Land and Food Security
Land for Those Who Work It, Not Just
for Those Who Can Buy It
International Seminar on the Negative Impacts
of World Bank
Market-Based Land Reform Policy Final Declaration
We are members of peasant, research, environmental, religious
and human rights organizations that have met in Washington, DC
from April 15-17. We share the struggle for a world and a society
in which the guiding principle will be the human being and the
full enjoyment of all human rights for all people and communities;
in which the right to land of rural communities is recognized;
the food sovereignty of all countries is guaranteed; the environmental
sustainability of the planet is preserved and the cultural integrity
of all peoples is assured.
Alarmed by the intensity with which the land policies promoted
by the World Bank and other international cooperation agencies
are depriving the poorest rural people of their means of livelihood,
we have analyzed various aspects of these policies in light of
our own testimonies and experiences. We have found that the Bank
imposes the same programs on innumerable countries, without regard
for their history, local realities and customs of production and
land use. Due to their impact, we conclude that the World Bank's
land policies basically seek to make land into a commodity, and
in the end, place it at the service of the interests of international
trade and transnational corporations. These policies are not the
agrarian reform that social movements have demanded throughout
their historic struggle, and therefore will not lead to substantial
improvements in the living standards of the poor, nor will they
lead to full development. By their nature land markets do not
help the needy, the poor. Markets respond to money, not to human
needs.
Specifically, we find that:
- The land administration projects of the Bank - including surveys,
mapping, cadastres, registries and the granting of individual,
alienable titles - while they try to address long-standing demands
by various rural groups for security of tenure, are designed
primarily to create the conditions for "functioning land
markets," and all too frequently result in a massive or
on-going sell-off of land, in the re-concentration of property
and in an increase in conflicts inside our communities, as we
have seen in the case of Thailand.
- The privatization of public or communal lands leads to the
re-concentration of land in the hands of large private landowners,
and to the loss of land-use rights by some or all of the members
of our communities. The privatization of communal lands undercuts
community strategies of survival, cultural cohesion and mechanisms
of cooperation, leading to greater impoverishment.
- So-called "market-based land reform," "market-led
land reform," "market-assisted land reform,"
or "community-based land reform" is another attempt
to evade the true redistribution of landed property and creates
more problems than it solves. Our experiences in countries like
South Africa, Brazil, Colombia and Guatemala indicate that these
programs, by their very nature, will never be able to create
conditions to overcome the landlessness of millions of families.
The programs have excluded the poorest of the poor for not meeting
required preconditions and traditionally marginalized groups
like rural women, and cannot be applied to indigenous communities.
The land which is offered for sale is of the poorest quality,
and landowners typically take advantage of these programs to
get rid of marginal lands or those far removed from market centers.
In other cases the land offered comes from medium or small landowners
in bankruptcy due to the freedom of imports, and as a result
the programs do not have redistributive effects, leaving large
landed estates intact. The non-integrated nature of the programs
means that the productive projects of the beneficiaries fail,
because they often lack the resources needed for food security,
working capital, basic services and technical assistance. In
all of the countries analyzed in the seminar, the great majority
of the beneficiaries are behind in the payment of their credits.
So, massive indebtedness and the abandonment or the loss of
the land to pay off the loan will end up intensifying the poverty
of the few beneficiary families. In addition to inviting corruption
and political clientelism, these programs have been used to
undercut agrarian reform policies based on the expropriation
or forfeiture of land held by large landowners, and to distract,
undermine, divide, and curb the movements of landless peasants.
- Programs of "productive associations" or "strategic
alliances" recently supported by the Bank are of grave
concern because they tend to subordinate peasants, communities,
and their lands to the service of large landowners and transnational
corporations. To presuppose a level playing field between large
and small "partners" is to chain the small to the
strategies of the large.
In light of this evidence, we demand:
- The immediate end of its current land policies and their replacement
with policies based on the right to land and food;
- The publication of all the documents and information available
on the projects.
- The decisive participation of peasants, other popular sectors
and their organizations in the planning, management and implementation
of economic programs in general, and of rural development and
agrarian reform programs in particular.
