View previous stories
	Large scale land investments by UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food UN Food & Agricultural Organization   August 2009   Large scale land investments: Recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.   Following the global food crisis, agricultural land has become more than ever a valuable source of food security. Taking into account the increasing trend of large scale investments on arable land in developing countries the Special Rapporteur on the right to food stressed the importance to integrate human rights principles in the negotiation and implementation of land investment agreements. He provided a set of recommendations in order to ensure the progressive realization of the right to food, the right to development and the right to self determination of local people.   The recommendations of the Special Rapporteur recognized that investments constitute an opportunity for economic development. However, he stressed that important risks for local population needed to be addressed under a human rights framework. He affirmed that the negotiation and implementation stages of the investment agreements must actively involve local farmers: civil society should have access to transparent information in order to participate and express their free consent about issues affecting their own land rights. Indeed, the Special Rapporteur recommended strengthening national legal frameworks related in particular to the property rights system.   Currently, many communities are victims of forced evictions without being consulted nor compensated and this phenomenon seriously affects the right to food as well as other human rights. In addition, the Special Rapporteur affirmed that the agreement itself should include provisions aiming to benefit local people in terms of employment and food sovereignty. Rather than highly mechanized operations, the agreements should consider sustainable farming systems based in intensive labor in order to reinforce local livelihoods.   He also pointed out environmental concerns, and recommended sustainable modes of production that would require ex post assessments. The enforceability of commitments and obligations was also raised in its recommendations. He suggested including pre-defined sanctions in case of non compliance and promoted the implementation of legal mechanisms in case of human rights violations and in particular the right to adequate food.   According to Mr. De Schutter, “While these measures may give the impression of representing additional constraints, they should be seen as true success factors in the short and long term”. Visit the related web page
	Legitimating common property in Africa and the Nobel Prize by Pambazuka News / Skoll Foundation   Nov 2009   Legitimating common property in Africa and the Nobel Prize, by Korir Sing’Oei. (Pambazuka News)   Much time has already been spent in discussing President Obama’s selection for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the other Nobel awardees, particularly Elinor Ostrom, the 73 year old woman professor of development economics at Indiana University, who together with Professor Oliver E. Williamson, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. I argue here that the choice of Ostrom for this important award is perhaps more significant for Africa’s poor.   Since the 1960s, the predominant policy prescription for ensuring the sustainable exploitation of land resources in Africa has been the individualisation of land held under custom. This move was largely driven by neoclassical economists led by Garrett Hardin, who called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources ''The tragedy of the commons''. Hardin argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed because more people utilised the common grazing ground without paying for the cost of maintaining it, a phenomenon known in economics as free-riding.   This view has inspired a variety of land reforms with a general trend toward market-oriented access to, and the privatisation of, land through private entitlement. The premise was simple: individualised tenure offers the best certainty in land rights, which provides incentives for sustainable use and facilitates access to credit for investment in agriculture and natural resources, hence contributing to increased productivity and improved natural-resource stewardship.   Evidence now suggests that this individualisation of common property has neither yielded the economic and environmental returns envisaged nor improved living standards for those affected. For instance, according to Rutten, a Dutch scholar who undertook extensive research work in Kajiado – one of the three Maasai districts in Kenya where the individualisation of title was pursued through the establishment of group ranches with funding from the World Bank and DfID (UK Department for International Development) – grazing land had reduced by well over 40 per cent over the period 1982 and 1990, leading to increased vulnerability and destitution of pastoralists, not to mention accelerated wanton environmental degradation.   By awarding Ostrom the prize, the Nobel Committee has indicated that a paradigm shift has occurred and that in fact Hardin''s famous tragedy of the commons theory should no longer be treated with reverential deference. Consequently, the developmental superstructure based on Hardin’s theory must yield to more cooperative property regimes. Ostrom’s research suggests that far from a tragedy, the commons can be managed from the bottom-up for a shared prosperity, given the right institutions.   