Country: Indonesia

Global land grab highlights growing inequality

Posted on by fredsaxo

Massive tracts of land in the Global South are being bought up by international investors and ultra-rich corporations, fueling growing inequality – part of a wider global trend of wealth transfers away from the poor and working people.

The report from FIAN International and Focus on the Global South, Lords of the Land: Transnational Landowners, Inequality and the Case for Redistribution, puts the spotlight on the world’s ten largest transnational landowners – who together control 404,457 km², an area the size of Japan.

This is part of a global land rush. Since 2000, corporations and financial investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land – twice the size of Germany. Today, 70 percent of global farmland is controlled by the largest 1 percent of giant industrial-scale farms.

Forced displacements

This concentration has grave implications for food security, threatening the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people, most of whom rely on agriculture for survival. It is also driving violence, forced evictions, and environmental destruction while also contributing significantly to climate change.

Virtually all the top global landowners named in the report have been implicated in reports of forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against communities.

One of the main players is the US pension fund TIAA, which has acquired 61,000 hectares in Brazil’s Cerrado region, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas. In the Cerrado, approximately half of the land has been converted into tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production — amid reports of violent land grabs, deforestation and environmental destruction which already shows signs of impacting the climate.

TIAA almost quadrupled its global landholdings between 2012 and 2023 — from 328,200 hectares to 1.2 million hectares.

Inequality

Land concentration undermines state sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, with distant corporations controlling vast tracts of land across multiple jurisdictions.

The industrial-scale monocropping, often carried out on this land, is a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction, preventing just transitions to more equitable and sustainable food systems and economic models.

These developments reflect a broader global trend of rising inequality and wealth concentration. Since the mid-1990s, the richest 1% of the world’s population has captured 38% of all additional accumulated wealth, while the poorest 50% have received only 2%.  An estimated 3.6 billion people, or 44% of the world population, now live on less than US$ 6.85 a day, below the threshold for a dignified life.

Because land grabbing is largely driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Colombia early next year offers a critical opportunity for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.

In a world facing intersecting crises – from climate breakdown and food insecurity to entrenched poverty and social inequality – and amid reconfiguration of the global balance of power, now is the time to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.

Watch an expert panel discussion on the report here:

For more information or media interviews please contact Anisa Widyasari anisa@focusweb.org or Tom Sullivan sullivan@fian.org.

Digital agriculture: A new frontier for data rights

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One morning in 2019, the inhabitants of Naya Toli, a village in eastern India, woke to find that they had become landless overnight. This time, it was not bulldozers or armed gangs driving them from their land but a state government program to digitize land records. The new digital registry attributed 108 acres in their area to the previous owner, who had sold the land to 19 families in 1973. 

What might appear to be a simple technical glitch reveals a fundamental problem with the rapid deployment of digital technologies: it risks entrenching existing exclusion and increasing inequalities.

Power imbalances embedded in digital technologies

The promise we so often hear about the future of food is that digital technologies will make food systems more productive, sustainable, and efficient, as well as help to address rising world hunger. In reality, the digitalization of agriculture is set to benefit mainly large corporations, while small-scale food producers, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups risk losing out. Smallholder farmers fear that their data will be extracted and used without their consent to create products and services that will then be sold to them for profit—deepening their dependence on external actors while lining the pockets of corporations. After all, there are enormous power imbalances between rural communities and multinational technology conglomerates.

The Indian government began digitizing land records in the 1990s and launched its ambitious Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) in 2008. By 2019, the state of Jharkhand had digitized more than 99% of its land registry records. However, with only 2.3% of land physically surveyed in the fast-paced process, the land rights and claims of many communities, such as those in Naya Toli, disappeared in the newly digitized registries. When villagers there tried to pay their land taxes, officials refused, claiming that they could not pay taxes for land they did not own, according to DILRMP records. The villagers have since tried, with great difficulty, to correct the information in the registry.

Communities across India relate similar experiences, especially smallholder farmers and Indigenous peoples, who possess traditional claims to common lands or collective forms of land ownership. The new digital registries have proved unable to document the diversity of tenure types, further disenfranchising marginalized groups. Indian communities are not alone: from Brazil to Rwanda and Georgia to Indonesia, people face similar challenges.

The pitfalls of “digital agriculture”

The digitization of land records is one part of a rapid and far-reaching transformation of food systems, sometimes referred to as “digital agriculture.” The Indian government announced in 2021 that newly digitized land records would be included in Agri Stack, a government-backed data exchange that enables the integration of land data with farmer profiles and other non-human sourced agricultural data (weather, soil health, hydrology, etc.). The stated goal is to create a pool of aggregated data to create customized products and services for farmers.

