The politics of land deals and dynamics of agrarian change: interconnections: from context to main unit of inquiry

Transcription

1 The politics of land deals and dynamics of agrarian change: interconnections: from context to main unit of inquiry Saturnino ( Jun ) M. Borras Jr. International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague & Transnational Institute (TNI) Jennifer C. Franco, Transnational Institute (TNI) 9-11 April 2015, ISEG/U of Lisbon

2 Proposition being developed in this lecture: It might be useful to carry out systematic research initiatives that consider broader political economic interconnections not just as context for specific land deal cases but as the main unit of inquiry/analysis. It might lead us to a fuller understanding of the character and trajectory of land-oriented capital accumulation processes and attempts to regulate these and/or attempts to protect, promote, restore poor people s resource tenure depending on their circumstances.

3 3 distinct waves or generations of research into land grabbing Not to be seen as unidirectional stage Always incomplete, uneven and ongoing Overlapping waves/generations; in continuum

4 The first 2 waves/generations of research into land grabbing (1) Making sense period: what is happening where? Who are involved? Drivers, displaced, et al. Politics of land deals: who gets what, how, how much, and for what purposes? Research agenda setting. (2) Deepening our understanding. Investigating deeper into specific case studies with more nuanced understanding of the (initial) agrarian/environmental outcomes of land deals and transformations (land, labour, livelihoods, ecology).

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8 Dominance of studies on specific land deal cases and country cases The greatest strength of current research: deeper and better understanding of actual political economic dynamics (this, and the accomplishments in the making sense wave = provided us the analytical lens to understand better the current land deals) At the same time, it is its relative weakness, that is: relatively weaker grasp of broader connections/contexts and political economic meanings and implications of specific cases

9 Discernable third wave/generation of research: emergence of studies into land deals and dynamics of agrarian change beyond specific land deal and country case studies: critical inquiry into interaction, intersection, intertwining, convergence, spill-over, entanglement, interconnection With perhaps the green grabbing JPS special issue by Fairhead, Leach & Scoones and the synthesis paper of the FAO 2011 Latin America/Caribbean 17 country case studies as trail-blazers for this distinct cluster of research

10 Our tentative argument, is It will be productive in terms of research (and activism) to take broader political economic & institutional interconnections between various actors and processes not just as context for specific land deal cases but as the main unit of inquiry/analysis. Not an either/or thing -- we need both: land deal case studies and studies on broader interconnections

11 Interconnections manifest in at least five ways: (1) Spatial (2) Political/socio-economic (3) Socio-ecological (4) Institutional (5) Temporal

12 (1) spatial

13 (2) Political/socio-economic

14 Mozambique: the Limpopo conservation park Procana small farms/pastoralist entanglement

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19 Land grabbing and land concentration Land grabbing is not the only compelling land issue today. The generic issue of land concentration due to a variety of mechanisms past and present (including massive displacements) is just as urgent This is one of the conclusions of the FAO country case studies How land grabbing and generic land concentration run parallel to each other or overlap or complement one another is a key point to investigate more deeply.

20 Processes towards formal large land concessions and various forms of informal, micro, land accumulation Overt, formal state-facilitated large-scale land concessions Plus: everyday forms of market-based micro land transactions, land accumulation by stealth, by theft and fraud, etc. (Brazilians in Santa Cruz, Brazilians in Colombian on the creeping soya expansion?; Brasiguaios in Paraguay, Chinese-Burmese in Burma, etc. Role of, and various types of, land brokers * Whether ultimately these two distinct processes towards land accumulation link up or just run in parallel

21 Many are formal, state-facilitated large-scale land concessions (overt though not necessarily transparent) = often directly involving big corporate names; focus of much research and formal regulatory intervention

22 But others are not too visible and not too formal, some are by stealth by scheme and others by straightforward fraud and theft but just as pervasive * more difficult to track and regulate via international standards* Below: photo of a typical shifting cultivation terrain in southeast Asia

23 Emerging terrain brought about by rubber boom in Northern Shan state (Burma) some of these land accumulation processes are by stealth, informal and fraud

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27 Interconnections between formal large concessions and outright fraudulent, micro, by stealth land accumulation Difference between the two are just in form and procedural, and essentially the same: land grabs? Post-land grab, the two meet up and work together anyway? Postland grab, the combined impact of the two socio/ecological processes is more far-reaching than previously assumed? Calls for international standards may have traction in formal land deals, but not in the micro, informal, by stealth/fraud, such as land size ceiling for land concessions? What regulatory institutions to catch both types? Good old statedriven measures such as land size ceiling across the board, that is land concessions and all others?

