MANILA, Philippines - Costs and consequences Land deals in Southeast Asia are already causing a major transition in some countries – from growing food for subsistence and domestic markets to producing agricultural commodities, largely for export. And they are having significant impacts on local environments and people.
The idea that land acquisitions are being promoted on “idle”, “empty’ or “waste” land – reinforced by exercises that classify land as such to facilitate its allocation to investors – is largely false.
The truth is that most “cultivable” land in Southeast Asia is already cultivated or offers critical ecosystem services. Any expansion of agriculture poses major threats to biodiversity and water quality. And rather than enhancing degraded land, such expansion, which often focuses on intensive cultivation and monocropping, is likely to add pressures to soil and water resources.
The rapid expansion of fast-growing wood and biofuel crops has led to the demise of some of the region’s most precious forests and forest ecosystems. Already 70 million hectares of tropical forest has been lost or degraded in Indonesia.
When it comes to impacts on people, the idea of ‘idle” land is similarly misleading because it often refers to land that is under customary tenure and use. Insecure rights and weak land governance are major challenges to ensuring that local landholders benefit from agricultural investments.
Many deals infringe on local land entitlements and do not respond to local development needs or priorities. Agricultural development strategies often go hand in hand with those to transform upland slash and burn practices to settled commercial agriculture.
It is true that commercial agriculture ventures can bring rural jobs or improved access to markets but, as elsewhere in the world, employment is often less than promised, exclusive of many and often insecure. Results of contract farming and joint venture initiatives are highly mixed.
Poor consultation, disregard for customary tenure and little evidence of free, prior and informed consent is well documented in Southeast Asia. The consequence is an increase in displacement and landlessness. Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to dispossession.
In Sarawak, Malaysia, alleged appropriation of ancestral lands has led to more than 200 legal cases being brought against the regional government.
Across the region land conflicts have increased and it is not uncommon for the military to be brought in to defend investor access to lands. The lack of mechanisms of redress adds to the injustice for local people: of 236 land disputes officially registered in Cambodia between 2001 and 2009, almost 70 percent went unresolved.
Of course, land acquisitions show only one side of the story. The expansion of agribusinesses through contract farming arrangements, while in some cases providing opportunities, can have similarly negative impacts on both people and environments – posing economic and environmental risks through monocropping and, in some cases, causing farmers to become indebted or lose control over their livelihoods.
Although many investors in Southeast Asia are not put off by concerns of reputational risk, corruption and?poor land governance, many are beginning to look for ways to foresee, and mitigate, conflicts arising from overlapping claims at the local level, with some seeking to follow international good practice or contribute to the development of commodity standards.
Priorities for action
Regional trends cannot be decoupled from demand for agricultural commodities in developed and emerging economies. Regulating private investments in agriculture, both nationally and internationally, should be a priority for Southeast Asia, alongside improvements to land governance.
This means focusing on agricultural development models that are driven by local producers, or where local producers have at least an equity share in private ventures. It also means strengthening safeguards to ensure that life-supporting land and natural resources are not expropriated from rural communities and that local food security is not undermined.
Just as local land politics vary from country to country, so too will the specific actions needed to improve land governance. But there are some region-wide actions that can, and should, be taken. These include:
• building a region-wide process for assessing home and host country regulation and social and environmental safeguards, including developing regional guidance for managing agricultural investments.
• supporting stronger producer associations to improve local farmers’ negotiating power at a national and regional level and with private actors.
• Protecting customary tenure rights, including stepping up recognition of ancestral lands of indigenous peoples through interim protection measures and communal titling where relevant.