Abstract
In this chapter, we argue that the idea of a Code of Conduct (CoC)-framed response to the global land grab—a generic formulation that includes a variety of specific mechanisms such as the “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investments” (RAI) and a variety of existing voluntary multistakeholder roundtables on different crops—veers away from questioning the fundamental roots of land-grabbing, i.e., the existing industrial pattern of food and energy production and consumption controlled by Transnational Corporations(TNCs), while engaging in the problematic notion of “win-win” scenarios. In our view, for all the reasons outlined above, a CoC-framed response to land-grabbing is likely to facilitate, not block, further land-grabbing and thus should not be considered, even as a second-best approach. Some may argue that the idea of a CoC, despite its inherent weaknesses, should still be considered as a possible second-best, pragmatic approach on the grounds that large-scale land-grabbing is inevitable in the current economic climate and political-institutional context. Yet we contend that land-grabbing is not inevitable, that it can be prevented, and that concerted efforts should be undertaken to stop it.
Saturnino M. Borras Jr is associate professor at the international Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, the Netherlands, Adjunct Professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing, and fellow of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) and California-based Food First. This chapter is an expanded and updated version of an earlier article that was published in the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal. See Santurina Borras Jr. & Jennifer Franco, From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with the Idea of “Code of Conduct” for Land-Grabbing, 13 Yale Hum. Rts. & Dev. L.J. 507 (2010).
Jennifer C. Franco is the Coordinator of the Agrarian Justice Program of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and is an Adjunct Professor at the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
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- 1.
Peter Utting, The Struggle for Corporate Accountability, 39 Dev. & Change 959, 959 (2008).
- 2.
Bridget O’Laughlin, Governing Capital? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Limits of Regulation, 39 Dev. & Change 945, 946 (2008).
- 3.
Id. at 946.
- 4.
See, e.g., U.N. Food & Agric. Org. [FAO] et al., Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources (2010); Joachim von Braun & Ruth Meinzen-Dick, “Land Grabbing” by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries: Risks and Opportunities, IFPRI Policy Brief 13, at 2–3 (2009).
- 5.
Oxfam International, Land and Power (2011); John Vidal, Fears for the World’s Poor Countries as the Rich Grab Land to Grow Food, The Guardian, July 3, 2009; Asia: Land Grabs Threaten Food Security, IRINNEWS.ORG see also Lorenzo Cotula et al., Land Grab or Development Opportunity? Agricultural Investments and International Land Deals in Africa (2009); GRAIN, SEIZED! THE 2008 LAND GRAB FOR FOOD AND FINANCIAL SECURITY (2008).
- 6.
In Mozambique, for example, the government leased thirty thousand hectares of land to Procana for sugarcane (ethanol) production for a ninety-nine year term. The land was already long occupied by subsistence farmers and pastoralists and had also been named the resettlement site for families that were displaced by the expansion of the Limpopo National Park. Daniel Ribeiro & Nilza Matavel, Jatropha! A Socio-economic Pitfall for Mozambique 10 (2009); Jennifer Franco et al., Assumptions in the European Union Biofuels Policy: Frictions with Experiences in Germany, Brazil and Mozambique, 37 J. Peasant Stud. 661 (2010). Other examples can be found in the Cerrado region of Brazil, an extremely high biodiversity area that has seen massive expansion of sugarcane monocropping for ethanol in recent years. See id. Many more examples can be found in the online industry news outlet Biofuels Digest, http://www.biofuelsdigest.com, as well as in reports produced by transnational activist networks such as Friends of the Earth and GRAIN. See, e.g., The Food Crisis and the Global Land Grab Blog, http://farmlandgrab.org.
- 7.
On the biofuel boom controversy, see, e.g., Sofia Monsalve Suárez et al., Agrofuels in Brazil: Report of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Impacts of Public Policies Encouraging the Production of Agrofuels on the Enjoyment of the Human Rights to Food, Work and the Environment Among the Peasant and Indigenous Communities and Rural Workers in Brazil (2008); Eric Holt-Giménez & Annie Shattuck, The Agrofuels Transition: Restructuring Places and Spaces in the Global Food System, 29 Bull. Sci., Tech. & Soc’y 180 (2009).