- Programs of land redistribution by means of expropriation
with or without compensation and forfeiture of quality land,
in which the State assumes its responsibilities;
- Fully integrated policies of support for the small farm economy,
which include macroeconomic aspects, marketing, technical assistance,
credit, processing of products, protection of national production,
and respect for the integrity of culture and environmental sustainability.
- Legal protection and the creation of agricultural tribunals
to resolve agrarian conflicts;
- Formulation of policies based on respect for human rights
and the principles of social justice and gender equality, rather
than on market forces.
- We call upon social organizations and civil society to join
in the defense of agrarian reform and the struggle for the principles
here expressed.
Washington, DC, April 17, 2002
Actionaid - Brazil
ADC - Alianza Democratica Campesina, El Salvador
ANUC-UR / Associacion Nacional de Usuarios
Campesinos - Unidad e Reconstrución, Colombia
APR - Animação Pastoral Rural, Brazil
BIC - Bank Information Center, USA
Bretton Woods Project, England
CECCAM, México
CNA - Coordinador Nacional Agrario, Colombia
COCOCH, Honduras
CNOC - Coordinadora Nacional de Organizaciones
Campesinas, Guatemala
CONGCOOP - Coordinadora Nacional de ONG y Cooperativas,
Guatemala
CPT / Comissão Pastoral da Terra, Brazil
Environmental Defense, USA
FENSUAGRO / Federacion Nacional Sindical Unitária
Agropecuária, Colombia
FIAN - Food First Information and Action Network,
Germany
Food First Institute for Food and Development,
USA
Franciscan and Dominicans International, Switzerland
Franciscan Network, USA
Franciscan Washington Office, USA
Global Land Reform Policy Center, Zimbabwe
INESC - Instituto de Estudos Socio-Económicos,
Brazil
La Via Campesina, Honduras
LPM / Landless Peoples' Movement, South Africa
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, USA
MST / Movimento Nacional dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra, Brazil
NLC - National Land Committee, South Africa
Nkuzi Development Association, South Africa
PER / Project of Ecological Recovery, Thailand
Rede Brasil sobre Instituicioes Financeiras
Multilaterais, Brazil
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human
Rights, USA
War on Want, England
"Globalizing Agrarian Reform"
BULLETIN No. 4 of the
VIA CAMPESINA
November, 2000
PRESENTATION:
Dear
peasant companions, intellectuals, NGO's, Cooperation and Development
Agencies, Gremial and Work Union Organizations, Human rights Activists,
Sympathizers and allies of the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform.
We are only a few days away from several activities around the
world, directed towards placing in public opinion the delicate
situation of the rural world. And even though treaties and agreements
exist for the "eradication of poverty" there is still a continuance
in the persecution, placing in jail and murder of those men and
women that struggle for an authentic Agrarian Reform.
INTRODUCTION:
In
this fourth edition we offer a summary of the letter we shall
be sending to all the World Bank offices that exist around the
world. Also included is the statement and activities agreed upon
in the Vía Campesina's III International Conference, the agrarian
situation in Colombia and the activities to be developed during
the Week for Human Rights and International Activities for Agrarian
Reform (4th to 10th of December).
PETITION
ADDRESSED TO THE WORLD BANK: "LAND IS MUCH MORE THAN A MERCHANDISE"
This
letter has been addressed to all our organizations and friends
with the objective that it is delivered to those in charge of
the offices the World Bank has around the world.
In
the letter an analysis is made between the demands of the peasant
sector and existent policies about the agrarian topic and especially
about the use, access and property ownership. The global
plans of action against hunger and poverty have in common that
the largest amount of people that live in poverty and hunger are
rural people. This, however, is the opposite in political reality,
where in most southern countries the agrarian reform process has
been held up and the structural adjustment programs and neo-liberal
agrarian policies have caused agrarian reform to be largely replaced
by implantation or deepening of the land market.
