull one of the thin strips out. It's two strips facing each other, stuck together. I'm supposed to rub it in my hand to warm and soften the wax (I'm guessing). I go one better: I pull out the hair dryer! And heat the SOB to ten thousand degrees. Cold wax, my ass. (Oh, how that phrase will come back to haunt me.)

I lay the strip across my thigh. I hold the skin around it and pull. OK, so it wasn't the best feeling in the world, but it wasn't bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am She-Ra, fighter of all wayward body hair and smooth skin extraordinaire!

With my next wax strip, I move north. After checking on the boy and verifying that he was, in fact, becoming one with Bear and learning all about smells, I sneak into the bathroom for The Ultimate Hair Fighting Championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I then apply the wax strip! across the right side on my bikini line, covering the right half of my vagina and stretching up into the inside of the right ass cheek. (Yeah, it was a long strip.)

I inhale deeply. I brace myself. RRRIIIIPPP!!!!

I'm blind! Blind from the pain! ....... Vision returning.

Oh crap. I've managed to pull off half an inch of the strip.

Another deep breath. And RIIIP! Everything is swirly and tie-dyed? Do I hear crashing drums? OK, coming back to normal again. I want to see my trophy - my wax covered pelt that caused me so much agony. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold the wax strip like an Olympic gold medallist.

But why is there no hair on it? Why is the wax mostly gone?

Where could the wax go, if not on the strip?

Slowly, I eased my head down, my foot still perched on the toilet. I see hair - the hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I feel. I am touching wax. I look to the ceiling! and silently shout "nooooooo!!"

And realize I have just begun living my own personal version of "The Tar Baby."

I peel my fingers off the softest, most sensitive part of my body that is now Covered in cold wax and matted hair, and make the next big mistake - up until this point, you'll remember, I've had my foot on the toilet. I know I need to move, to do something. So I put my foot down on the floor. And then I hear the slamming of the cell door. Vagina? Sealed shut. Ass? Sealed shut. A little voice in my head says "I hope you don't have to shit anytime soon. Your head just might pop off." I penguin walk around the bathroom trying desperately to figure out what I should do next.

Hot water! Hot water melts wax! I'll run the hottest water I can stand and get in - the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it away, right? Wrong.

I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than is used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment. And I sit.

Now the only thing worse than having your goodies glued together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of a tub. In scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt the cold wax.

So now I'm stuck to the tub. I call my friend, C, because she once dropped out of beauty school So surely she has some secret knowledge or trick to get wax off skin. It's ever good to start a conversation with "So my ass and vagina are stuck to the tub."

She doesn't have a trick. She does her best to suppress laughter. She wants to know exactly where the wax is on the ass. "Are we talking cheek or hole, here?" she asks. She isn't even trying to hide the giggles now.

I give her the run-down of the entire night. She tells me to call the number on the side of the box, but to have a good cover story for where the wax actually is. "You know that if we were working the help line at XX Wax Co. and somebody called with their entire crack sealed shut we'd just put them on hold then record the conversation for everyone we know. You're going to end up on a radio show or the Internet if you tell them the truth.

While we go through various solutions, I have resorted to scraping the wax off with a razor. Boy, nothing feels better to the girly goodies than covering them in wax, sticking them to a tub

In the middle of the conversation (which has inexplicably turned to Other subjects!) I find the little, beautiful saving grace that is the lotion provided with this torturous box of wax, to remove the ‘excess’.

I rub some in and start screaming "It's working! It's working!" I get hearty congratulations from C and we hang up.

I successfully remove all the wax and notice, to my dismay, that the Hair is still there. So I shaved the damned stuff off.

Hell, I was numb by that point anyway. And then I put the box of wax back in my medicine cabinet! Never know when a mustache might start to come in.

Tonight, I attempt hair dying.

... but this one (for men - and hard-hearted women) has just recently started to do the rounds:

A review of Veet for Men

After having been told my danglies looked like an elderly Rastafarian I decided to take the plunge and buy some of this as previous shaving attempts had only been mildly successful and I nearly put my back out trying to reach the more difficult bits. Being a bit of a romantic I thought I would do the deed on the missus's birthday as a bit of a treat.  I ordered it well in advance and working in the North sea I considered myself a bit above some of the characters writing the previous reviews and wrote them off as soft office types...oh my fellow sufferers how wrong I was. I waited until the other half was tucked up in bed and after giving some vague hints about a special surprise I went down to the bathroom. Initially all went well and I applied the gel and stood waiting for something to happen.

I didn't have long to wait.

At first there was a gentle warmth which in a matter of seconds was replaced by an intense burning and a feeling I can only describe as like being given a barbed wire wedgie by two people intent on hitting the ceiling with my head. Religion hadn't featured much in my life until that night but I suddenly became willing to convert to any religion to stop the violent burning around the turd tunnel and what seemed like the destruction of the meat and two veg.

Struggling to not bite through my bottom lip I tried to wash the gel of in the sink and only succeeded in blocking the plughole with a mat of hair. Through the haze of tears I struggled out of the bathroom across the hall into the kitchen by this time walking was not really possible and I crawled the final yard to the fridge in the hope of some form of cold relief. I yanked the freezer drawer out and found a tub of ice cream, tore the lid of and positioned it under me. The relief was fantastic but only temporary as it melted fairly quickly and the fiery stabbing soon returned .

Due to the shape of the ice cream tub I hadn't managed to give the starfish any treatment and I groped around in the draw for something else as I was sure my vision was going to fail fairly soon.I grabbed a bag of what I later found out was frozen sprouts and tore it open trying to be quiet as I did so.I took a handful of them and tried in vain to clench some between the cheeks of my arse. This was not doing the trick as some of the gel had found it's way up the chutney channel and it felt like the space shuttle was running it's engines behind me.

This was probably and hopefully the only time in my life I was going to wish there was a gay snowman in the kitchen which should give you some idea of the depths I was willing to sink to in order to ease the pain. The only solution my pain crazed mind could come up with was to gently ease one of the sprouts where no veg had gone before.

Unfortunately, alerted by the strange grunts coming from the kitchen the other half chose that moment to come and investigate and was greeted by the sight of me, arse in the air, strawberry ice cream dripping from my bell end pushing a sprout up my arse while muttering..." Ooooh that feels good ". Understandably this was a shock to her and she let out a scream and as I hadn't heard her come in it caused an involuntary spasm of shock in myself which resulted in the sprout being ejected at quite some speed in her direction.

I can understand that having a sprout farted against your leg at 11 at night in the kitchen probably wasn't the special surprise she was expecting and having to explain to the kids the next day what the strange hollow in the ice cream was didn't improve my status...So to sum it up Veet removes hair, dignity and self respect.

UPDATE: the earliest online source I can find for the second piece is here.