Source: The New Security Beat

9 Sep 2010 - After months of delays and false starts, and a tantalizing partial leak to the Financial Times earlier this summer, the much-ballyhooed World Bank report on large-scale land acquisitions has finally arrived.



For the last year, those thirsting for more information about these land deals - which are rumored to extend millions of acres of developing-world farmland to foreign agribusiness investors and governments dependent on food imports - have assured themselves that the Bank’s study would answer all their questions.



They are in for a major disappointment. The 164-page report, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Results?” may have landed with a powerful thud, but the product is a resounding dud.



The study essentially rehashes the glass-half-full, glass-half-empty debate in much of the substantive work previously published on the issue:



• If done well, these deals can reduce poverty in the developing world and revitalize sagging agricultural sectors.

• If done poorly, they can destroy smallholder livelihoods, spark rampant displacements, and wreak grave environmental damage.



Nothing new here.



The report also recycles the “principles for responsible agro-investment” that many international organizations believe will promote beneficial and sustainable agricultural investments: Respect for indigenous land rights; emphases on transparency and good governance; participation of all “stakeholders”; and attention to social and environmental sustainability.



Much of the anticipation surrounding the report centered on data the Bank promised to reveal about specific land deals - data practically impossible to obtain anywhere else. Yet the data, as reported in the study, are anticlimactic. On the one hand, they reveal “displacement of local people from their land without proper compensation,” and on the other, support for social infrastructure “through community development funds using land compensation” - all of which is essentially in line with previously published work.



Fortuitously, several thought-provoking conclusions do eventually emerge from the report’s otherwise dry discussions about “yield gaps,” “institutional frameworks,” and the like.



The Bank finds that “virtually everywhere, local investors, rather than foreign ones, were dominant players” in large land transfers between 2004 and 2009. This finding amplifies the under-reported fact that overseas farmland acquisitions are sustained as much by the eagerness of host governments - and their local partners - to attract foreign investors as they are by the motivations of foreigners. The World Bank does not comment on the character of these “local investors,” though anecdotal evidence suggests they are not particularly warm-hearted.



[...]



Michael Kugelman is a program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Much of his recent work has focused on resource shortages. He is the lead editor of, and a contributor to, the 2009 book “Land Grab? The Race for the World’s Farmland.”

For the complete article, please see The New Security Beat.