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Nepali Rupees in land transac� ons (The Himalayan Times, 10 May 2010).
This has resulted in the surge of interest rates from 8% to 16%. It is es� mated
that urban coopera� ves have made about 93% of their investments in land
and real state. Moreover, more than 80% of remi� ances have been invested
in land and household consump� ons (Nagarik Daily, 14 April 2009). Likewise,
fi nancial companies have also found land transac� ons as a major area of
investment (Kan� pur Daily, 16 June 2011). The instable poli� cal situa� on
in Nepal has heightened risk in business investments blamed at insecurity,
power shortages, extor� ons and dona� ons, which have increasingly made
investments in land less risky, more than 50 industrialists in the eastern
region of Nepal have siphoned off their investments from business to land
(Annapurna Post, 17 May 2011). The trend of land grabbing has not only
been an increasing phenomenon in the capital city, but it is on the rise in
the rural areas too. Recent media reports show a trend of price rise of land,
incredibly high in the headquarters of the remote district like Argakhachi. For
example, the price for 1 square metre of land is approximately 1.5 million in
Chutrabesi, Argakhachi (Kan� pur 3 March 2011).
The aid for land grab at Interna� onal level
A report by Oxfam, published September 2011, iden� fi ed 227m hectares
(561m acres) of land – an area the size of north-west Europe – as having been
sold, leased or licensed, largely in Africa and mostly to interna� onal investors
in thousands of secre� ve deals since 2001. In another case, 56m hectares
iden� fi ed by the World Bank earlier this year, again predominantly in Africa
(Retrieved from h� p://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/
oct/06/un-land-deals-governance-talks?intcmp=122, UN expert calls for
guidelines to protect vulnerable people against 'land grabs', on 7th October
2011).
Foreign land acquisi� ons worldwide now cover 218 million hectares
(almost 10 � mes higher the World Bank’s 2008 es� mates), with 67 million
hectares as more or less “verifi ed”. Some 71% of these are in Africa, 19% in
Asia 3 . Independent panels of MDBs (Mul� lateral Development Banks) since
1995 have established independent panels to receive complaints by ci� zens
(non-state actors) aff ected by the impact of development projects funded by
them. Perhaps the most recent one was the World Bank’s Land Titling Project
in Cambodia, where 20,000 families near Phnom Penh were displaced when
denied � tling to the land and later evicted by government that sold the land to
a private developer. But the ques� on about these panels remain paramount:
many are not truly “independent” from Bank staff or management; they
only involve Bank projects with regards to their compliance with internal
policies (eg “involuntary rese� lement”); to them, Bank policies are “givens”,
these Panels are not mandated to engage in discussions about Bank policies
themselves (Ibid- Tony Quizon). The burgeoning evidence for the last several
3. Tony Quizon, presented paper Land Asia Forum 2011, organized by ILC, CSRC and ANGOC
from 20-21 October 2011, Kathmandu, Nepal
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Changing paradigms of aid eff ec� veness in Nepal