(Bio)Fueling Injustice? - Europafrica

2.2. A growing opposition
Faced with these challenges, farmers’ groups and civil society have started to react
and organise themselves, particularly in Africa. 31 Farmers’ organisations, religious
organisations, non-governmental organisations, unions and other social movements
gathered in 2011 in Dakar for the World Social Forum and adopted the Dakar Appeal
against the land grab which has been signed by more than 900 organisations
worldwide. 32 It calls on parliaments and national governments to immediately cease all
land grabs current or planned for future and to return the plundered land, and it
demands that that states, regional organisations and international institutions
guarantee people's right to land and support family farming and agro-ecology.
Regionally, the Pan African Parliament (the legislative body of the African Union), at a
meeting held in June 2011 in South Africa, expressed concern and alarm about land
grabbing and its impact and called for a moratorium on new large-scale land
acquisitions. 33 The Land Policy Initiative, a joint initiative of the African Union, the UN
Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank have started to
discuss how to implement the AU land policy framework. It also organised in October
2011 in Kenya a High Level Forum on Foreign Direct Investments in Land in Africa,
where representatives from African governments, Members of Parliament, traditional
leaders, private sector, civil society and other stakeholders, agreed on the Nairobi
Action Plan on Large scale land-based investments in Africa. In this plan, they
undertake, amongst other things, to establish, within 12 months, a monitoring and
reporting mechanism for tracking large-scale land based investments with a view to
ensuring that these ventures are beneficial to national economic development and
local communities, including women. 34
At the international level, relevant policy discussions regarding investments in land are
currently underway that move away from the formerly prevalent “win-win”
discourse and seek to protect the local control over natural resources. A Set of
Minimum Principles for Land Investments was presented by the UN Special
Rapporteur on the right to food in 2010. The FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the
Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of
National Food Security are currently being negotiated in the context of the UN
Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Following the adoption of these Guidelines,
the CFS will start a process of broad consultation to develop principles guiding
investment in agriculture.
Some government have also expressed concerns about this phenomenon. A number
of countries (Brazil, Argentina and Ukraine) have legislated or called for limits on land
purchases by foreigners. 35 In December 2011, at a side event at the UN climate talks
in Durban, South Africa Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister explained that the
AU was taking action “because people are realising that we are losing security of
tenure and we are losing control over our own natural resources.” She even declared
that foreign countries which buy African farmland in order to gain food security are
guilty of a “new form of colonisation.” She gave the example of the new country of
South Sudan, where she said "close to 40% of its land surface has already been sold"
to foreign interests. 36
27