28 (3) Political/socio-ecological Interconnections between land concessions and climate change mitigation initiatives: Maybe coveting the same blocks of land? Maybe overlaps between the two blocks of land for the two institutional processes? Adjacent blocks of land? Spill-over of displaced people onto the other area? Into other communities? Spill-over of ecological damage into the other area? Rerouting of resource flows (such as water) to a land concession to the detriment of other users outside or endangering community watershed area? Institutional entanglement as to which laws, policies, ministries to handle which resource conflict in which area?

29 Land investments on/for: neither food, nor feed, nor fuel: the rise of flex crops and commodities and the research challenge

30 Flex crops: crops/commodities with multiple & flexible uses brought the issues of interlinkages/interconnections in the spheres of production, circulation & consumption at all levels: local, national & international from value chain to value web

31 Source: Virchow et al. (2014) as cited in Rural 21 (2014 n.p.)

32 Notions of Crop use change as land use change Or Land use change by crop use change

33 Various types of ILUC/interlinkages the European rapeseed and southern palm oil link

34 (4) Institutional

35 For example: conflicting policies, competing state agencies Land becomes central to key state policies in conflicting manner: Example -- Burma today: Land for restitution in the context of peace settlement to end multiple ethnic-based armed rebellions where land-based livelihoods are key Land for large-scale land investments as state strategy for development that are labour-saving and people-displacing = but they talk about the same land! Question is: who is going to get which land, how, how much, and for what purpose? + in the current global land rush, we have seen and we will see dramatic increases in the instances of such institutional interconnection seen in this way

36 Another dimension of institutional interconnection: An investor s diverse portfolio of investments, varied strategies of land acquisition, and diverse outcomes in their initiatives from one society to another that may perhaps influenced by/responding to pre-existing structural and institutional -- conditions of target investment sites

37 A large-scale plantation type in Uruguay operation of Stora Enso

38 Thousands of individual contracts with small landholders in Guangxi, China by Stora Enso

39 Chinese investors Big successful land deals across Southeast Asia (relatively easier to accumulate land when state and other landed elites facilitate quick, mass accumulation though they can do otherwise when forced to do so, such as in Guangxi) But in the Philippines in attempt at gaining access to 1.4 million ha of land allocated via government to government signed MOU was stopped and never pursued. (difficult to maneuver with small landholdings due to widespread prior land redistribution; similar case in Vietnam that s why Sikor s 2012 argument about absence of land grabs in Vietnam)

40 Inter-penetration of capital across national borders: boom crops outside and inside a particular country and how these are linked

41 Booms crops in Southeast Asia (and beyond) are generally linked to demands in China = very much the context of many research on land grabs in SEA (and beyond)

42 There s no known research about the boom crops inside China, at least not in the family of current land rush literature. But there are phenomenal crop booms inside China since the past 10 years = and many of these sectors involved foreign capital

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45 Interconnections between crop/commodity booms across national borders Interlinkages between crop/commodity booms inside China and in SEA? Or inside Brazil and Bolivia; or inside Brazil and Argentina? Interconnections between Chinese capital and non-chinese capital fuelling all these cross border crop/commodity booms? Trans-Latina Companies in LAC = interpenetration of capital. Interconnections between BRICS (China in this specific context) and middle income countries or MICs (Thai in this specific context)? How do we theorize this? Brazil vis-à-vis Argentina, etc.? How do we theorize this more broadly in terms of the role of capital and the state and national territories?

