Skip to content
Menu
REDD-Monitor
  • Start here
  • About REDD-Monitor
  • REDD: An introduction
  • Contact
REDD-Monitor

Land Grabbing: “Big, big problem”

Posted on 29 January 2016
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

Land Grabbing“It’s very attractive. The earnings are very high and we’ve got hybrid material now. You harvest in the 24th month, and the repayment period is about seven years at the most… For the next 20 years it’ll be laughing yourself all the way to the bank.”

That’s Suriya Moorthy, a consultant for agricultural investments in Malaysia, talking about oil palm investments. The quotation is from a documentary film, “Land Grabbing“.

It’s well worth a watch – if you’re in London, it’s showing at Bertha DocHouse from 29 January to 4 February 2016 (details here).

Director Kurt Langbein visits the scenes of land grabs and talks to farmers, local communities and to the investors behind the schemes.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

The documentary team travelled to Cambodia, to investigate a sugar plantation that has taken people’s land. They talk to Venerable Luon Sovath, a buddhist monk who interviews villagers and documents everything he finds. More than 1,000 families living in the area were violently evicted. Many houses were burned.

The plantation belongs to Phnom Penh Sugar, a company run by Senator Ly Yong Phat. The sugar is exported to the European Union. Under the EU’s “Everything but Arms” treaty with Cambodia, the sugar is exported duty free.

The documentary looks at large-scale industrial agriculture in Romania and contrasts this with small-scale farming there. While small-scale farmers can get small subsidies from the EU, millions of Euros are available for industrial agriculture.

In Ethiopia, we see how tomatoes and peppers are grown in greenhouses for the “top of the market” in the Middle East and Africa. The work is backbreaking and poorly paid. Workers are searched when they leave work to check that they haven’t stolen any tomatoes. It’s enough to make you want to boycott tomatoes.

Oil palm

For me, the most extraordinary part of the film is in Indonesia. We see workers on an oil palm plantation belonging to Cargill. They stand in rows and recite the “Hindoli Plantation Employees Pledge”. This includes a list of seven items, starting as follows:

I’m ashamed of myself:
 
1. When I don’t follow the rules and I make a mistake.
 
2. When I don’t use my personal safety equipment.

John Hartman, a manager at Cargill, explains how important discipline and routine is within the workforce. Hartman explains the importance of sustainability. Behind him is the industrial oil palm monoculture where rainforest once stood.

Hartman

A bioenergy plant in Sierra Leone is the next stop. Addax Bioenergy earned Africa’s first Rountable on Sustainable Bioenergy certification. But Ibrahim Serie, a village head, describes how villagers gave away their land without understanding the impacts on their livelihoods.

Addax showed the villagers a map and told them how many hectares of land they had. “We didn’t even know what a hectare was,” Serie says.

The biofuel from Addax’s bioenergy plant in Sierra Leone will be exported to Europe, where it will be blended with petrol to be used by cars. ADDAX got a €250 million loan from public funds, including from the Development Bank of Austria.

Addax

While there was no violence or evictions to make way for Addax’s sugar plantations, farmers have entered into contracts that result in them losing their land over longer periods of time. While some have benefitted, others are losing out. Water supply has been affected through Addax’s irrigation schemes.

“If Addax won’t help us drill a well, they’re going to kill us,” Serie says. He accuses Addax of mixing chemicals into the water sprayed onto the sugar cane. “Our animals died from eating weeds near the sugar cane fields,” he says. In the rainy season, the chemicals are washing into the river. “This is a major problem for us. Big, big problem.”

The documentary makes no comment, but none is necessary. The injustice of this destructive “development” model could not be clearer.
 

Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Email this to someone
email

Related

1 thought on “Land Grabbing: “Big, big problem””

  1. Robert Hii says:
    29 January 2016 at 6:08 pm

    Dynamite.From palm oil to sugars for soda/pop, there’s tears in them products if not outright blood

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

SUBSCRIBE!

Enter your email address to receive notification of new posts.

Recent themes
Natural Climate Solutions
WWF's conservation scandals
Aviation and offsetting
Conservation Watch

REDDisms

“Where do they buy carbon credits for these emissions? Well, Papua New Guinea is here, and Papua New Guinea is putting its hands up to say that, hey, we’re prepared to conserve our forest for REDD programmes for you to buy carbon credits.”

— Douglas Tomuriesa, Papua New Guinea’s forestry minister, May 2015

Recent Posts

  • Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • How REDD greenwashes Glencore’s coal mining operations in Colombia
  • The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading
  • Book review: “Forest Conservation and Sustainability in Indonesia” by Bernice Maxton-Lee
  • Plant for the Planet: Felix Finkbeiner’s fake forests

Recent Comments

  • st john on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow
  • Gordon Emery on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Jonathan Price (@B3CPres) on Capitalism is driving us to disaster
  • Mrs Linda Knight on Savraj Gata-Aura sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the Bar Works investment scam
  • Chris Lang on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow

Issues and Organisations

AB 32 Boiler rooms Bonn California Can REDD save ... ? Carbon accounting Carbon Credits Carbon Offsets CDM Conservation-Watch Conservation International COP21 Paris Deforestation FCPF FERN Financing REDD Forest definition Fossil fuels FPP Friends of the Earth FSC Greenpeace Guest post ICAO Illegal logging Indigenous Peoples Natural Climate Solutions NGO statements Plantations Poznan R-M interview REDD and rights REDD in the news Risk RSPO-Watch Safeguards Sengwer Sustainable Forest Management The Nature Conservancy Ulu Masen UN-REDD UNFCCC World Bank WRM WWF

Countries

Australia Bolivia Brazil Cambodia Cameroon Canada China Colombia Congo Basin region DR Congo Ecuador El Salvador European Union France Germany Guatemala Guyana Honduras India Indonesia Kenya Laos Luxembourg Madagascar Malaysia Mexico Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Republic of Congo Sweden Tanzania Thailand Uganda UK Uncategorized United Arab Emirates USA Vietnam West Papua
©2021 REDD-Monitor | Powered by WordPress and Superb Themes!