Nature Areas

Land grab fears for Ethiopian rural communities

A controversial new farms policy has led to a political clampdown in a remote lowland region of Ethiopia. The government of Meles Zenawi is pioneering the lease of some three million hectares of land over the next five years, an area the size of Belgium. The policy is targeting massive lowland areas mostly in the west and south-west of the country. These are regions populated by smaller minority ethnic groups. The government denies conducting any repression, and says instead that its policy is aimed at lifting local people out of poverty. Foreign investors in Gambella include Chinese, Indian and Saudi firms. The Saudis alone say they are hoping to produce as much as a million tonnes of rice per year, most of it for their own domestic market. Read more (BBC, 16.12.2001)

Futures Group about the future of food

The Futures Group looks at possible futures in the timeline 2020-25 for opportunities and threats. It straddles both Asian and Western perspectives. In their own words:

Trends/shifts are like seeds today. Some seeds sprout to become towering trees, some seeds will grow for a short while but have no staying power and will die off. Some seeds never make it. What we try to do is make an educated guess how these seeds will contribute to the forest of tomorrow. Then we backcast and ask “How do we prepare ourselves to survive and thrive in this forest?” We’ve covered a variety of topics from Arctic Melt, Food, Global Cities to Little economy, Augmented human beings, Batteries and Electric Cars.

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Neoliberalism in the oceans: ‘‘rationalization,’’ property rights,

Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on privatization and marketization, is becoming a dominant mode of ocean governance. In this paper I show that neoliberalism in ocean fisheries has a specific form and history based on the ways that, for the last 50 years, regulation debates have centered on the question of the commons. Focus on the role of the commons in problems such as overfishing and overcapacity has contributed to convergence of different viewpoints around neoliberal, market-oriented approaches that try to harness the profit motive to conservation and economic efficiency. I trace the idea of property rights in fisheries from the point in the 1950s when economists first identified the commons as the underlying cause of fisheries problems, through extended political jurisdiction, to recent emphasis on the benefits of common property. Despite their differences, proponents of these different viewpoints all take property as their central problematic and contribute to the idea that creating market incentives, by specifying property rights, is the foundation upon which proper use of ocean resources rests. I illustrate these ideas with a description of the shift toward privatization in the fisheries of the US portion of the North Pacific, which have a direct annual value of almost $1 billion. Neoliberal approaches to fisheries regulation are not simply spillover from larger trends toward market-based governance, but instead are influenced by the ways that past policy orientations toward fisheries have centered on enclosing the oceans within carefully delimited regimes of property rights, be those regimes of collective, state, or private control. Download the article as PDF

Madagascar: The New Land Grab

aa-transJust when colonialism was considered dead and buried, along comes neo-colonialism in its latest guise. Allied with its close relatives globalisation, free marketeering and lack of transparency, it is currently launching a new offensive on the disempowered population of this continent. Kwame Nkrumah, along with others in the post-colonial Pan Africanist movement, coined the term ‘neo-colonialism’ to describe continued access to the resources of less developed nations, by both national and private interests allied to wealthy nations. He warned against the continued impacts of colonialism if the risks inherent to neo-colonialism were neither addressed nor dealt with. Read More