Land Reforms and Management of Natural Resources in Africa and Latin America Conference
Posted by Ruth Thomas-Pellicer on January 24, 2010 |
Panels scientific committee
PANELS PROPOSED TO THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
A meeting is being held for the report presentations of the following panels:
1. Economic development, land possession and poverty
Coordinators: Nuria Duperier, Gonzalo Ramírez de Haro
The panel concerning economic development, land possession and poverty will be directed at:
- Analysing to what extent agricultural reform processes have contributed to the reduction of rural poverty (and exclusion).
- Identifying the factors that explain the different results obtained by agricultural reform initiatives. Special attention can paid to the type of complementary measures (of training, credit access…) which accompany them.
- Analysing the “land reform” initiatives adopted recently (which in some countries attempt against the advances on the subject of land redistribution that had been made in the past) that cause in practice an increase in the concentration of land property.
- Studying how the processes of deruralization taking place in African and Latin-American societies are affecting the ownership and distribution of land.
2. Land reform and social movements
Coordinator: Víctor Bretón
The relationship between agricultural reform and the articulation of collective action organization platforms for rural populations is a remarkable subject that does not always receive the attention it deserves by researchers and analysts. The analysis will have to be examined in the panel with two perspectives:
- One in a historical view, analysing the importance that the demands for the agricultural sharing had in accord with the rural movements of the decades corresponding to classic “deveopmentalism” (the 60s and 70s).
- The other with a current or contemporary character, in the sense of deepening the ascertainable relationships between, on the one hand, the articulation of new organisation models (much of these revolve around ethnic identify and not explicitly concerning a class conscious type of discourse) and, on the other hand, the persistence of problems derived from the unresolved problems of land concentration and other resources in the age of neoliberalism.
3. Reviewing the tragedy of the commons: the viability of community management
Coordinators: Albert Roca, Marina Padrão Temudo
In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote the famous article “The tragedy of the commons” which, regardless of his later efforts to avoid simplistic interpretations of that work, became a sacred text in neo-Malthusian conservation efforts and in neo-liberal interventions on land tenure. The main assumption underneath them maintains that common property resource management could be sustainable at low population densities but open access to growing populations and unrestricted demand for a finite resource by competitive individuals will lead to over-exploitation and land degradation. Therefore, only privatisation could assure a sustainable use and investments for increasing productivity.
The sequence of events in many groups and societies has denied or nuanced Hardin’s approach. Communal resources management has often proved to be much more resilient than expected — not in the atavistic sense, but in the utilitarian sense that they are solving daily needs of local people — and extremely diverse. This resilience and diversity may lighten the general perspectives about land reform and about local or native knowledge in resources management, understanding that this knowledge and this land tenure are connected with the local social structures and power relations. The panel proposes a comparative and diachronic approach to the question.
4. Land reform and alimentary sovereignty: the new booms and their impact on the agriculture of the South.
Coordinator: Andreu Viola
Last year several studies documented a re-emergence of the world hunger phenomena. The land’s problem has been historically and structurally related with hunger, for which land reform and alimentary sovereignty are two inseparable goals.
During the last decade some new variables that are generating a considerable controversy have appeared. Some examples that we have proposed to analyse in this panel are as follows:
- The sale or rent of huge areas of agricultural land to foreign investors by several African and Latin American governments.
- The transgenic soybean crop boom. Its commercialisation means a frantic increase in deforestation, ground degradation, and pollution from agrochemical products; it is necessary to highlight the social conflicts provoked by an increasing concentration of land agricultural and the massive invasion of native territories and country properties by agribusiness interests.
- The quick increase in the worldwide production of agrofuels that presents new threats for alimentary sovereignty and rural population.
These situations delimit an interesting area of reflection and discussion, centring us on an impact analysis of these commercial booms that concern the possession and management of land, agricultural relationships and the feeding of the local population, as well as increasing interests and foreign capital in the agriculture of the South, separated by the territory and foreign to their needs.
5. International law and indigenous territories
Coordinator: Monica Martínez
In 1989, the ILO approved the Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, and more recently, in 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The approval of these two legal mechanisms in an international context has marked before and after an agenda of indigenous collectives and populations as well as autonomous communities, a centred agenda recognizing access to their lands, territories and natural resources. In the American and African continents, in spite of their differences in the indigenous and autonomous conceptions, a legal process is taking place with very diverse results, for which regulatory precedents are being created concerning indigenous rights and reclamation of territories to give back to diverse groups.
In this panel we are interested in these processes and their effects on the local management of natural resources, as well as on the alternatives of legal procedures.
6. Market-led vs non-market oriented agrarian (land) reforms
Coordinator: Carlos Oya and Saturnino “Jun” Borras
The diversity of policies and actions that are encompassed under the “land reform” banner is very extensive and, in different cultural and historical contexts, different responses and adaptations arise. A key factor is the role that the market plays (in this case especially the land market in the distribution of assets, in the form of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ redistribution arrangements) in each one of the policies mentioned. Openly productivist approaches can be distinguished in general in which land reform is basically seen as an improvement mechanism in the efficiency of land use, and in other cases, the fundamental goal of reform is rather social and political, focused on equity, for which the market as a resource assignment is problematic if not contradictory. Transnational agribusiness can also adopt alternative mechanisms for land access, which do not interfere with established land property rights, as is the case with contract farming, for example. The panel will approach these and other related debates, giving special attention to the evidence accumulated concerning land reform processes (fundamentally concerning land redistribution) that have followed a market approach (willing seller-willing buyer’).
7. Rural and farm women of the south
Coordinators: Juana Moreno and Asli Ocal
Ever since a few decades ago, the process of international commerce liberalization, the privatisation of agricultural production and the promotion of monocultures for export have been dismantling family agricultural productions, increasing the dependence and vulnerability of farmers that are impoverished and very often destined to abandon agriculture.
These macrostructural processes are not gender-neutral. The strength of patriarchal structures results in, according to the FAO, women making up 70% of people who are considered in absolute poverty in the rural world.
The objective of this panel is to know the new problems of rural women, interrelating the different spheres that affect their realities from a gender perspective. In the wake of this general objective, the following specific questions are presented:
- How do transformations in the modes of agricultural production impact rural women? What strategies are there on individual and collective levels that display rural women in this context?
- To what extent is it a context that offers new opportunities or is it a dynamic that reinforces, on the contrary, inequality between the sexes.
- How is the collective action organized concerning the situation of rural women?
Tags: food sovereignity > indigenous territories > international law > land possession > Land reform > social movements