In the petition, the different articles of treaties and truces
of Human Rights are indicated, in which states that agrarian reform
is an obligation of human rights. The agreements of the International
Encounter for those Without Land were also taken in consideration,
agreeing on "rejecting the ideology that considers land only as
merchandise". We worriedly observe that domineering agrarian policies
implemented in the frame of neo-liberalism intend every time more
to replace agrarian reform for the mechanism of the land market.
[.] We wish to demonstrate that governments, when not compromising
to carry out Agrarian Reform and only leave the market as the
regulator, violate the Human Rights of peasant families that need
access to land for the right to feed themselves, as well as their
Financial, Social and Cultural Human Rights, known by International
Law.
The "Land Market" or "Agrarian Reform assisted by the Market"
is being analyzed, and we see it's pushing different governments
supported by the World Bank. The application of this model causes
a lot of concern for the Vía Campesina and FIAN, because it does
not secure the realization of an ample and integral Agrarian Reform
that guarantees poor peasants' rights in the access of land and
other productive resources for them to feed themselves with dignity.
Finally, in the letter the following demands are presented: Due
to the fact that most of the States, members of the World Bank,
are Members of the International Treaty of Financial, Social and
Cultural Rights, and that, because of this, the Bank is obligated
to respect, protect and guarantee the rights there known, we demand
that the Bank should:
·
Suspend the approval
and support of the Market agrarian Reform.
·
Check the Markets
Agrarian Reform model thoroughly beginning an evaluation process
of participation that will involve the different countries in
which the model has been put into practice in the main organizations
of peasants without land, with governments and independent experts.
Every evaluation shall pay special attention to the following
things: if the markets' agrarian reform programs are complementing
or replacing existent processes of agrarian reform,; if they are
improving poor peasants self-accessibility to productive resources;
and if they are improving the equal access of men and women to
land and other productive resources.
·
Make sure that
Banks' reform policies on the ownership of land guarantee the
right to adequate feeding and the reform of Agrarian Systems for
that purpose, instead of contributing to the violation of human
rights by weakening the states' legal obligations.
·
Evaluate and
check the programs for the structural adjustment of the agrarian
sector in regard to its implications in processes of agrarian
reform for different countries.
·
Include an agrarian
reform policy in every reduction of poverty strategy in the different
countries. This will guarantee access, ownership and control of
land and other productive resources by the same peasants.
·
Put into practice
the Plan of Action established in the World Meeting on Feeding
in relation to Agrarian Reform and the right to adequate feeding.
DOCUMENT APPROVED IN THE III INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE VIA
CAMPESINA:
"The
struggle for agrarian Reform and Social Changes in the field".
This document sums up, from the peasants world view, different
aspects of the struggle developed for an integral agrarian reform
and concludes with principles, strategies, commitments and a plan
of action to be developed in the continual struggle for the integral
agrarian reform.
Plan
of Action
This was the topic discussed n the III Conference of the Vía Campesina,
based upon the question/challenge: What must we do in our countries
to guarantee the application of our principles and to carry out
our strategy?, from this analysis came the following:
Ø
Articulate our
regional struggles since the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform,
pushing the struggle permanently, taking three fundamental
dates as base:
a
10th
December, Human Rights day, worldwide.
b
12th
October.
c
17th
April, Peasants' struggle for land and against repression day,
worldwide.
Ø
Struggle against
the re-concentration of land.
Ø
Struggle against
World Bank policies.
Ø
See the end of
private militia, paramilitary groups and police forces.
Ø
Impulse the Worldwide
campaign for the Recuperation of Land, against violence inn the
field and repression.
Ø
Struggle for
immediate freedom for political prisoners that struggle for land.
Ø
Push forward
the International Conference for Agrarian Reform and Food Sovereignty
together with FIAN and the Vía Campesina.
Special
Pronouncements
The Vía Campesina's III Conference resolves the following:
Ø
Push forward
activities in favor of the people of Colombia and against North
American Government intervention.
Ø
Launch a campaign
of the Vía Campesina, consisting in sending food, medicine and
medical doctors as human aid to Colombia.
Ø
We pronounce
ourselves in favor of the immediate freeing of our partners the
political prisoners, the peasants of the Movement of Rural Workers
of those without land from Brazil.
