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	Rich Countries land grab alarms poor by UN News / The Guardian   May 2009   Large-scale foreign land acquisitions can harm local people, says UN-backed report. (UN News)   A United Nations-commissioned study shows that land acquisitions are on the increase in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, raising the risk that poor people will lose access to land, water, and other resources.   The study, carried out at the request of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said that large-scale acquisitions, often by investor countries interested in food security, can bring many opportunities, including guaranteed outlets, employment, investment in infrastructures and increases in agricultural productivity.   However, the study found, that they “can also cause great harm if local people are excluded from decisions about allocating land and if their land rights are not protected,” FAO said in a news release.   The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which conducted the study, found acquisitions of almost 2.5 million hectares of land since 2004, and said the trend may be on the rise.   Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods and welfare.   “A lack of transparency and of checks and balances in contract negotiations can promote deals that do not maximise the public interest. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps and other factors too often undermine the position of local people,” FAO said.   The report called for, among other steps, securing land rights for rural communities, involving local people in negotiations, and proceeding with land acquisition only after their free, prior and informed consent.   Nov 2008   Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.   The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.   Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.   "These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.   Madagascar"s government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.   "In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We"re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much."   At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.   According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.   Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.   Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialization, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.   Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar"s land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.   Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.   "If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam"s head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don"t see any place for the small farmers."   Alex Evans, at the Center on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land."   Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations.   Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I"d say "you are taking a very big risk". Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don"t learn the lessons of history."
	Income inequalities in the age of financial globalization by International Labour Organization (ILO)   Nov 2008   World of Work Report 2008 - Global income inequality gap is vast and growing.   Despite strong economic growth that produced millions of new jobs since the early 1990s, income inequality grew dramatically in most regions of the world and is expected to increase due to the current global financial crisis, according to a new study published today by the research arm of the International Labour Organization (ILO).   The new report, entitled World of Work Report 2008: Income inequalities in the age of financial globalization, produced by the ILO’s International Institute for Labour Studies also notes that a major share of the cost of the financial and economic crisis will be borne by hundreds of millions of people who haven’t shared in the benefits of recent growth.   “This report shows conclusively that the gap between richer and poorer households widened since the 1990s”, said Raymond Torres, Director of the Institute responsible for the report. “This reflects the impact of financial globalization and a weaker ability of domestic policies to enhance the income position of the middle class and low-income groups. The present global financial crisis is bound to make matters worse unless long-term structural reforms are adopted.”   The report notes that while a certain degree of income inequality is useful in rewarding effort, talent and innovation, huge differences can be counter-productive and damaging for most economies, adding that “rising income inequality represents a danger to the social fabric as well as economic efficiency when it becomes excessive”.   The report marks the most comprehensive study to date of global income inequalities by the Institute, and examined wages and growth in more than 70 developed and developing countries. It calls for longer term action to put the global economy on a more balanced track, including promotion of the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda to link economic, labour and social policies to boost employment and improve incomes and income distribution.   The report says that as global employment rose by 30 per cent between the early 1990s and 2007, the income gap between richer and poorer households widened significantly at the same time. What’s more, compared with earlier expansionary periods, workers obtained a smaller share of the fruits of economic growth as the share of wages in national income declined in the vast majority of countries for which data was available.   “The ongoing global economic slowdown is affecting low-income groups disproportionately”, the report says. “This development comes after a long expansionary phase where income inequality was already on the rise in the majority of countries.”   Among its other conclusions, the report says:   Employment growth has also occurred alongside a redistribution of income away from labour. In 51 out of 73 countries for which data are available, the share of wages in total income declined over the past two decades. The largest decline in the share of wages in GDP took place in Latin America and the Caribbean (-13 percentage points), followed by Asia and the Pacific (-10 percentage points) and the Advanced Economies (-9 percentage points).   In countries with unregulated financial innovation, workers and their families became increasingly indebted in order to fund housing investment and consumption. With stagnant wages, this was key to sustain domestic demand. However the crisis has underlined the limits to this growth model.   Between 1990 and 2005, approximately two thirds of the countries experienced an increase in income inequality. The incomes of richer households have increased relative to those of the middle class and poorer households.   Likewise, during the same period, the income gap between the top and bottom 10 per cent of wage earners increased in 70 per cent of the countries for which data are available.   The gap in income inequality is also widening – at an increasing pace – between top executives and the average employee. For example, in the United States in 2007, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of the 15 largest companies earned 520 times more than the average worker. This is up from 360 times more in 2003. Similar patterns, though from lower levels of executive pay, have been registered in Australia, Germany, Hong Kong (China), the Netherlands and South Africa.   Noting that prospects are for a continuing increase in income inequality in the course of the present economic situation, the report also added that excessive income inequalities could be associated with higher crime rates, lower life-expectancy, and in the case of the poor countries malnutrition and an increased likelihood of children being taken out of school in order to work.   “Already now, there are widespread perceptions in many countries that globalization does not work to the advantage of the majority of the population”, the report says. “The policy challenge is therefore to ensure adequate incentives to work, learn and invest, while also avoiding socially-harmful and economically-inefficient income inequalities.” Visit the related web page
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