WASHINGTON D.C. – According to a report released today by leading environmental and social justice advocates, the investment management firm TIAA is leading a trend of speculating in land markets, which drives up farmland prices and displaces family farmers in the US and in Brazil.

To mark the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles, Focus on the Global South releases this special edition that puts together articles on issues that small farmers and peasants continue to face. These pieces also highlight the different forms of resistance that farmers and peasants put up amidst these challenges.

Across the Mekong region, ‘development’ has become synonymous with rapid economic growth, to be achieved through predominantly large-scale, private investments. The development model promoted by the region’s governments prioritizes trade and investment liberalization, and privatization. Private investment is sought in virtually every sector of the economy from energy, oil, minerals, agriculture and food processing to education, health, tourism, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, transportation and urban infrastructure.

In Brazil’s least developed state, Amapá, locals fear that government plans to increase soya and oil production will destroy the area – and their livelihoods

I was in Brazil to participate in the “International Encounter of Struggling Youth” as a Turkish delegate, which was held in Marica, Rio de Janeiro in June 2016. After the youth encounter, I had the chance to stay a couple of weeks in Brazil to visit some camps and settlements of the Agrarian Reform, some cooperatives and agroecology schools of MST.

Campaigners in Brazil on Wednesday hailed a court decision to cancel a major land acquisition deal because investors had illegally acquired territory from small-scale farmers. A state court in Piaui in Brazil’s poor northeast issued an order canceling the deal for a tract of land larger than Los Angeles earlier this month.

Since the early 1990s, Cambodia has been heavily reliant on foreign aid. The Cambodian Government is seeking to reduce donor-dependence and increase self-reliance, aiming to lift the country to the status of higher middle-income country by 2030. This goal depends heavily on increasing private investment, and the Government has described the private sector as the “engine of economic growth” for Cambodia. It is therefore seeking to encourage both foreign and domestic investment in order to maintain current growth rates and facilitate continued development of the country.

Land speculation stimulates the expansion of plantations across Brazil, increasing land conflicts and displacement of campesino and Indigenous communities. Historically, Indigenous and peasant communities in Brazil have resisted against violence and displacement. Land concentration is a root cause of social and economic inequality, in a country where 1 percent of large landowners control over 90 percent of agricultural land. In the past 12 years, 390 Guarani Kaiowa Indigenous people were assassinated in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where agribusiness corporations and local large landowners have expanded monocropping of commodities.

Who are we? People who struggle for territory

AGROECOLOGY FOR FOOD SECURITY AND NUTRITION PROCEEDINGS OF THE
FAO INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

18-19 September 2014, Rome, Italy