46 The challenge of research on these interconnections in Latin American context Deepen research on earlier idea (by Sergio Gomez, 2011) on Trans-Latina Companies (TLCs) operating inside the region or intraregional dynamics and interconnections. Brazilian capital in Bolivia or Paraguay, Argentinian capital in Brazil, and so on. Points of convergence, competition, tension?

47 Fluid, interlinked and multiple flows of labour within and across sectors and national borders Tracking capital flows within the region is one thing; tracking labour dimension of these flows is another thing. Both require careful research

48 In Guangxi, not many Chinese local labour wants to do sugarcane cutting; migrant workers from poorer provinces = Yunnan; but increasingly and more importantly, from Vietnam and Myanmar (tens of thousands of workers from Nov to Mar every year informally cross border to cut cane) In Myanmar, many of those cane cutters who go to Guangxi were those who lost lands due to land grabs by formal large land concessions and through land grabs by stealth and micro processes marked by fraud, involving on many occasions local and mainly Chinese to produce stuff for Chinese market Many of the Chinese individuals and companies who sought land via various modalities in Vietnam and Myanmar were compelled by the limits in land expansion and technical change possibility in Guangxi s boom crops = complex interconnections/spill-overs between crop booms, but received little attention in current land grans literature

49 Some 80,000 Vietnamese cane cutters every year in Guangxi

50 A village in Northern Shan state near the border with China; militia supported by the military forcibly and fraudulently seized 3,000 acres from the village land (in the name of poppy substitution program!), and planted sugarcane; recruited displaced villagers to cut cane grown on the land grabbed from them, and the cane are loaded up and brought to a Chinese owned sugar mill just on the Myanmar/China border = a strategy to deal with land scarcity inside Guangxi and high Chinese labour cost

51 Land, labour and livelihoods inside and outside a land deal More reports are coming out now that in many land deals where villagers leased or sold their lands or entered into contract growing scheme, they continue to maintain some lands dedicated to food oriented production while working for the plantation (in cases of lease) or working on their farms (in cases of contract growing scheme * How actually are these political economic processes interlinked? How do we theorize this? Classic debates on propertied proletariat and semi-proletarianization which has been big and important in Latin American context in the past (Cristobal Kay et al.)

52 The case of Ecofuel sugarcane plantation workers and their food subsistence farms in Isabela, Philippines

53 This is very much the case in China where many households have lands in scattered plots (for paddy, intermediate lands, hilly/rocky lands); one of the key institutional basis for the rise of boom crops there. Key to look are interconnections between what they do in these different plots, and why, and how this in turn intersects with what they do outside the village if they already become peasant workers in the city?

54 Intertwining of social justice movements: agrarian justice, food justice, labour justice, environmental justice movements and the political dynamics in their issue-analysis and demand/claim-making.; tensions and synergies in these interconnections

55 (5) Temporal Changes over time in pol-economic/institutional interconnections within and between the first four dimensions discussed earlier. A village near Kutkai in Northen Shan State in Myanmar: why are the villagers so panicking about a rumor that 600,000 acres will be seized from their villagers to give to investors to produce biofuels? Too alarmist? Not until we trace back in time the interconnection of events: in early 1990s, 500 acres of paddy were destroyed by mining company; villagers evicted without compensation; resettled in a less productive area; they made the new land productive plain, rolling hills plus agro-forestry. Then a few years ago, militia came and seized 3,000 acres in the name of poppy substitution program (and planted sugarcane for China); then the Forestry Department seized 1,400 acres from their village forestry and planted industrial pine trees. And now, this talks about the government looking in their area for 600,000 acres of land for biofuels production triggering panic among villagers. Too alarmist? Probably not.

56 Preliminary, random thoughts we can derive from the discussion above: (1) Political economic/institutional interconnections: from context to main unit of inquiry That is, the broad political economic and institutional interconnections are just as important unit of inquiry/analysis as specific land deal cases. It s not an either/or issue; it s a matter of giving equal emphasis on both.

