Land grab caution for G8

“RUDE and barbarous”, sometimes “uncivil”, the Irish have been called many things in their pursuit of land rights.
But no one could call us unfocused.
From Michael Davitt’s denunciation of “the hoary-headed culprit of landlordism” to Charles Stuart Parnell’s skilled negotiation of the land acts that pushed the rights of Irish tenants through Westminster, we patiently established a claim to what we believed was rightfully ours.
Leaders of the world’s eight wealthiest countries would do well to remember this as they arrive in Fermanagh on Monday next for the G8 Summit. A century after Parnell stood on the plinth in Ennis and called on Clare men to shun any man “that takes a farm from which another has been evicted”, poor countries are losing an area of land the size of a football pitch to banks and investors every single second.
In a land rush that makes the cruel actions of the Vandeleurs and a host of other Clare landlords and agents from the 19th century pale in comparison, wealthy states and investors are taking advantage of lax laws and weak land rights in the developing world to snap up vast tracts of land for themselves. Indeed, between 2000 and 2010, an area five times the size of Ireland was sold off in Africa alone.
At a time when 870 million people go the bed hungry every night, this is an injustice as ugly as the export of grain from Ireland during the Famine of 1845-1848. 
But around the world, people are being denied access to what they believe is rightfully theirs. Since 2008, when global commodity prices began to rise significantly, land deals involving big companies have boomed by 200%. As a result, around a fifth of farmland in Senegal and Sierra Leone, nearly a third in Liberia and over half in Cambodia has been acquired by companies. 
Some of it is used to grow crops for food. Much of it is converted for use in biofuels, diverting food from hungry mouths to petrol tanks. As much as 58% of global land acquisitions in recent years are estimated to have been to produce crops that could be used for biofuels. This reduces land available for farming, pushing food prices higher and out of the reach of many ordinary people.
The speed and scale of growth in these large-scale land acquisitions is outpacing the ability of governments to oversee them adequately, leading to poor people losing out in far too many cases. Of the 82 land deals that Oxfam has investigated, 56 used to be under smallholder cultivation and most of the rest was communal land, typically used for grazing animals.
Given that smallholder farmers feed a third of the planet, this is disastrous for everyone who wants to see an end to global hunger. Land is crucial for people in poverty to grow food to eat, make a living and work towards a more prosperous future. The food they grow doesn’t just keep families healthy. It’s sold to buy the schoolbooks that children need to climb the economic ladder. But from Guatemala to Ghana, land grabs have stripped people of their homes and the land they rely on for their survival and economic prosperity, often violently.
G8 leaders must put the issue of large-scale corporate ‘land grabs’ in developing countries on the agenda in Fermanagh, promoting action to help improve their governance, transparency and accountability.
As the largest shareholders in the World Bank, they can also put pressure on that institution to freeze its large-scale agricultural investments until it puts these new measures in place that boost transparency of deals.
Decisions the G8 makes now will be remembered long after they are made. Indeed, 30 years after the mass expulsions of the Famine, Parnell brought the British government to its knees by calling on the masses not “to be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847.”
G8 leaders take note.

n Jim Clarken is chief executive of Oxfam Ireland