Today’s Financial Times has a preview of a much-awaited World Bank report on land grabs. The Bank has, for months, been promising the arrival of a report that makes a cast iron case for why allowing rich foreign investors to buy land in poor countries is win-win-win-win. The release date for the report keeps slipping because it appears that even the Bank is struggling to massage the facts to fit its case. From a leaked version of the report:
“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.
The report was leaked by
a person who said they wanted to prevent the World Bank releasing the report in the middle of the summer holiday period.
With the FT piece comes a graph showing the countries with the largest land transfers. But the FT doesn’t say whether the draft report tracks the recipients of land transfers. For that, you’ll need to look to Franca Roiatti’s Il Nuovo Colonialismo, in which it appears that in Africa the two leading land-grabbing countries are China and the United Kingdom. More globalisation old and new, it’d seem.
Full article here, and watch this space for further developments.
Raj et al,
Thank you for your leadership and valuable enunciation of common sense.
The Capitalist system is dead, more appropriately killing and dieing. It is the insane momentum of financial abstractions and technological “advancements” that is DRIVING (the automobile is a fluke of human history)the world to genocide, ecocide, and suicide. The Center of such a “progression” is the Military Industrial Complex led hegemony of the British Imperialist Capitalist/Industrial “culture” that saw the Bank of England transform itself to the Federal Reserve in the USA. Its’ continental and colonial tyranny have manifested themselves in the World Bank and WTO, Corporate Capitalist Conglomerates and Wall Street and Main Street Financial and Land Overlords.
It is far past the 11th hour in our world, but if there is a solution, it lays in the the idea of a World Congress for Community Economic Development where we can work towards neighborhood/community, inter-community, and inter-regional solidarity and cooperation with local ecological economic redevelopment plans based on need and bypassing the International Finance “Community” as represented in the US by the Federal Reserve and participating Financial domineers and exploiters.
Save for strongholds like Kerala and Cuba, emerging Venezuela and the outgrowths of the work in these areas, we have not yet begun to organize. It is quite problematic from where I live, and throughout at least the North American continent (the only geography that I know) in that people are so firmly acculturated by the status quo that the people do not seem to have the hope, let alone the ability, to visualize an alternative economic system. The environmental damage and the momentum of entropy is so severe and the consciousness of the people so polluted and so incremental. “They’ve all bought into it”, a friend terms it.
To each his own has become to each his own personal crisis and I wonder whether we have the educational and communication tools to reach them, that there may be, and the only hope is, a collective solution beginning with local community but extending out to world around solidarity and cooperation.
As I write this, my neighbors go their separate ways.
“To each his own has become to each his own personal crisis and I wonder whether we have the educational and communication tools to reach them, that there may be, and the only hope is, a collective solution beginning with local community but extending out to world around solidarity and cooperation.”
Maybe something like “The Venus Project” – but until now I don’t understand their “goals” in deep. (Sorry for my bad English … I am German)
This message by Mr.Morin supports Globalisation.
The linguistics appears to say otherwise.
I’d be happy if I could find some local community.
“The release date for the report keeps slipping because it appears that even the Bank is struggling to massage the facts to fit its case.”
Neuro-linguistic programming apparently has limits.
Made popular in the 80’s/90’s by leader, the motivational guru, Anthony Robbins, is commonly used to sell anything, product to idea.
The technique is used from selling bread to making a Communist/Fascist agenda appealing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
A Note to Dr. Mike Ellis on 08/06/2010
Mike,
We need a new paradigm of economic development. Given the existing crises and impending otherwise in resource constraints and the lack of equitable allocation, I know that many reject the politics of the G-20, the G-8, the G-1 (the USA) and the Capitalist Plutocracy and concomitant Military Industrial Complex that has been riding centuries of history based on economic Lordism/serfdom, substituted with the Capitalist profit paradigm or requirement of “risk and return”.
We need to cut the Gordian knot and reject such servitude and replace it with an ethos and modus operandi and intentional evolution to Homa Ecologica Cooperativo. Practical translation of such involves much education, particularly with respect to the goals of community organization, cooperation, and solidarity, and eventual direct action of the taking of Treasuries resources for direct, non-usurious, allocation to individuals and communities (in the form of community betterment organizations) based on need. The mission is One of ecological economic redevelopment inculcated on the principles of inclusion, humanity, equity, altruism, well-being and quality of life, sustainability, and peace. This is a cooperative communitarian/socialist economic democracy paradigm of “plan and implement”.
Being that most calls for socialism only clamor against the offending parties, and make weak attempts to organize within the political constraints and organizational and media domination, some with an impossible and misguided agenda of electoral victory and others with the misguided and premature agenda of revolution. What the political reformers and the cheerleaders of revolution have in common is a complete lack of understanding of the resource concerns and fundamental economic reorganization that is necessary.
I think that it is necessary to mitigate the inhumanities of the progressions of the industrial revolution and phase back more of an industrious ethic that goes along with relocalized artisanry, human ecology, agroecology (including urban agroecology) and an ethic of peace, cooperation, and solidarity.
Given that I feel much alone, although it is completely eclectic, in the enunciation of this paradigm, I call upon you for expressions of solidarity and commitment to aid in the furtherance of this mission. Please do not tarry with respect to a response, particularly related to how we can progress.
In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,