But as in other sectors of the economy, there is a race underway for profitable data and data collecting and processing technologies—including artificial intelligence. In recent years, several of the world’s leading agribusiness companies have partnered with large technology companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. These provide the technical infrastructure, such as cloud-based systems and artificial intelligence, that underlies a range of new applications and services that agribusinesses sell to farmers. In India, massive farmers’ protests challenged new agricultural laws adopted by parliament in September 2020, which opened up the country’s agricultural sector to corporations. The new laws coincided with the launch of Agri Stack, reinforcing farmers’ fears of a new wave of data-driven land grabs. 

Just digitalisation 

Two important lessons can be drawn from the experiences of communities in India and other countries. First, the development and use of digital technologies are firmly embedded in a given socioeconomic context. Technology does not develop in a bubble but is shaped by money and power, both of which are highly concentrated in a few large companies. Second, the implications of digitalization go beyond data protection and privacy. More specifically, digitalization impacts equity and the distribution of resources and wealth. It must be shaped proactively to make our societies more just rather than reproducing patterns of exclusion and discrimination. There is an urgent need for strong human rights–based governance frameworks that establish principles and standards for the use of digital technologies in the context of food and agriculture.

Governments and the United Nations appear to be finally rising to this challenge. The UN Human Rights Council recently adopted a resolution on “new and emerging digital technologies and human rights.” While highlighting the potential of these technologies, the resolution also recognizes the risks they may pose to human rights, including the economic, social, and cultural rights of marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples and people living in rural areas. In addition, it calls on states to establish governance frameworks to prevent, mitigate, and remedy the adverse effects of digital technologies on human rights, including regulating the activities of technology companies.

The UN’s Committee on World Food Security also recently agreed on a set of policy recommendations on the collection and use of data in the context of food security and nutrition. This document includes the first formal attempt to describe how data and related technologies are affecting food systems and to propose guidance on how to manage the associated opportunities and risks. Significantly, the recommendations, to be adopted in October 2023, recognize farmers, Indigenous peoples, and other small-scale food producers as rights holders over their data and related knowledge, with the right to an equitable share of any benefits generated from that data. 

Whether these global initiatives will help to shape the use of digital technologies in food and agriculture in a way that supports human rights remains to be seen. However, they clearly demonstrate that the issues raised by digitalization are inherently political. We cannot leave it to technicians and corporations to shape the future of our societies. 

As seen with the massive farmers’ mobilizations in India, food producers’ organizations are putting forward an alternative vision in which technologies are at the service of people and the planet, not financial interests.

Philip Seufert is a FIAN international policy officer working with small-scale food producers to support the realization of their right to food in the context of land, biodiversity, and digital technologies.

This article was originally published in OpenGlobalRights on September 22, 2023.

For more information or media interviews please contact Tom Sullivan, FIAN International Communications and Campaigns: sullivan@fian.org

Digital technologies cut off access to land

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As corporate giants discuss “Tech for Good” at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, recent findings show that *digitalization may increase existing inequalities. A study published by FIAN International ‘Disruption or Déjà Vu? Digitalization, Land and Human Rights’ reveals how digital technologies have become new tools for land grabs and sources of profits. Based on research conducted in Brazil, Indonesia, Georgia, India and Rwanda, the study shows that the use of digital tools in land governance exacerbates existing forms of exclusion. 

Some of the key findings include:

  • Corporations, wealthy individuals as well as local elites are using new digital tools to appropriate lands, resulting in the displacement of families and entire communities. A case in point is Mirador State Park in Brazil, where agribusiness companies have illegally encroached into a 700,000-hectare conservation area using digital land registries, dispossessing hundreds of families from lands where they have been living for generations.
  • In the absence of regulation for the public interest and human rights, main beneficiaries of the digitalization of the land sector are digital and agro-food companies to the detriment of disadvantaged groups. Governments increasingly rely on corporate actors to provide the infrastructure for digital land administration, thus undermining public control over essential services and goods.
  • Although land is recognized as a human right and is essential for the lives of rural people, digitalization projects are implemented with no human rights safeguards.
  • Despite its shortcomings for the public interest, international donors are spending millions of dollars to ramp up the use of digital technologies in the land sector around the world. The World Bank alone funds projects with more than USD 1 billion, targeting mainly Sub Saharan Africa as well as South and Southeast Asia.
  •  Initiatives using blockchain technology – the technology underlying cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin – exist in more than 20 countries. Whereas blockchain is being promoted as a cutting-edge technology that is able to solve land management problems, available information indicates that the technology has proven to be ineffective and most activities have stalled.

