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Land ‘Grabs’ Expand To Europe As Big Business Blocks Entry To Farming
Land rights not just issue for developing world as report shows public subsidies help a few firms ‘grab’ vast tracts of EU land John Vidal guardian.co.uk , Wednesday 17 April 2013 17.19 BST Farmers harvest grain in Chernigov. In Ukraine, 10 giant agro-holdings now control about 2.8m hectares. Photograph: Genia Savilov/AFP/Getty Images Vast tracts of land in Europe are being “grabbed” by large companies, speculators, wealthy foreign buyers and pension funds in a similar way to in developing countries, according to a major new report . Chinese corporations, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth and hedge funds, as well as Russian oligarchs and giant agribusiness have all stepped up land acquisitions in the past decade in a process that the report says is preventing ordinary people farming, and concentrating agriculture and land wealth in few hands. According to research by the Transnational Institute , Via Campesina and others, half of all farmland in the EU is now concentrated in the 3% of large farms that are more than 100 hectares (247 acres) in size. In some EU countries, land ownership is as unequal as it is in Brazil, Colombia and the Philippines. Although peasant farmers and smallholders have been moving off the land for decades, speculators and commodity crop farmers are taking over vast tracts of land, says the 200-page report. This is seen widely in former Soviet states, say the 25 authors in 11 countries. In Ukraine, 10 giant agro-holdings now control about 2.8m hectares. One oligarch alone controls more than 500,000 hectares. Chinese companies have moved into Bulgaria on a large scale and Middle Eastern companies are now major producers in Romania. The concentration of land ownership is speeding up. In Germany, 1.2m land holdings in 1966-67 shrank to just 299,100 farms by 2010. Of these, the land area covered by farms of less than two hectares shrank from 123,670 hectares in 1990 to just 20,110 in 2007. In Italy, 33,000 farms now cover 11m hectares, and in France more than 60,000 hectares of agricultural land are lost each year to make space for roads, supermarkets and urban growth. In Andalusia, Spain, the number of farms has dropped by more than two-thirds to under 1m in 2007. In 2010, 2% of landowners owned half of the land. None of the new research was done in Britain, which has some of the highest concentrations of land ownership anywhere in the world, with 70% of land reportedly owned by less than 1% of the population . “This is an unprecedented dynamic of land concentration and creeping land grabbing. It has worsened the existing situation where many young people want to stay in or take up farming but cannot maintain or gain access to land,” said Professor Dr Jan Douwe van der Ploeg of Wageningen University, a member of the research team. The authors argue that the “land grab” has been fuelled by the common agricultural policy (CAP), which distributes one-third of all EU subsidies to farmers each year, but the funds have been captured by large-scale farmers. “In Italy in 2011, 0.29% of farms accessed 18% of total CAP incentives, and 0.0001 of these, or 150 farms, cornered 6% of all subsidies. In Spain, 75% of all the subsidies were taken by just 16% of the largest farmers. In Hungary in 2009, 8.6% of farms cornered 72% of all agricultural subsidies,” said Van der Ploeg. “The three most pressing land issues in Europe today are land concentration, land grabbing and inability of young people to maintain or gain access to land to enter sustainable farming – interlinked, triangular land issues quite similar to the ones we see in Africa, Latin America and Asia today.” The report suggests that, as in many developing countries, there is strong opposition to land “grabbing” in Europe. There have been reports of communities occupying land. In Andalusia, landless farmers are occupying land collectively and cultivating it. In Vienna, young people are squatting on fertile urban land. “Land needs to be seen again as a public good. We must reduce the commodification of land and instead promote public management of this common resource on which we all depend,” said Jeanne Verlinden of the European Co-ordination Via Campesina. “Priority should be given to the use of land for smallholder and peasant agriculture and food production, rather than handing over land to those private property commercial interests.” Continue reading
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Is There Life After ETS?
By Dave Keating – Today, 02:10 CET If the Emissions Trading Scheme does become an irrelevancy incapable of lowering emissions between now and 2020 (see above), then José Manuel Barroso’s declared ambition to put climate change at the top of the agenda during his presidency of the European Commission would be counted a failure. Although environmental campaigners are now among the loudest voices calling for the ETS to be saved, this was not always the case. When the idea of a market mechanism to address the problems of climate change was first proposed, many environmental campaigners were sceptical, to say the least. Then, as it became clear that the ETS was to become the law of the land, some environmental groups clambered on board, joining the business community. However, not everybody joined the party. Friends of the Earth, for instance, has always opposed using a market mechanism as the EU’s main tool for fighting climate change. Ahead of the European Parliament’s vote, a group of 36 global NGOs, including chapters of Friends of the Earth, Corporate Europe Observatory and FERN, the European forests campaign group, released a report calling for the ETS to be scrapped. “The vote on backloading is the wrong debate,” said Hannah Mowat of FERN. “No amount of structural tinkering will get away from the fact that the EU has chosen the wrong tool to reduce emissions in Europe.” The report says that rather than wasting time and energy fixing a broken system, the EU should instead shift to more direct policies for stimulating changes that lower emissions, such as feed-in tariffs for renewables, redirecting public subsidies away from the fossil-fuel industry and towards low-carbon infrastructure, and improving energy efficiency. Such a change of approach would not be straightforward. The ETS is now almost ten years old. For the past decade, the EU’s climate policy has been constructed with the ETS at its core. “I don’t see how [scrapping the ETS] would offer immediate solutions,” said Sam Van Den Plas of campaign group WWF. “That’s a process that would require many more years.” “Despite the disappointing news on backloading, ETS is still a directive in place,” he added. “It’s still a useful policy framework, but the parameters are incorrect. The real debate still lies in the structural changes [to be proposed by the Commission], regardless of whether backloading goes ahead or not.” But the backloading debate has left environmental campaigners in the awkward position of defending a market mechanism they were never keen on from the outset, while the centre-right politicians who devised the system are now silent as it crumbles. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, was a main proponent of emissions trading, but now she refuses to take a position on backloading. Barroso was also a champion, but has not come out with a statement on ETS since the Parliament’s vote. German centre-left MEP Matthias Groote, chairman of the Parliament’s environment committee, has criticised him for this silence. Quiet support Ville Niinistö, Finland’s environment minister, says that there is still support for the ETS as the main vehicle for emissions reduction, particularly because the alternative at this point would probably be 27 different national climate policies. The UK’s recent unilateral climate action, for instance, seems to be a troubling sign of things to come. But he says that the current sense of crisis around the ETS is alerting political and business leaders to the need for change if the ETS is to be relevant in the future. “There is still momentum behind making sure that the ETS works, but this is a good reminder that NGOs were right when they said that you cannot have a market-based mechanism and then make it too loose, because then there is no market,” Niinistö said. “The ETS is a big part of the European approach, and we should not leave it easily,” he said. “But we have a lot to prove – that this market mechanism works. European companies have a lot to prove – that they want this market mechanism to work. There seems to be quite a lot of discussion within the business world in Europe at this moment, that if they want the ETS to work they should be supportive of making sure it is the main vehicle for emissions reductions.” If no solution to the ETS crisis of confidence is found in the coming months, there could be big implications worldwide for other countries that are copying the EU system – the first and largest carbon market in the world. Australia’s system is set to begin trading in 2015 and has plans to link to the EU ETS. China is launching ETS pilot schemes and California has a fully functioning market. A collapse of the ETS might lead these countries to rethink their plans. Continue reading
