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	How Not to "Feed the World" by Oxfam & agencies   How Not to "Feed the World", by Tom Philpot. (Mother Jones)   The debate over how to "feed the world" amid population growth and climate change often hinges on crop yields. The theory is that if we can squeeze as much crop as possible per acre of farmland, we"ll have abundant food for everyone.   This idea dominates the marketing material of giant agrichemical firms like Monsanto. "In order to feed the world"s growing population, farmers must produce more food in the next fifty years than they have in the past 10,000 years combined," proclaims the company"s website.   "We are working to double yields in our core crops by 2030." Such rhetoric is routinely echoed by policymakers like US Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack.   But jacking up yields—even if Monsanto and its peers can accomplish that feat, which they haven''t so far—won"t solve the hunger problem on its own. The globe"s farms are already producing enough food to feed 12 billion people—twice the current population and a third again more than the peak of 9 billion expected to be reached in 2050.   Yet at least 925 million people lack access to enough to eat. What causes hunger isn"t insufficient crop yields but rather people"s economic relationships to food: whether they have access to land to grow it, or sufficient income to buy it.   Unfortunately, rising food prices and competition for resources appear to be making the situation worse. Take the trend of rich-country investors buying or leasing huge, highly productive tracts of farmland in low-income countries, and exporting the resulting crops.   In a scathing report on these "land grabs," the global anti-hunger group Oxfam reports that an "area of land eight times the size of the UK" has been sold off in the past decade—a combined swath of land that "has the potential to feed a billion people," or more than the 925 million who live in hunger."   Very few if any of these land investments benefit local people or help to fight hunger," Oxfam adds.   Investors in these deals aren"t agribiz companies like Monsanto, which just want to sell inputs like seeds and agrichemicals, not take on the risk of farming. Rather, they are US or European hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds from nations like China or Saudi Arabia, or companies like Iowa"s AgriSol, owned by GOP stalwart, large-scale hog farmer, Iowa university regent, and all-around charmer Bruce Rastetter.   While some land grabs involve domestic elites taking land in low-income areas of their own countries, the more typical cases involve rich-country investors gobbling land in poor countries.   According to a 2012 analysis by the Land Matrix, cited by Oxfam, the average investor in these deals come from a country with a per capita GDP of $18,918, while the target countries per capita GDPs average $4,404—a more than five-fold disparity.   Oxfam presents a devastating analysis: Two thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem. Yet perversely, precious little of this land is being used to feed people in those countries, or going into local markets where it is desperately needed.   Instead, the land is either being left idle, as speculators wait for its value to increase and then sell it at a profit, or it is predominantly used to grow crops for export, often for use as biofuels.   Let"s get this straight. Nearly a billion people live in hunger today, and yet the land that could be used to sustain them is being bought up by investors and being put to other uses, including speculation. Now, defenders of these deals claim that the targeted land is typically abandoned and marginal farmland that can only be made productive with outside intervention.   Not so, Oxfam says. "Most agricultural land deals target quality farmland, particularly land that is irrigated and offers good access to markets," the report states. And "much of this land was already being used for small-scale farming, pastoralism, and other types of natural resource use." Since 2000, according to the Land Matrix"s analysis, about 140 million acres of African farmland, or nearly 5 percent of the continent"s total agricultural area, have been snapped up in deals. That"s a land mass nearly the size of Alaska.   Perhaps because so much of the land is already being used by domestic farmers, land investors tend to target countries with weak frameworks for protecting the land tenure of small-scale farmers, Oxfam shows. Thus displaced people are often compensated at below-market rates for their land—if they"re compensated at all, the report adds. The result has been an attack on food security in countries that can least afford it. Here"s Oxfam:   More than 30 per cent of the land in Liberia has been handed out in large-scale concessions in the past five years, often with disastrous results for local people. In Cambodia, NGOs estimate that an area equivalent to between 56 and 63 per cent of all arable land in the country has been handed out to private companies. In Honduras, the toll of people killed in a land conflict in the Bajo Aguán region has risen to over 60, and shows no sign of stopping.   The situation in Honduras Bajo Aguán region is indeed bloody—a human rights lawyer representing smallholder farmers in a land dispute with palm plantation owners was gunned down just last month, BBC reports.   