Monday, February 18, 2013

Land grab is also water grab

Agriculture is in fact one of the world's most insatiable consumers of water. And yet it's facing growing competition for water from cities, industry, and recreation at a time when demand for food is rising, and water is expected to become increasingly scarce.

Corporations and investors are buying up foreign farmland and the freshwater perks that come with it. From Sudan to Indonesia, most of the land lies in poverty-stricken regions, so experts warn that this widespread purchasing could expand the gap between developed and developing countries. The 'water grabbing' by corporations amounts to 454 billion cubic metres per year globally, according to a new study by environmental scientists. That's about five per cent of the water the world uses annually. Investors from seven countries - the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, United Kingdom, Egypt, China and Israel - accounted for 60 per cent of the water acquired under these deals. Most international land deals involve a tangle of different corporations and partnerships. A handful of the purchasers are countries, but most are investment firms, biofuel producers or large-scale farming operations. Some of the more active buyers in the United States, which leads the pack in number of deals, include multinational investors Nile Trading and Development, BHP Billiton, Unitech and media magnate Ted Turner.

"In many of these countries, the sum of the water being grabbed would be enough to eliminate malnourishment," says D'Odorico, who collaborated with scientists from Italy's Polytechnic University of Milan.

Wendy Wolford, a professor at Cornell University who studies political and social impacts of international land deals, says they "don't grab land in places without access to water." Some countries - including Indonesia, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of Congo - had large amounts of water rights grabbed because they're countries with a lot of rainfall. Wolford says there is danger that local people - especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa - are not aware of land purchases and how it could affect their way of life. "That's probably the biggest problem - people could have gathered timber from the woods or lived downstream of the land grabbed," Wolford says. "These things could be taken away without them knowing what happened."

A plantation in Ethiopia's Gambela region, owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire, diverts water from the Alwero River and it has led to violence. The Alwero River is important for thousands of people in the region - for farming and fishing. In Sudan where land is usually grabbed on the banks of the Blue Nile - heavily sought after spots in an otherwise dry place, pushes out small farmers causing the local population is becoming increasingly dependent on food aid and international food subsidies.

Since 2000, 1,217 deals have taken place, which transferred over 830,000 square kilometres of land, according to the public database Land Matrix. About 62 per cent of these deals were in Africa - totaling about 560,000 km2. Asia. About 66 per cent of the total deals are in countries with high hunger rates. Land grabbing surged from 2005 to 2009 in response to a food price crisis. Droughts in key grain-producing countries - such as the United States, Argentina and Australia - in recent years play a role as well. With dwindling yields, richer nations buy up land in other places to secure their own food supply. Another big driver is biofuels and new biofuel policy. It has really increased the demand for agricultural land.

Jennifer Franco, a researcher at the Transnational Institute, an international think tank in the Netherlands explains "Capitalist firms are not Boy Scouts, and they are unlikely to place moral codes and 'good governance' above the interests and demands of their owners or shareholders,"

Taken from here

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