- 8.
Perhaps the most aggressive mandatory targeting has been by the European Union, which legislated in early 2009 that twenty percent of all energy used in the EU and ten percent of each Member State’s transport fuel must come from renewable sources by the year 2020, with most of this expected to come from biofuels. See Franco et al., supra note 6.
- 9.
See, e.g., GRAIN, supra note 5. Civil society groups of course are highly differentiated—by class base, ideology and politics. Their analysis of global land grabbing and its causes and consequences may have some similarities but are also significantly differentiated.
- 10.
Alongside “code of conduct,” the phrase “principles of responsible large-scale land acquisition” is also being deployed. But even if the term used by its proponents is not always (or even any longer) “code of conduct” per se, the basic idea is essentially the same. The core notion that this kind of approach offers a “win-win solution” continues to characterize the endeavor, as it has from the start.
- 11.
Our understanding of a truly pro-poor land policy is discussed in more detail elsewhere. See Saturnino Borras, Jr. & Jennifer C. Franco, Contemporary Discourses and Contestations Around Pro-Poor Land Policies and Land Governance, 10 J. Agrarian Change 1 (2010).
- 12.
John F. Richards, Introduction to LAND, PROPERTY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT 1 (John F. Richards ed., 2002).
- 13.
Von Braun & Meinzen-Dick, supra note 4, at 2.
- 14.
Borras & Franco, supra note 11, at 3.
- 15.
Cotula et al., supra note 5, at 59–60; World Bank, Rising Interest in Land (2010).
- 16.
Commission Directive 2009/28/EC, 2009 O.J. (L 140) 16 (E.U.).
- 17.
See COTULA ET AL.., supra note 5, at 62.
- 18.
Renewable Fuels Agency, The Gallagher Review of the Indirect Effects of BiofuelsProduction 66 (2008).
- 19.
See Franco et al., supra note 6.
- 20.
Von Braun & Meinzen-Dick, supra note 4, at 2.
- 21.
See id. at 3.
- 22.
Several transnational and global-regional networks of poor peasants and small farmers have embraced the alternative vision of food sovereignty, with their member organizations working toward achieving this vision, albeit with varying degrees of progress and success to date. The most prominent agrarian justice movement working along these lines is La Vía Campesina. See La Vía Compesina, http://www.viacampesina.org (last visited Apr. 8, 2010). Meanwhile, similar trends can be seen in other kinds of networks, especially those working with an environmental justice orientation, such as the African Biodiversity Network and Friends of the Earth. Some of these same groups have also begun discussing the notion of “energy sovereignty” in response to the fact that many areas where rural poverty is most concentrated often suffer from lack of access to national electricity grids as well. This is the case even in countries where energy produced through mega-dams, coal-mining, or large-scale monocropping is mostly exported or diverted to cities for industrial use, as in Mozambique, for example.
- 23.
See, e.g. Rachel Nalepa & Dana Marie Bauer, Marginal Lands: the Role of Remote Sensing in Constructing Landscapes for Agrofuel Development, 39 J. Peasant Stud. 403, 403–22 (2012).
- 24.
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 24 (1998).
- 25.
Id. (emphasis added).
- 26.
See Borras & Franco, supra note 11, at 19.
- 27.
See e.g., Brenda Balleti, Neo-developmentalism and the Struggle for Territory in the Lower Brazilian Amazon, 39 J. Peasant Stud. 551, 551–572 (2012). For general comment on this transformation, see Saturnino M. Borras, Jr. & Jennifer C. Franco, The Politics of Contemporary (Trans)national Commercial Land Deals: Competing Views, Strategies and Alternatives, 13, 17–20 (Oct. 30, 2009), (unpublished manuscript prepared for Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series, Yale University), available at http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/papers/08borras.pdf. It is difficult in the current policy climate to find specific examples, since many companies have begun “green-washing” their public statements. For example, Cargill, which has been quite controversial for its expansion of soy monocropping into the Amazon rainforest, has stated that it is “supporting cutting-edge research on how to rehabilitate degraded lands for agricultural use to increase production and reduce habitat loss.” Cargill, 2007 Corporate Citizenship Review: Finding the Right Balance 12 (2007). Elsewhere in that report, the company implies that expansion is occurring in areas that were already deforested and that, in light of Brazil’s “strict” Forest Code, it is working with small farmers by supplying them with soybean for crushing to restore old pasture to forest. Id. Although this not an explicit justification of expansion by working to make the marginal more productive, it comes as close as one might expect from a company that is under fire from social and environmental justice activists.