Ø
Worldwide support
for peasants in India against the expulsion from their own land.
Ø
Push Incidence
forward in International Forums with the proposals of the Agrarian
Reform.
THE
PROBLEM OF LAND IN COLOMBIA:
On an international level, Colombia is well known for being one
of the main centers for drug dealing in the world. Added recently
to this image of a country of Mafia is the perception of Colombia
sinking into a cruel undeclared civil war in which an average
of 12 people died daily during 1999. This has also caused the
forced internal displacement of more than a million and a half
of Colombians. Although these symptoms are relatively known, international
public opinion is completely uninformed of the origins of these
problems: unfair distribution of land and the conflict for it
as the most important of them all.
It is estimated that in Colombia 300 thousand families exist without
land and a million families without sufficient land. The Colombian
percentages of land concentration are very close to those of Brazil:
Small owners have pieces of land inferior to 10 hectares, having
access to only 7.8% of the country's agricultural territorial
extension, and represent 77.9% of the total of land owners. Large
landowners have more than 1000 hectares, having access to 38.2%
of the country's agricultural territorial extension and represent
0.13% of landowners. Apart from these percentages of extreme land
concentration, it is estimated that 75% of all agricultural land
in Colombia is being used for cattle.
All these factors have obligated a large group of peasants to
colonize areas in the jungle mainly dedicating them to plant the
only to lucrative crops: Cocaine and Amapola. The environmental
devastation is shocking, not only due to the cutting of forests
and jungles, but also due to the governments anti-drug dealing
policies that focuses on the lethal fumigation of these regions.
The situation of Colombian families without land worsened deeply
since the 80's when drug dealers laundering money from drug transactions
started to take over most of the best land for agriculture and
use it for cattle. These new landowners soon associated with the
armed forces and the traditional political parties to attack the
leftist guerilla groups and defend by force their own economical
interests.
This is how paramilitary groups were born -responsible mainly
for human rights violations today in Colombia- as part of a strategy
against rebellion that has taken land and goods from peasants
by fire and blood.
ACTIVITIES
TO DEVELOP IN THE WEEK OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND AGRARIAN REFORM:
·
The central activity
shall be giving in the petition addressed to the World Bank in
protest against Market Agrarian Reform programs. In each country,
Vía Campesina and FIAN members will deliver the petition to the
political people in charge of the World Bank (especially in the
north) and to the Banks representatives in the different countries.
·
The emergency
network will start to activities related with the implementation
of Market Agrarian Reform Programs: one about Colombia and another
about South Africa.
·
The sections
of FIAN in Germany, Austria, Belgium and France invited a delegation
from Brazil for the activities of the Global Action Week. This
was for them to be present at every activity and for them to inform
about their country's situation of their agrarian reform movement.
·
All Vía Campesina
members will carry out demonstrations in front of the Colombian
Embassies the 10th of December, in protest of the dramatic
situation that Colombian peasants are going through.
·
The following
activities are taking place in Honduras: a meeting of main leaders
of organizations members of COCOCH with the authorities of the
National Agrarian Institution with the purpose of exposing their
ideas and proposals on the agrarian topic and getting to know
the activities and institutional policies that will be developed
during 2001.
·
There are two
conferences programmed for Belgium: the 30th of November in the
university of Lovaina La Nueva and the 1st of December
in Liege. In the context of violence and demoralization tentative
of the Movement of those without land (MST) in particular, we
have titled the topic of both conferences like this: Agrarian
Policies and Those without Land Movement in Brazil.
·
Discussions
will take place in Austria with multipliers from Vienna, in several
high schools in the southern province of Carintia and a seminar
together with Alliance for the weather in the city of Wolfsberg,
Carintia.
Development:
World Bank Land Reforms
Collide with Civil Society
by Gumisai Mutume
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Apr. 6, 2001
As they seize, occupy and farm idle lands, poor communities in
developing countries are placing land reform on the international
policy agenda.
But market-assisted land reforms, championed by institutions such
as the World Bank, are threatening sustainable land redistribution
in a growing number of countries, a food and development policy
non-governmental group there warns.