The Bajo Aguán conflict involves a key driver of the land grab phenomenon: the pushing of food-growing smallholders from land to make way for vast palm oil plantations for exported biofuel.   According to Oxfam, the area used for oil palm cultivation has increased "nearly eightfold over the last 20 years to an estimated 7.8 million ha [hectares, or 19.3 million acres] in 2010 and is expected to double again by 2020."   That means that within eight years, a chunk of land equivalent to the area of Iowa will have been plowed over for palm plantations to feed not the world"s people, but its cars.   If such trends continue, no amount of Monsanto wonderseeds, even if they do pan out on their promises to increase crop yields, will put a dent in global hunger.   The solution to the growing global food crisis will not be technical; it will be social and political. The Oxfam report offers a good start: The World Bank, which operates under the leadership of a president chosen by the US, should stop financing dodgy land deals in the global south—as it has been doing—and start advising the governments of low-income, food-insecure countries to set up strict protections for smallholder farmers. Further, Oxfam advises, the World Bank should cajole low-income nations to insist that any land deals be structured to ensure that local food security is enhanced by them. Visit the related web page
	Chinese journalists strike against censorship by Edward Wong, John Garnaut NYT, Sydney Morning Herald   January 7, 2013   Hundreds rally to support Journalists of Censored Chinese Newspaper, by Edward Wong. (NYT: Extract)   Beijing: Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change. The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal Southern Weekend newspaper, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials. At the same time, the embattled newsroom received backing on the Internet from celebrities and other prominent commentators that turned what began as a local dispute into a broader national display of solidarity.   “Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the revered Russian dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”   Disputes between media organizations and local party leaders over the limits of reporting and expressions of opinion are common in China, but they rarely emerge into public view. But this time calls to support the frustrated journalists spread quickly in Chinese online forums over the weekend, and those who showed up on Monday outside the media offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, ran the gamut from high school and university students to retirees.   Many carried banners scrawled with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning. One banner read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.” Police officers watched, but did not interfere.   The journalists at Southern Weekend have been calling for the ouster of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, who took up his post last May. They blame him for overseeing a change in a New Year editorial that originally called for greater respect to rights enshrined in the Constitution under the headline of “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.”   The editorial went through layers of changes and ultimately became one praising the direction of the current political system, in which the Communist Party continues to exercise authority over all aspects of governance.   A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said online that the actions of Mr. Tuo had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition installing Xi Jinping as Communist Party chief. Mr. Xi, who is also scheduled to assume the nation’s presidency in March, has raised expectations that he might pursue a more open-minded approach to molding China’s economic and political models during his planned decade-long tenure. But more recently, he has said China must respect its socialist roots, which appeared to be a move to placate conservatives in the party.   Signs had emerged earlier that central propaganda officials were moving to dismantle support for the protest. A fiery editorial by Global Times, a populist newspaper, attacked the rebels at Southern Weekend and essentially accused them of conspiring against the government. Xinhua, the state news agency, and other prominent news sites published the editorial online, presumably at the orders of propaganda officials.   “Propaganda is still on the old road,” said an editor at a party media organization.   It was unclear how many employees in the Southern Weekend newsroom had heeded calls by reporters for a strike to display their determination to resist censorship. Outspoken intellectuals have circulated an online petition demanding Mr. Tuo’s removal.   On Monday, People’s Daily, a party-controlled newspaper, ran a signed commentary that said propaganda officials should “follow the rhythm of the times” and help the authorities establish a “pragmatic and open-minded image.” Some people have interpreted this as encouragement for officials to adopt a more enlightened approach in dealing with the news media.   But the scathing editorial by Global Times reflected a conflicting, perhaps more official line on the uprising at Southern Weekend, since by Monday night it had been reprinted on several major news Web sites.   