Usurpation of public lands in Brazil

This blog post is mostly based on Harvard Land Ownership in Brazil Scrutinized in Title Dispute by Michael McDonald and Tatiana Freitas, published in Bloomberg, 24 April 2018.

Caracol, a company working on behalf of Harvard University, purchased a sprawling 140,000-hectare (540 square miles) area of land in Brazil and created a large-scale industrial farm, with the hope that the farm would generate profits for the university for years to come.

When Caracol built its mega-farm, subsistence farmers who had depended on the land were forced out.

But these farmers protested that Caracol had no legal right to drive them off the land because it was in fact public land – land which, since the Portuguese invasion centuries earlier, had never been legally titled to anyone, and which had been managed by local people for generations.

The state of Bahia, Brazil formed a commission that found irregularities with 24 titles that Caracol holds for lands it acquired. The commission recommended in a 2014 report to revoke titles after finding a “festival of irregular and illegal procedures which resulted in usurpation of public lands” that predated Caracol’s involvement. The prosecutor’s office in Bahia says it’s determining whether to sue to reclaim the titles.

Such fights have become more common in Brazil as industrial agriculture spreads to poorer regions of the country.

Results of 20 year ‘Roundup-Ready’ experiment are in

The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.

Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.

… the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany…

Since genetically modified crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen by 21 percent.

By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.

– From GMO Promise falls short by Danny Hakim, The New York Times, Oct 29 2016.

How corporate agribusiness prevents small farmers from saving and exchanging seeds

This post is an exerpt from the report Seed laws that criminalise farmers: resistance and fightback, published jointly by Via Campesina and GRAIN.

Almost all farming communities know how to save, store and share seeds. Millions of families and farming communities have worked to create hundreds of crops and thousands of varieties of these crops. The regular exchange of seeds among communities and peoples has allowed crops to adapt to different conditions, climates and topographies. This is what has allowed farming to spread and grow and feed the world with a diversified diet.

Corporations’ ongoing struggle to control all food production

Seeds have also… given rural people the resolute ability to maintain some degree of autonomy and to refuse to be completely controlled by big business and big money. From the point of view of corporate interests that are striving to take control of land, farming, food and the huge market that these factors represent, this independence is an obstacle.

Corporations have deployed a range of strategies to get this control, but farmers and indigenous peoples have resisted and continue to resist this takeover in different ways. Today, the corporate sector is trying to stamp out this rebellion through a global legal offensive. The result is that seed laws are constantly evolving and becoming more aggressive. Through new waves of political and economic pressure – especially through so-called free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and regional integration initiatives – all the ‘soft’ forms of ownership rights over seeds were hardened and continue to be made more restrictive at a faster pace. Seed laws and plant variety rights are being revised again and again to adapt to the new demands of the seed and biotechnology industry.

How seed laws make farmers’ seeds illegal

Marketing laws: are often justified as a means of protecting farmers, as consumers of seeds, in order to ensure that they are only offered good seeds – both in terms of physical quality (germination rate, purity, etc.) and of the variety in question (genetic potential). But whose criteria are used? In the countries that have adopted the system of “compulsory catalogue”, seeds are allowed on the market only if they are “distinct”, “uniform” and “stable” (DUS criteria). This means that all plants grown from a batch of seed will be the same, and that their characteristics will last over time. Peasant varieties do not fit these criteria, because they are diverse and evolving.

Intellectual property laws: applied to seeds are regulations that recognise a person or an entity, most often a seed company, as the exclusive owner of seeds having specific characteristics. The owner then has the legal right to prevent others from using, producing, exchanging or selling them.

Plant health and biosafety laws: Such laws are intended to prevent health or environmental hazards that can arise from seeds… The problem lies in the fact that these laws actually serve to protect the interests of industry. For example, sometimes small-scale exchanges of seeds among farmers are prohibited, or their seeds are confiscated and destroyed, because farmers are held to the same standards as multinational corporations, which sell seeds in far greater amounts and to more distant locations – with a corresponding increase in the chance of spreading disease. Under such laws, farmers’ seeds may be viewed as a potential risk or hazard while industry seeds are hailed as the only safe ones, even though they play a huge role in spreading disease and contamination.

A snapshot of the ongoing dispossession of small farmers

The following is an excerpt from Asia’s agrarian reform in reverse: laws taking land out of small farmers’ hands, published by GRAIN.

Over time, peasants have been able to win some legal protections that provided some basic safeguards to maintain their access to lands.

But the legacy of these struggles is under attack. Today, small farmers in Asia are being squeezed onto ever smaller parcels of land. Across the continent, farmland is being gobbled up for dams, mines, tourism projects and large-scale agriculture, with scant regard for the people living off those lands. Farms that peasant families have cared for for generations are being paved over for new highways or real estate development as cities expand. Long-standing government promises to redistribute land more fairly have been broken – in many places, governments are taking land away from peasant farmers.

Land concentration in Asia is higher now than it has ever been. Just 6% of Asia’s farm owners hold around two-thirds of its farmland. Many of these landowners are politically connected elites, as is the case in the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

As this concentration increases, one consequence is the eruption of conflicts over land throughout the continent. Peasant protests against land grabs have become a regular sight on the streets of major cities like Phnom Penh and Manila. The court systems in China and Vietnam are backlogged with thousands of rural land conflict cases. And militarised repression is a harsh daily reality in many places where communities are resisting land grabbing, from West Papua to West Bengal.

… Free trade… agreements play an important role in bringing about laws and policies that facilitate the transfer of lands from small farmers to big agribusiness. They do so both indirectly, by encouraging specialised, vertically integrated production of export commodities, and directly by obliging governments to remove barriers to foreign investment, including in agriculture.