"While we applaud the World Bank for recognizing the importance
of the land issue, we fear their policy prescriptions are doomed
to failure," says Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute
for Food and Development Policy (Food First) which also lobbies
for the right to food and land.
"The market responds to money, not human need, and it is
hard to see how the poor will benefit," says Rosset the author
of a new report "Tides Shift on Agrarian Reform: New Movements
Show the Way,"* which critiques World Bank-led land reforms
and highlights mass movements driving alternative reforms from
below.
Decades of grassroots movements have convinced institutions such
as the World Bank that landlessness is an important cause of poverty.
The Bank is now either financing or setting the tone for land
reform programs in many developing countries, from Guatemala to
the Philippines to South Africa.
Three countries, Brazil, Colombia and the Philippines, have been
most exposed to market-assisted land reforms, which the Bank has
been pushing over the last five years.
"The World Bank has never pushed that model of land reform
as the only model," says John Bruce Senior Counsel at the
Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development network of
the Bank. "It is a model that can produce genuine benefits
where the political situation does not permit redistribution through
other models."
The Bank says their model is not a substitute to laws enabling
governments to expropriate land. Expropriation has been an important
instrument of breaking large landlord resistance to land reform.
"This is still a new model that is still being evaluated
and we need to do more studies on it," says Bruce.
Market-assisted reforms involve
granting loans and credits to the landless to buy land at market
rates from wealthy landowners and to acquire fertilizers and technical
assistance for new, marketable crops. They are often viewed as
an instrument of rewarding landlords rather than for improving
the livelihoods of the landless poor.
Food First says market-assisted reforms are bound to fail because
they place a heavy burden on poor people to repay expensive loans,
often from harvests from poor soils. Landowners often choose to
sell the most marginal and ecologically fragile plots that they
own.
While assisting resettled farmers with technical support is hardly
opposed, some sections of the NGO community and landless people's
movements such as La Via Campesina are opposed to Bank-supported
packages that rely on pesticides and chemical fertilizers and
introduce non-traditional export crops into communities.
"The approach responds to the need to make land reform more
demand-driven and, in addition to giving access to land, provide
avenues for beneficiaries to make investments and make productive
use of this land," says Robert Thompson, director of the
Bank's rural development department in response to an earlier
NGO petition to the Bank.
Some of the concerns around market-assisted land reform are that
privatizing communal lands increases individual competition.
Individual profit motives -- sometimes linked with outside corporations
-- can create an emphasis on extraction-like profit-taking, breaking
down community-based resource management systems and accelerating
land degradation, critics charge.
"In our research on the promotion of similar packages by
the U.S. Agency for International Development in Central America
during the 1980s and early 1990s, we found them to intensify land
degradation and ecological problems, while leaving poor farmers
in risky enterprises with high failure rates," notes the
study.
Profit-driven land use often leads to the introduction of new
exotic crops, often more in demand abroad. New problems may also
arise with land claims of women and indigenous communities --
who are often left out of land titling programs because of a myriad
of reasons such as traditional or discriminatory practices.
Landless people and their struggles have gained world attention.
In Zimbabwe, so-called veterans of the liberation war are currently
confronting white commercial farmers who control the vast majority
of prime land in the country, as the government looks the other
way.
In Brazil, landless workers occupy idle lands and take advantage
of a clause in the constitution to legalize their claims. Some
250,000 families have managed to win titles to more than 15 million
acres of land through the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in
Brazil, by seizing land, described by Food First as "a veritable
reform from below."
"The total cost to the state to maintain the same number
of people in an urban shanty town is 12 times the cost of legalizing
such land occupations," says Rosset. "The beneficiaries
are measurably better off than other poor people in Brazil."
Yet these seizures are not without incident. Brazil's Catholic
Church
estimates that the number of people who have died fighting for
land in the country is four times the number of those who officially
disappeared during military rule in the country from 1964 to 1985.
Food First says poor families should not be saddled with high
debts when they receive land and thus recommends government expropriation
of idle land as the most workable solution for many of the world's
landless poor.
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