The editorial said Southern Weekend is merely a newspaper and should not challenge the system, as it appeared to be doing. It criticized the newspaper’s supporters, including Chen Guangcheng , the rights advocate persecuted by Chinese officials, who fled to the United States last year.   The conflict had been exacerbated Sunday night by top officials at the newspaper who posted a message on the publication’s official microblog, saying the New Year’s editorial had been written with the consent of editors at the newspaper.   According to an account from a newspaper employee posted online on Monday, that statement was made after pressure was exerted on the top editors by Yang Jian, a deputy provincial propaganda official.   * Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting; Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou, and Shi Da from Beijing.   January 7, 2013   Chinese journalists strike against censorship, writes John Garnaut - Sydney Morning Herald''s China correspondent.   Chinese journalists fed up with censorship have staged what may be the first walkout of its kind since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989.   The strike marks a major escalation of a rebellion that was ignited last week at one of China''s most credible and reader-oriented newspapers, Southern Weekend, by the ham-fisted intervention from propaganda officials.   It poses an early test of China''s direction under the new leadership of Xi Jinping, who has made strong and seemingly contradictory calls for the country to press forward with reform while also returning to the revolutionary legacy of its Maoist past.   “Everybody knows that the system stands naked and that the system is aware that the public knows that it is naked,” said political commentator Zhang Lifan, who is close to several liberal-leaning “princeling” children of revolutionary leaders.   “The question is whether it wants to put on clothes, or not,” he said.   The propaganda chief of Guangdong province, Tuo Zhen, stands accused of axing the newspaper''s New Year''s editorial, which called for the protection of individual rights, and replacing it with his own poorly-written and error-riddled paean to Communist Party power. Chinese journalists are calling it the “rape of Southern Weekend".   Tensions grew when Southern Weekend journalists published open letters that revealed a combustible environment where more than 1,000 stories had been censored or scrapped since Mr Tuo took up his propaganda post a year earlier.   It became a newsroom mutiny late on Sunday night, when editorial staff accused propaganda officials – including the one who Mr Tuo had appointed as editor-in-chief – of hijacking the newspaper''s microblog, and credibility, to push out a story that misleadingly blamed reporters for the editorial.   "The statement does not represent the opinion of the editorial staff,” said editorial staff via a different microblog.   "The editorial staff will fight against the falsified statement . . . Until the issue is resolved, we will not do any editorial work."   Strikes are effectively banned in China, exceptions being when they have been orchestrated by the party against foreign-owned firms.   And almost all Chinese news media outlets are owned, controlled and tightly trameled by the state and explicitly seen as a tool for “guiding” public opinion to uphold party rule.   Chinese journalists are, nevertheless, increasingly judging themselves and each other by the professional standards of journalism.   The newsroom rebellion is spreading as hundreds of intellectuals, students, lawyers and other journalists sign petitions and pledge support.   “We have been loyal readers of Southern Weekend,” said Zhou Ze, one of several lawyers who has pledged to defend the striking journalists.   “We share the concerns expressed by its journalists and editors that it is becoming more like the People''s Daily.”   Students at Guangdong''s leading university signed a petition on Sunday saying their years of silence had delivered nothing but “untempered intrusion and infiltration of rights by power".   Leading public intellectuals released a separate petition on Sunday night saying Mr Tuo must be sacked to preserve the place of Southern Weekend and Guangdong province at the vanguard of China''s opening and reform.   Separately, the website of one of China''s most boundary-pushing magazines, Yanhuang Chunqiu, was taken offline on Friday after it published a petition for the party to uphold its own constitution.   The decision to tolerate or crackdown on the striking journalists presents a major test of Mr Xi, his premier-in-waiting, Li Keqiang, and the new Guangdong Party boss, Hu Chunhua, who is reported a frontrunner to take over from Mr Xi in ten years'' time.   "The reaction will speak volumes about their sincerity in deepening reform and opening up,” said Liu Yawei, head of the China Program at the Carter Centre.   Mr Liu said it was the first journalists'' walkout he had heard of since 1989.   Mr Zhang, the commentator, says Mr Xi has been backed into a corner before he is ready to show his true colours, whatever they may be. The expected premier, Li Keqiang, and other members of the State Council will not be appointed until March.   The new leadership line-up was brokered by former leaders and powerful families who are divided on whether the party should overcome its sagging credibility by returning to the party''s revolutionary legacy or pressing forward with reform.
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