Key Meeting to Discuss Land Grabbing Menace in Africa
By George Okore
The politics of policy underlying transnational commercial land deals in Africa will be the subject of the forthcoming global land grabbing conference from April 6 – 8, 2011at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton, (UK).
The meeting comes at time when many Western Super powers are being accused of having started, promoted and perpetuated improper land acquisition, hence the agricultural challenges and food crisis facing the world. Critics are accusing the former colonial masters of land problems in many African countries including Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Somalia, Ethiopia among others.
The conference is organized by The Journal of Peasant Studies in collaboration with Land Deals Politics Initiative (LDPI) under the new land theme of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC). It will discuss issues that unite or divide the rural poor, organized movements, and rural communities around the issue of land deals.
It will address urgent and strategic questions around global land grab, including land disparity in form of class, gender and ethnicity. It will also explore how illegal land deals undermined food security at the local, national and international levels.
According to Professor Ian Scoones- a joint convener of the IDS-hosted Future Agricultures Consortium, the meeting will investigate howglobal land policies of different international development agencies encouraged or discouraged land deals. He says it will analyze land issues from various critical perspectives including agrarian political economy, sociology and ecology.
The workshop is also organized by Initiatives in Critical Development Studies (ICAS), Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrian Studies (PLAAS), Future Agricultures Consortium, The Resources, Environments and Livelihoods and Polson Institute of Global Development. Klaus Deininger, a senior economist at the World Bank will examine risks associated with single owners of large land holdings and the institutional reforms needed to make land deals successful.
Speakers include UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food and Professor of Law and Human Rights at the Catholic University of Louvain Olivier de Schutter who will present a paper on promotion of small family farms and human rights in the context of contemporary debates on land grabbing. The Research Chair and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada Tania Murray Li, will examine how land deals can lead to dispossession and "rural exclusion”.