In her study ''Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action'' (1990), based on numerous case examinations of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterises the rules that promote successful outcomes.   On this premise, she proceeded to propose eight ''design principles'' of stable local common pool resource management, most of which principles are not too dissimilar to those already in place in pastoral commons in the Sahelian regions of Africa. These Sahelian common property systems, now codified as ''pastoral codes'' for instance, allow for the surveying, mapping and recording of ''all forms of existing and practiced land rights, such as they are perceived and presented by the holders of these rights themselves''.   Ostrom’s proposals suggest that while markets can organise production and consumption pretty efficiently, they can only do so when supported and nurtured by networks and communities. In Ostrom’s thesis therefore, private associations often, unaided through the instrumentality of state legislation, have managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and develop efficient uses of resources.   The recent adoption by the African Union (AU) of the ''Framework guidelines on land policy in Africa'' under the guidance of the late Professor Hastings Okoth Ogendo and the ongoing attempts by UN-OCHA (United Nations-Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and the AU to formulate a continental policy on pastoralism suggest increasing macro-policy recognition of the importance of common property regimes and, implicitly, the fact that standing on Hardin’s postulates is no longer holy ground.   Similarly, the current emphasis on participatory forest management points to the importance of local community cooperation as the singular logic in sustainable environmental resource use. This is in contrast to the individual-responsibility models of the last three to four decades post-independence.   Coming hot in the heels of these developments, Ostrom’s Nobel prize should serve to catalyse efforts aimed at the protection and promotion of indigenous systems of resource utilisation in Africa. Because the resilience of indigenous systems of land management have time and again proven that commons do not have to end in tragedy, Ostrom’s Nobel is well-deserved.   More importantly though, her prize is deserved because the utilisation of her economic theory will unlock the potential of common-property regimes which, if better deployed, could serve to ensure a more people-centred face of national development in Africa. Such a shift will protect vulnerable communities and individuals from the unchecked market and environmental shocks that presently imperil their existence and threaten global food security.   * Korir Sing’Oei is a international human rights lawyer with a focus on indigenous and minority rights law and policy.   Aug 2009   Socialized Farming versus Free Market Poverty, by Jonathan Lewis. (Skoll Foundation)   Agricultural is the largest employer in the developing world, but farmers are the poorest of the poor. Of the world’s hungry people, half are small-scale farming families.   Of 525 million farms worldwide, 85% are under five acres; 445 million truly small farmers. Perhaps at odds with our mental picture of a solitary male tilling the soil or tending a goat herd, the U.N. Development Fund for Women reports that sub-Saharan Africa women contribute 60-80% of the agricultural work. In Asia, typically females do half the farming.   If you want to gag on your next meal, chew on the fact that large-scale American farmers annually get agricultural welfare payments of $80 billion. The same amount of money would fund all cancer research for the next decade or buy healthcare every year for nearly 2 out of 3 senior citizens.   The Polish essayist Stanislaw Lec once asked, “Is it progress if a cannibal eats with a knife and fork?” Americans might ask, “Is it progress if a welfare recipient gets a farm subsidy?”   American farms employ only 2% of the total workforce and generate a bit under 3% of GDP. Nonetheless, American farmers dominate 50% of the U.S. Senate, as noted by economist Lester Thurow in Fortune Favors the Bold, because demographically 25 rural states with 50 Senators have a combined population of less than urbanized California with only 2 Senators.   As Big American Agricultural farms its subsidies and milks its political connections, it competes with un-subsidized, free market small farmers in the developing world. Rural poor farmers might be more efficient and more productive, but that doesn’t matter because their governments can’t afford to put them on the dole.   Ironically, impoverished farmers in the developing world have one clear competitive advantage. Their labor rates average five to ten cents an hour. At that wage scale, the choices are ugly: forgoing needed medicine; no shoes for your school-age children; skipping the purchase of seeds for next year’s crops; slaughtering your kids’ only milk source.   What is the difference between spreading fertilizer and spreading political claptrap? For American farmers, not much. For the poor, another day of poverty farming. Visit the related web page
	View more stories