“What we are seeing is that the current use of digital technologies in the context of land deepens inequalities. This is not ‘Tech for Good’ but for profit,” explains Philip Seufert, one of the authors of the study. “The question is not whether digital technologies are good or bad. But when their application is not embedded in human rights, the outcomes benefit a small group of powerful corporations and individuals. For rural communities this means losing their land and livelihoods,” he adds.

 

Land is an indicator of existing social inequalities and dispossession of local communities has increased since the financial crisis of 2008, which has triggered a global rush for land by all kinds of investors. Lack of secure and stable access to land is also a key factor causing poverty and hunger. Addressing these requires tackling structural issues such as highly unequal distribution of land and a lack of legal protection of community’s land rights. Digital tools, such as digitized cadasters, have been put forward as a short cut to solve pressing land problems. But evidence from the five countries analyzed in the study shows that land-related digitalization processes are primarily designed to make land attractive for financial investments. 

“It is unacceptable that governments and development agencies are scaling up the use of digital technologies in the land sector without taking into account internationally accepted human rights standards,” says Mathias Pfeifer, a co-author of the study. “Pretending that technical fixes can replace policies addressing structural discrimination is irresponsible and dangerous. The generalized lack of participation by those affected only makes things worse.” 

 

The analyzed data shows that digitalization entails a transfer of state powers to private actors. In Georgia for example, a Netherlands-based company runs the blockchain infrastructure that is supposed to serve as the basis of the country’s land management system, including automated land transactions. This and other public-private partnership arrangements raise serious concerns about public control over essential goods and governance functions. 

In 2020, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced the establishment of an international platform that aims to provide guidance to the application of digital technologies in the context of food and agriculture. The findings of the study underline the need to uphold and implement internationally agreed human rights standards in the context of digitalization, including the FAO’s own Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests.

For enquiries please contact delrey@fian.org

**Download**
Disruption or Déjà Vu? Digitalization, Land and Human Rights
 Analysis Grid for the Assessment of Land-related Digitalization Projects and Processes from a Human Rights Perspective
Mapping of Digitalization and Blockchain Projects in the Land Sector

 

FAQ

*What is digitalization?
It is the integration of digital technologies into all aspects of society and the economy, based on the process of converting information into a digital format that can be processed by a computer (“digitization”). Digitalization entails new forms of production, distribution and consumption.

*How is land concerned by digitalization?
Digital technologies and tools are increasingly used for land governance and management. For instance, lands are mapped and demarcated using GPS devices and drones. Information related to land ownership and use are also stored in digital registries and cadasters. Lastly, digital tools and platforms serve to carry out land transactions and to define policies. Digitalization in the context of land has major implications for the access to, use of and control over this critical resource.
 

Indonesia Law puts food and environmental rights at stake

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On World Food Day, FIAN Indonesia together with FIAN International and dozens of national and international organizations express their concern over the ratification of the Omnibus Law (also called the Omnibus Law on Job Creation) on October 5th, 2020, which was done in an undemocratic and hasty manner. The Omnibus Law overrules more than 70 existing laws and regulations, and includes controversial articles that threaten the right to food and nutrition of millions of Indonesian labourers, small-scale food producers, indigenous peoples, migrant workers, and other marginalised groups.

This view is expressed in a statement of solidarity signed by 55 national and international organizations.

“On this World Food Day, Indonesia continues to grapple with the pandemic and its derivative impacts, but this country has passed the Omnibus Law which increases the vulnerability of small-scale food producers and consumers in already fragile food systems,” explained Laksmi Adriani Savitri, Chair of the National Board of FIAN Indonesia.

The Omnibus Law contains articles that will adopt the food liberalization agenda, thus creating acute dependence on imported food, building corporate monopoly on the food supply chains, and causing environmental destruction by further pushing agricultural industrialisation and deforestation.

“In fact, food liberalization has proven to impact availability, accessibility, adequacy and sustainability of food, especially for rural communities and indigenous people who fulfil their food needs from food sources available in nature,” said Sofía Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International.

Several national sections of FIAN from various countries such as Colombia, Norway and Sweden together with other civil society organizations also expressed their solidarity with this statement, condemning the creation process of the Omnibus Law, which did not involve the Indonesian people in the drafting process.

They are also concerned about the existence of the Omnibus Law which contradicts the international legal instruments that guarantee human rights that have been signed by Indonesia, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP).

