Biofuels and Land Grabbing in Africa - Mokoro

II: REPORTS
Discussion of some reports follows the order in which they are presented in my latest Select
Bibliography of Reports on Biofuels, Land Rights in Africa & Global Land Grabbing,
dated 31 March 2012, now posted at http://www.mokoro.co.uk/ where the URLs for each
entry can be found.
Included here are a number of conference proceedings (e.g. Brussels Development Briefing
9, CTA /ACP, Development Policy Review Network, Global Donor Platform, SDC, 3D). At
such gatherings PowerPoint presentations now seem now to be standard (and sole) fare. In
my view, with rare exceptions, these tend to be banal in the extreme.
The FAO has published a plethora of papers on a variety of subjects including:
voluntary guidelines on responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and
forests http://www.fao.org/nr/tenure/voluntary-guidelines/en/
food security
principles for responsible agricultural investment (RAI)
the right to food http://www.fao.org/righttofood/governance_en.htm
biofuels and bioenergy
papers presented at the World Summit on Food Security, 16-18 November 2009;
http://www.fao.org/wsfs/world-summit/en/
Like other UN agencies, FAO dares not antagonize national governments, so it deploys
diplomatic language at all times. Hence the voluntary guidelines are rather anodyne to my
taste, while some of the economic forecasts in the World Summit papers appear to be based
on sheer guesswork.
The pressure group GRAIN produced the seminal and hugely influential briefing Seized! The
2008 land grab for food and financial security in October 2008, and has published widely on
land grabbing across the world, and also on biofuels, which it prefers to call agrofuels. On 24
February 2012, it released a data set of over 400 global land grabs. Its daily updated site
http://farmlandgrab.org/ is essential reading and quite incomparable.
IIED, notably Lorenzo Cotula, has produced a series of much cited research reports on
biofuels in Mozambique and Tanzania, on business models, investment contracts, water
grabs, and biofuels and land grabs (usually in inverted commas!). The work is generally
excellent though, as its authors state, still premature and incomplete. There is a tendency to
look for win-win scenarios.
Pambazuka News, a weekly newsletter providing space for ‘pan-African voices for freedom
and justice’ has a section on land and land rights http://pambazuka.org/en/category/land/
which regularly carries a number of important articles on land grabbing. It also has useful
sections on the perspectives of emerging powers (China, India etc) on Africa including
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/africa_china/
The International Land Coalition (ILC) has produced a wide range of excellent country
research reports (on Ethiopia, Zambia, Rwanda, Kenya and Madagascar) and policy briefs
as part of its ‘commercial pressures on land’ programme. These were followed, in December
2011, by a fine synthesis report, Land Rights and the Rush for Land. It has expanding its
membership and in May 2011 in Tirana it publicly denounced ‘all forms of land grabbing,
whether international or national. It circulates useful bi-weekly updates and commissioned an
outstanding report by Liz Daley on the almost totally neglected gendered aspects of land
grabbing, one on public lands by Liz Alden Wily, as well as an excellent historical
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