Joan McAlpine: Green goldrush snatches food from the hungry

SOME call it the green goldrush. For others, it’s the great western land grab and resembles the colonial scramble for Africa more than a century ago. Oxfam wants the world to know about the scandal of the lost lands, of a continent being gobbled up by western greed. It illustrated the scale of the problem at a protest in Edinburgh recently, with 29 cutouts of Scotland – representing the 227 million hectares of land taken from the people of the developing world in the past decade.

Smallholdings that once supported villages and extended families have passed into the hands of anonymous investors such as pension funds and global agribusiness. Often the land is simply “banked” for the future, because the rising demand for both food and fuel ensure its price will rocket – land is a lucrative alternative to gold at this time of economic crisis.

The rise of world population and the rapid industrialisation of China and India are partly to blame. This has resulted in upward pressure on energy and food. Biofuel has become particularly attractive as the price of oil escalates and the West seeks to cut carbon emissions.

Biofuels offer the prospect of motoring that is cheaper and greener. But there is growing evidence that this alternative to fossil fuels is resulting in thousands of farmers in the developing world being dispossessed.

The European Union’s carbon reduction targets accelerate the trend. The EU plans to double biofuel imports in the next decade. Two years ago, Brussels passed legislation that commits its members to obtain 20 per cent of their energy and 10 per cent of their vehicle fuel from renewable sources by 2020. They look towards Africa, which combines a tropical climate that allows crops to grow fast with the attractions of cheap land and labour.

ActionAid has conducted research showing that 18 per cent of biofuels in the UK are made from wheat and corn grown in the developing world – a year ago, the figure was negligible. Other sources include sugar cane and palm oil. The ten UK companies currently investing in African biofuel plantations will tell you it has opened doors for the continent and its people – it provides much-needed jobs where the population are desperate for work.

But Oxfam’s report found that this was often not the case. The crops are refined into fuel elsewhere, meaning Africans lose out on the high-quality factory jobs. Those who are pushed off the land are women – who conduct most agricultural labour in Africa. They are replaced by a small number of men who operate the machinery in the far more mechanised plantations.

In 2010, a US company secured a 49-year lease on 5,000 hectares of land in Ghana for a plantation to produce material for biomass power plants. The same company also operates in Guyana, and intends to establish energy crop plantations in Madagascar and Tanzania. The government of Mozambique is promoting the country as a southern African biofuel hub and at least one-seventh of the arable land has already been leased for this purpose.

ActionAid is aware of five proposed massive biofuel plantations in Kenya, a country where we know the pressures on land and food have bubbled over into violence. The charity warns that one proposal in the east African country could displace about 20,000 people. Already, in Uganda, a single deal has lead to the eviction of that number, sometimes violently.

One woman who lost her home and smallholding told Oxfam: “All our plantations were cut down – we lost the banana and cassava. We lost everything we had. The company’s casual labourers would attack us – they beat and threatened people. Even now they won’t let us back in to look for the things we left behind.”

Oxfam recently held a protest in Edinburgh to draw attention to their “Grow” campaign and their Land and Power report. The green goldrush is leading to another global food crisis as prices soar. But that in turn results in yet more land grabs as industrialised countries, such as China, snap up agricultural land in Africa in order to secure a reliable supply of food for their expanding workforces. In one incredible passage, the Oxfam report describes the ambition of the Gulf states to turn Ethiopia – presumably the parts where people are not already starving – into Arabia’s breadbasket.

The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have all warned that biofuels will push up food prices globally, yet many of these agencies also have business development arms that actively encourage the process.

Oxfam Scotland draws parallels with the Highland clearances of 200 years ago, when the native peoples were cleared to make way for sheep – to feed international market demand. There are also modern Scottish examples of destructive speculation, such as the monocultural mass planting of sitka spruce in the 1980s as a result of a tax loophole.

Recently, the rising price of land has squeezed young Scots from farming families out of the market, as holdings are consolidated. There are fears that farms could eventually become so large they will be effectively owned by the supermarkets – as happens in the United States. The Scottish Farmer newspaper recently reported that land inflation was 15 per cent in England – twice that of Scotland. This has resulted in many farms north of the Border being snapped up by buyers from the south.

But while this is of great concern to those affected, and to the diversity of our rural communities, it does not result in starvation. It is time we all questioned the target for biofuels in Europe and worked harder to develop our own technologies, in particular marine and offshore wind as well as electric cars. These require more investment and commitment than biofuels, but ultimately they are kinder to the planet and its people. One billion human beings in the world today are hungry. They need their land more than we do.

• www.oxfam.org/grow