57 (2) Capital goes wherever it can make profit, and will deploy various strategies and enter into different modalities according to circumstances they found on the ground as long as they control the desired quality/quantity of land and investment = places in the south and north, relatively democratic settings and authoritarian systems = Deploy various strategies to control needed lands: large purchases, purchases by stealth, outright theft and fraud, transparent/nontransparent, long-term/short-term lease contracts, contract growing schemes, etc. It is not committed to any strategy, i.e. (a) strategies that expel people from the land or not; (b) go for singular large tract of land versus numerous individual plots, (c) acquisition modes up to international standards or not, (d) from powerful countries to weak countries, and so on.

58 (3) The role of the state is critical in capital accumulation. Both on the side of investors and on the side of host country/community Better seen always from the perspective of state-capital alliance (Harvey) or from the perspective of two permanent tasks of the state: (i) facilitate capital accumulation and (ii) maintain minimum level of political legitimacy (Fox 1993)

59 (4) Over-emphasis on overt/formal large-scale land concessions is partly responsible for over-focus on international standards (transparency, code of conduct, CSR, etc.) to address land grabs, and vice versa. This analytic and advocacy angle is already problematic. It becomes even more problematic when we bring in land transactions that are not formal/large-scale, but micro/informal/by stealth though quite pervasive, and thus, has similar overall impact on local communities just the same. This latter type is difficult to address through international standards, but can be caught through conventional state-driven social justice/redistributive land policies, such as across the board land size ceiling. The latter becomes urgent because it is likely that formal large-scale concessions and informal, micro-but-pervasive land accumulation run in parallel in many societies and their interconnection is explosive.

60 (5) It will require future research to combine, and combine more systematically, theoretical frameworks and traditions in methods of research coming from agrarian studies, environmental studies, food studies in the fields of political economy, political ecology and political sociology. Methodologically, various types of comparative studies become obviously important: comparing various strategies deployed by a single investor across sectors and countries, comparing diverse outcomes in the attempts of an investor to accumulate land and engage in production, and so on.

61 (6) In the context of current debates on the VGs: CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure: possibilities and limits as international governance instrument to address burning land issues in at least three contexts: (i) In settings where poor people have existing access to land, but that access is being threatened by the current land rush, the task is to protect such access. This can be done in a variety of tenure (private individual, private collective, community, state, and so on).

62 (ii) In settings where people do not have access to land due to past and present processes of land concentration, including past and present land-based capital accumulation, the challenge is how to pursue and promote effective redistributive land policies: land reform, forest land reallocation, indigenous people s land claims, and so on set against an across the board land size ceiling policy

63 (iii) In settings where poor people were expelled from their lands usually through various forms of extra economic coercion, the challenge is how to restore previous access via land restitution broadly cast: can be interpreted as restituting land as productive factor of production (in agriculture) or as territory for community of people. Based firmly on the principle of historical justice not on current market compensation price. It should redistributive too (and not just restituting to clans, communities without democratic redistribution of access within blocks of land restituted).

64 The challenge for the Voluntary Guidelines in and around these these types of settings and the triple challenge of: to protect, promote, restore: (i) In national settings where existing national state laws/policies and/or customary rules necessary to addressed one or all of the three settings but that these are either absent or too weak, the challenge for the Voluntary Guidelines is how to address this deficit. In such a situation, state and social movements actors can mobilize and utilize the Voluntary Guidelines to advance their interest or at least to shield them during their clam-making advocacy work from possible (violent) retribution from state and non-state reactionary forces.

65 (ii) In settings where the national state laws/policies and/or customary rules are in place and are better and stronger than the Voluntary Guidelines in addressing the three types of situations mentioned above, the challenge for the VGs is how to protect and enhance those laws/policies/norms on the one hand, and how to internal those so as to strengthen the VGs.

66 In the context of the triple tasks of protect, protect and restore in the broad settings of stronger or weaker national laws/policies/customary norms, deploying Voluntary Guidelines as an additional governance instrument is already quite complex and challenging, framed in possibilities & limits. This becomes even more complicated but potentially far more rewarding academically and politically when we deploy the Guidelines against a unit of inquiry and public action in and around political economic & institutional interconnections related to land politics.