THE NEW SCRAMBLE FOR LAND | Kenneth Hermele
CASE 5. UGANDA loss of windbreaks, scarcity of water, less attraction to tourism, one of the main income sources of the islanders.
A land grab which now is fourteen years old enables an assessment of the medium-term impact of the introduction of palm oil on 10 000 hectares of the Ugandan island of Bugala in Lake Victoria.
The assessment today is that all of these negative effects have come true – wetland loss, soil erosion, contamination of water sources – while most of the poorly paid jobs (one dollar a day) have gone to immigrants to the island. At the same time, land prices have begun to climb, stimulating further privatization of land.
In 1998, the government of Uganda joined forces with the World Bank, the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and one of the global leaders in palm oil production, Wilmar International, based in Singapore, to produce palm oil on the island. The project included an outgrower scheme on 3 500 hectares, which supposedly would give local employment in addition to the jobs held out on the 6 500 hectares of plantations of palm oil. Already at the outset, drawbacks were recognized as an environmental impact assessment warned that a number of negative environmental and social effects were to be expected: reduced forest cover, declining biodiversity,
One of the islanders, who was directly impacted by the project, sums up his experience: “We no longer have land where we can plant crops and there is an increasingly spread of some rare diseases which we had never heard about.” Source: Friends of the Earth International 2012.
which today is using the land in question as the World Bank openly admits that the intensive commercial agriculture that it is advocating will cause “environmental damage” but it finds this destruction “acceptable” as the alternative to this damage would have been
However, the green grab logic may backfire: monocultures of feed-stocks for agro-fuels have decidedly negative impact on biodiversity, and some of them oust other land uses and lead to the opening up of new lands which may cause further emissions of greenhouse gases, thus also questioning the environmental credentials of agro-fuel. This has prompted the EU Commission to recently propose to limit acceptable feed stocks for agro-fuels in an attempt to avoid competition with crops used for food and feed. No agro-fuel produced from today’s traditional feed stocks – sugar cane and maize for ethanol, soya, palm oil and rapeseed for biodiesel – is acceptable in principle if this proposal is accepted, which will not put an end to land grabbing but at least weaken one of the drivers to find more areas to produce agro-fuel feed stocks.43
It should be clear that the World Bank is presenting us with a choice between two negative routes of expansion of agriculture: extensification of present production systems which will require new land to be cleared, and intensification which will require more chemical and fossil-based inputs but may make do with smaller areas. The World Bank is linking potential agriculture, with hypothetical yields, to actual existing agricultural production systems, which are found wanting.46 A “yield gap” of serious dimensions is identified and closing the gap by investing in large-scale, mechanized, monocultural farming depending on high levels of chemical and fossil inputs is seen as providing an efficient and area-saving solution to a real predicament: how to support a growing global population with the food, feed, fibres, fuels and forests it craves.
The modern agriculture argument: The development grab By comparing actual to potential land use an argument may be constructed in favour of intensifying commercial agriculture for the benefit of the environment. In this tradition, the World Bank argues that “commercialization of agriculture” by
increasing the productivity of intensive commercial production systems can relieve pressure for agriculture to expand into marginal zones, protecting them from eventual damage caused by unsustain- able extractive methods”. 44
As we will see in the next chapter, this is not the only alternatives available, but by framing the choice which we face globally in this way, the World Bank reduces our options and in fact leads us to the foregone conclusion: intensification beats extensification, without discussing if there are other intensifications systems
Note that intensive commercial agriculture is pitted against traditional agriculture, which is supposed to be non-commercial, an assertion which is questionable. Also here, the World Bank knows what it is suggesting, doing away with the peasantry
44
even greater environmental damage occurring elsewhere as the result of expansion of low-productivity agriculture into highly vulnerable areas. [...] Intensification inevitably comes at some environmental cost, but arguably a lower one than might have been incurred with further extensification. 45
World Bank 2009:163. 45World Bank 2009:11-12. 46In a following chapter, the World Bank’s dichotomy modern-traditional will be questioned with the help of the inverted relationship farm size – area productivity, a fact which is disregarded in the World Bank discourse 47Oxfam 2011:11.
18