Impact of Landgrabbing on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Mr. /Mrs. President,

FIAN International, together with the international landless and peasants movement La Via Campesina and CETIM would like to draw the attention of the Committee to the dramatic new wave of land grabbing. While precise details are hard to come by, some estimates indicate that 70 to 220 million hectares of good agricultural land could have been transferred from peasants to corporations in the last few years alone, and each day more investors join the rush. The High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security has stated in its second report in 2011 that large scale investment in land is damaging food security, incomes, livelihoods and environment for local people.

We are of the opinion that land grabbing violates the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It directly interferes with the right to feed oneself by foreclosing the lands and waters taken for landless or land-scarce communities who can make alternative and better use of the resources. This Committee has underlined the core obligation of states to give particular attention to the most disadvantaged groups. A state which does not provide available land and related productive resources to  marginalized groups, but instead hands over these lands to rich investors do not comply with these core obligations, which are of immediate application. Many countries particularly in Africa have a large population of unemployed rural and urban youth and a high rate of population growth. Land resources are necessary to offer opportunities for labor intensive food production. For this matter, even where companies acquire lands that are not fully utilized at the moment, the human right to feed oneself is affected. In fact, peoples may be deprived of their future means of subsistence in an open violation of Human Rights’ Covenants Article 1.

Since large-scale land acquisition is profit-oriented and mainly exports driven, it will foster the introduction/deepening of an industrial agricultural mode of production in the host countries. There is abundant literature available indicating that this mode of production is ecologically destructive and not sustainable. It implies massive loss of topsoil, pollutes and overuses water, destroys biodiversity and releases large amounts of greenhouse gases. It displaces local producers who often have the knowledge of producing sustainably and would be in a position to do so with even higher yields if they were provided with an enabling agricultural policy environment and with proper learning and communication networks.

Increased agricultural production does not mean that local communities will have better access to food even if more food is produced. In fact, the expansion of cash crop monocultures has a severe impact on local availability of food as it diverts food producing resources and labor to cash crop production. As a result, communities are forced to depend on the market and on commercialization networks from outside the region for their basic provisions which puts them at the mercy of volatile food prices. The lack of local food availability and the high level of dependence on food from elsewhere also reduce the quality and variety of the diet of communities and alter their food customs. This constitutes yet another threat to their enjoyment of the right to food: the right to food implies that food must be adequate and culturally appropriate.

With land grabbing the globalization paradigm has reached the primary sector of national economies; sectors which are absolutely essential for countries’ and peoples’ self-determination and food sovereignty. The act of land grabbing fits well in a strategy towards deepening the commoditization of nature, agriculture and the global rule of a small group of “investors” and their TNCs. The corporate food regime is undermining, in a systemic way, the realization of the right to adequate food not only of peasants in food insecure countries, but of us all. Defending an equitable access to land and resources as precondition for decentralized, sustainable and autonomous peasant agriculture is a crucial component of the right to adequate food. Land cannot be left to the mercy of markets and speculators.

Given the dramatic situation on the ground, we would like to urge the CESCR to:

1. Increase the protection of the human rights of peasants e.g. by issuing a general comment on land as suggested by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food in his thematic report (A/65/281). Such a general comment should recognize land as a human right and pay particular attention to the importance of agrarian reform as crucial measure to fulfill this right.

2. Support the recommendations of the Final Study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the advancement of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (A/HRC/19/75).

3. Consider the human rights impacts of land grabbing in the questions asked during the constructive dialogues with the states and in the provision of the concluding observations.

4. Apply the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial States Obligations of States in the area of ESCR to cases of land grabbing reported during the monitoring process.

I thank you for your attention.