Depuis l’invasion russe en février 2022, la guerre en Ukraine est au centre des questions de politique étrangère et des médias. Cependant, peu d’attention a été accordée à une question majeure qui est au cœur du conflit : qui contrôle les terres agricoles dans le pays connu comme le « grenier de l’Europe » ?
Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa: Publications
Reports
The report from the Oakland Institute exposes the financial interests and the dynamics at play in Ukraine leading to further concentration of land and finance.
The report sounds the alarm on the severe humanitarian crisis faced by Indigenous tribes in Ethiopia's Lower Omo Valley and urges government and aid agencies to provide relief assistance.
The Great Carbon Boondoggle: Inside the Struggle to Stop Summit’s CO2 Pipeline, unmasks the billion-dollar financial interests and high-level political ties driving the Midwest Carbon Express. Led by Summit Carbon Solutions, the project intends to build a 2,000-mile pipeline to carry CO2 across Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, to eventually inject and store it underground in North Dakota.
Flawed Plans for Relocation of the Maasai from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area builds on field research conducted at two relocation sites — Msomera village in Handeni district and Kitwai A and B villages in Simanjiro district — to reveal that the sites lack adequate water resources and grazing land while promises of improved social and health services by the government remain unfulfilled.
The report debunks the world’s largest proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) pipeline project and reveals the checkered history of the man behind it — Bruce Rastetter.
Menace sur les eaux africaines : comment l’expansion de l’agriculture industrielle assèche l’Afrique
Alors que la crise climatique menace l'accès à l'eau pour des millions d'Africains, Drying Out African Lands: Expansion of Large-Scale Agriculture Threatens Access to Water in Africa dévoile l'impact dévastateur des grandes plantations agricoles sur le droit à l'eau sur le continent.
As the escalating climate crisis threatens access to water for millions across Africa, Drying Out African Lands: Expansion of Large-Scale Agriculture Threatens Access to Water in Africa unveils the devastating impact of large-scale agricultural plantations on the right to water on the continent.
As community efforts to reclaim 100,000 hectares of their ancestral land occupied by oil palm plantations are met with violent repression, unlawful arrests, and murder, Meet the Investors Behind the PHC Oil Palm Plantations in DRC exposes the financiers profiteering from the plantations.
Stealth Game: “Community” Conservancies Devastate Land & Lives in Northern Kenya — reveals the devastating impact of privatized and neo-colonial wildlife conservation and safari tourism on Indigenous pastoralist communities.
Pages
Briefs
In its 2013 Growing Africa report, the World Bank argued “wider uptake and more intensive use of improved seed, fertilizer, and other inputs would go a long way to closing the African ‘agricultural performance deficit.’” The report goes on to advocate policy and regulation reforms claiming, “policy and regulatory barriers, including import restrictions and rigid, lengthy processes for releasing new varieties are slowing the adoption of agricultural inputs.” According to the World Bank, growth of the private sector is the best way to bring about agricultural development. Assuch, the Bank’s Doing Business (DB) project “encourages countries to compete towards more efficient regulation,” resulting in deregulation of the sector.
International financing has played a significant—although not always reported—role in the current conflict in Ukraine. In late 2013, conflict between pro-European Union (EU) and pro-Russian Ukrainians escalated to violent levels, leading to the departure of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and prompting the greatest East-West confrontation since the Cold War.
En 2013, la Banque Mondiale classait le Mali parmi les pays africains ayant fourni le plus d’efforts pour améliorer le « climat des affaires » depuis 2005. Malgré la crise qui a secoué le nord du pays de 2012 à 2013, il est resté le premier parmi les huit nations de l’Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine (UEMOA) au classement Doing Business 2013. En 2014, le Mali a perdu ce leadership en arrivant juste derrière le Burkina Faso au classement général (155e place). Le pays reste cependant un des « bons élèves » de la Banque Mondiale en Afrique sub-saharienne.
In 2013, Mali was classified among the African countries that made the most effort to improve their business climate since 2005 by the World Bank. Undeterred by the 2012-2013 political crisis, the country retained its top ranking out of the eight West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) nations in the Doing Business 2013 report. In 2014, Mali lost this leadership, coming at the 155th place, just behind Burkina Faso. The country, however, remains a good student of the World Bank in sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite unreconciled tensions following the three-decade-long civil war, militarization of the state, human rights violations, and more than 200,000 civilians in displacement camps, the World Bank generously increased Sri Lanka’s ranking in the Doing Business assessment in recent years. During and after the war, the Sri Lankan military seized large tracts of land through forced evictions and by occupying land abandoned by civilians fleeing violence. Many of the lands were deemed “High Security Zones” during the war, but are now being converted into “Economic Processing Zones” for foreign investors rather than being used for resettling displaced populations. The Bank’s measurements do not factor in this theft of resources nor the overwhelming human rights violations, affording the country a high ranking.
Since 2004, the World Bank has provided continuous “investment climate advisory services” to Sierra Leone. Business reforms and Bank-piloted programs such as Sierra Leone Business Forum and the Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency led to the World Bank classifying Sierra Leone among “the top 15 economies that improved their business regulatory environment the most” since 2005 and rank the country third in the regional “Protection of Investors” category. In the agricultural sector, reforms around land, mapping of parcels, and fast-tracking land leasing processes have attracted investors eager to develop large-scale monocrop plantations of sugar cane or oil palm, which deprive local communities of their resources and undermine human, social, and environmental rights in Sierra Leone.
Senegal has made numerous reforms in an effort to garner a higher ranking in the Doing Business evaluation. The latest round of reforms, likely to be praised by the World Bank, favor land grabbing in Senegal, a country where large-scale land deals have become increasingly frequent in the recent years. Since the late 1980s, the World Bank has influenced the Senegalese public policy at the expense of households’ livelihoods, and in recent years has pushed for even more withdrawal of public and social action, promoting instead economic liberalization and trade facilitation.
Le Sénégal ne cesse de dégringoler dans le classement Doing Business. Le pays a perdu 32 places depuis sa 146e position sur175 pays en 2007 jusqu’à sa 178ème sur 189 pays dans le dernier rapport. Le président Macky Sall s’est plaint que le classement 2014 n’ait pas pris en compte les mesures du troisième trimestre 2013, telle que la suppression de l’autorisation de transaction, l’amélioration de la protection des investisseurs par l’adoption de décrets révisant le Code de procédure civile, ou encore la facilitation du transfert de propriété. Ces réformes de nature à plaire à la Banque Mondiale sont favorables à l’accaparement des terres au Sénégal, où déjà plusieurs grands investissements ont été mis en oeuvre ces dernières années.
The Philippines is now hailed as a top ten reformer as a direct result of making economic, regulatory, and administrative policy changes following the advice and direction of the World Bank. As a result of these changes, in 2013 the Philippines became the third most popular destination for foreign investment in land in the world, with 5.2 million hectares acquired since 2006.
El Nicaragua es uno de los países más pobres del hemisferio occidental. La inversión extranjera directa en el país fue más que duplicada en los últimos años, y el Banco Mundial promueve activamente la inversión extranjera en el sector agrícola, a pesar de los numerosos problemas sociales, ambientales y de salud que están asociados con las plantaciones industriales en Nicaragua. Una de las actividades más perjudiciales es la producción de caña de azúcar para la producción de etanol. Hay una gran demanda para este cultivo, así como para la mano de obra que corta la caña, pero el aumento de la producción de caña de azúcar es costoso en términos de vidas humanas.