- 28.
See Richards, supra note 12 and accompanying text.
- 29.
Suzana Sawyer & Edmund Terence Gomez, U.N. Res. Inst. Soc. Dev.,Transnational Governmentality and Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations, Multilateral Institutions and the State 3 (2008).
- 30.
There is a growing literature on the difficult challenges of “making rights real” in the case of land. See, e.g., Ben Cousins, How Do Rights Become Real? Formal and Informal Institutions in South Africa’s Land Reform, 28 Int’l Dev. Stud. Bull. 59 (1997) (discussing land reform in South Africa); Jennifer C. Franco, Making Land Rights Accessible: Social Movements and Political-Legal Innovation in the Rural Philippines, 44 J. Dev. Stud. 991(2008) (discussing land reform in the Philippines).
- 31.
See Borras & Franco, supra note 11.
- 32.
See Franco, supra note 30.
- 33.
Based on Borras’s field observation in the state of Sao Paulo in 2008.
- 34.
For a range of outcomes on recent oil palm contract farming in Indonesia, both favorable and unfavorable to the rural poor, see John McCarthy, Processes of Inclusion and Adverse Incorporation: Oil Palm and Agrarian Change in Sumatra, Indonesia, 38 J. Peasant Stud. 821, 821–50 (2010).
- 35.
Lorenzo Cotula & Sonja Vermeulen, Over the Heads of Local People: Consultation, Consent and Recompense in Large-Scale Land Deals for Biofuels Projects in Africa, 37 J. Peasant Stud. 899, 899–916 (2010).
- 36.
Ben Cousins, More Than Socially Embedded: The Distinctive Character of “Communal Tenure” Regimes in South Africa and Its Implications for Land Policy, 7 J. Agrarian Change 281 (2007).
- 37.
See Jonathan Fox, Introduction, inThe Challenges of Rural Democratisation: Perspectives from Latin America and the Philippines Jonathan Fox ed., 1990).
- 38.
Utting, supra note 1, at 960.
- 39.
See generally THE CHALLENGES OF RURAL DEMOCRATISATION, supra note 36.
- 40.
Deininger, supra note 21.
- 41.
See JENNIFER FRANCO, TRANSNATIONAL INST., RURAL DEMOCRACTISATION: (RE) FRAMING RURAL POOR POLITICAL ACTION (2008) (building on the work of The Challenges of Rural Democracy, supra note 36); John Gaventa, Exploring Citzenship, Participation and Accountability, 33 IDS Bull. 1 (2002). Here, rural democratization is understood as a long and difficult process that involves struggles to build social and political organizations capable of representing the diverse interests of the rural poor and amplifying their voices in public policy processes, including development-related decision making that affects their lives. It involves struggles to increase state accountability to excluded or marginalized members of the rural working poor population. This includes struggles to effectively claim their rights and the right to decide what kind of development is to be pursued in their name. From this perspective, “development” may still be the answer to rural poverty, but it is equally important who defines what kind of development and for what purposes development is pursued.
- 42.
Sawyer & Gomez, supra note 29, at 17.
- 43.
Borras & Franco, supra note 12; see also Jennifer Franco, Pro-Poor Policy Reforms and Governance in State/Public Lands: A Critical Civil-Society Perspective, 1 Land Reform 8 (2009).
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Borras, S., Franco, J. (2014). From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with Codes of Conduct for Land Grabbing. In: Lambek, N., Claeys, P., Wong, A., Brilmayer, L. (eds) Rethinking Food Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7778-1_7
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