Signatories of the statement urge the Indonesian Government to uphold the principles of justice and democracy and to respect and fulfil the right to food and nutrition of the Indonesian people.

The full statement is available in this link

Contact:
Laksmi Adriani Savitri (Chair of the National Council of FIAN Indonesia, email: laksmi.adriani@gmail.com)
Yifang Tang (Case Work and Research/Asia of FIAN International, email: tang@fian.org)

FIAN takes roots in Indonesia

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The human rights organization took roots in Indonesia last January, becoming the fourth office in Asia. FIAN’s work in the country comes at a time when 19 million Indonesians face hunger. Today, while most of Indonesia’s 255 million population lives in rural areas and works in the agricultural sector as food producers, 16 million farmers are still landless and do not have adequate access to food producing resources. 

Commenting on the founding of the office, FIAN Indonesia’s Chairperson Laksmi Savitri said: “Despite the right to food and nutrition being implicit in the Indonesian Constitution, it is not acknowledged by the people. Nor is the government conscious about its obligation. In the face of free trade agreements such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and ASEAN Economic Community – which started to be implemented this year, the country will be facing more and more the issue of large scale land grabbing and farming dictated by the global supermarket. All these developments will have a negative impact on people’s ability to feed themselves and cause violations of their right to food. This is the main reason why FIAN is needed in Indonesia.”

Despite Indonesia’s ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the enactment of Food Law 18/2012, many have been evicted – or are facing displacement – in the name of development and economic growth, and their rights are violated. Indonesia has signed 64 bilateral investment treaties, 24 multilateral agreements and 15 comprehensive free trade agreements, and currently, there are plans to join the TPP. The detrimental impact of trade agreements on people’s ability to feed themselves has been widely documented and threatens the right to food of millions of Indonesians.

For media enquiries, please contact delrey[at]fian.org

National Information Tour on Right to Food in Indonesia

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“More than 12% of population is suffering from hunger in Indonesia today. The global food crisis has had its impacts in Indonesia – reports on starvation deaths have made headlines in a flurry of news.  There is enough food but people either have no money to purchase food or lack access to land to produce their food”,  says Nanang Hari Supraptyo, a head of advocacy division at Bina Desa, an non-governmental organization serving as a secretariat for the network.  “Through the National Information Tour, we want to reach as many victims of the right to food as possible, and engage in dialogues with local governments”, Nanang adds.

The first stop of the information tour is Kediri District, East Java. Between 14- 17 November, 26 people who are from actual victims of the right to food and supporting organizations attended the training. The tour will then head off to Medan of North Sumatera in December, Maros in South Sulawesi in December, Merauke in Papua in January 2010, Lombok  in West Nusa Tenggara in February, and the final stop in Kupang of East Nusa Tenggara in March 2010, before all network members gather together in Jakarta to attend the Forum of the Right to Food, in which the results of the tour and different dialogues with local authorizes will be presented. Representatives from the Central Government will also be invited to attend the forum and involve in the drafting of the national strategy towards the fulfillment of the right to food.

FIAN International – together with Bina Desa – have initiated the creation of the right to food network, and currently still serves as a right to food consultant for the network.

Indonesia: Mining activities will threaten the right to food of 60,000 people, Lembata, Flores.

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In June 2005, a gold and copper mining company began preliminary exploration activities in the regency (district) of Lembata in Flores.  The proposed mining activities will result in the people of Lembata losing their agricultural land as well as ocean resources, which provide their staple diet. The planned mine will also cause the resettlement of at least 60,000 local people. As such, the right to food of the local people will therefore be severely threatened.  

International action is needed in order to stop current exploration activities and to stop the mine from going ahead.  Please send a letter to the Minister for Energy and Mineral Resources, Governor of East Nusa Tenggara,  Chair of the Lembata Regional Parliament, and the Regent of Lembata, requesting them to protect the right to food of 60,000 people in Lembata.

Indonesia: State Forest Department threatens the right to food of peasants, Ompo, Lapajung, Bila and Mattabulu villages, Lalabata Subregency in Soppeng Regency, South Celebes

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For over 20 years, 340 peasant families in Ompo, Lapajung, Bila and Mattabulu villages, Lalabata Subregency in Soppeng Regency, South Celebes, have been struggling for their right to food. In 1982, their land was declared as “State Forest Zone” and the peasants were arbitrarily prohibited from cultivating their land. Since then, their access to land has been denied and neither compensation nor rehabilitation took place. Many have migrated to cities in search of other employment, while others stayed and tried to survive on their little garden.