WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week the World Bank is holding its annual conference on land and poverty. Officially titled "Linking Land Tenure and Use for Shared Prosperity," the 16th annual conference is March 23-27 at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.
According to notes from the conference website, the theme this year highlights how land tenure can affect the distribution of assets between men and women and how this can affect the wider community. Land tenure is defined as the system that confers landholding rights in a society.
"Although they are by no means a ‘silver bullet,’ recent innovations in geospatial technologies provide exciting opportunities to document and analyze" factors that can determine land tenure as well as some of the effects that land use change can have on land tenure.
Geospatial technology usually refers to visualization equipment, such as global positioning systems (GPS), geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. The conference is, as some might put it, for "land geeks," but agriculture and farming are the backdrop.
That’s because small landholders in poor parts of the world are mostly farmers. According to the World Bank, 78 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and most of those work in agriculture. The World Bank provides loans and guarantees to help fund projects that purport to help the world’s rural poor.
The World Bank says improving agricultural performance is the most powerful tool to end global poverty and hunger and boost shared prosperity. Agriculture remains "fundamental" for economic growth and feeding a population that is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, the World Bank says. Agriculture accounts for one-third of gross domestic product and three-quarters of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
The World Bank says it’s committed to boosting agriculture and agriculture-related investment; to Oakland Institute Executive Director Anuradha Mittal, the World Bank talks a good game, but that’s all it is.
Instead of helping small landholding farmers get resettled, such people are often displaced and without any recourse, she asserted. She said many of the recent land deals the World Bank has financed promise benefits to communities but don’t "follow through." She said it should stop "exploiting" land and people.
"They are increasing poverty and perhaps ending the poor," she stated. "If you look at the kind of displacement that has taken place, this has not helped the poor. It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with them, it’s about the facts and the evidence.
"We have found that there is a land rush taking place that is totally ignoring customary land rights. The World Bank has admitted that their resettlement policies are really poor."
Mittal said farm workers who used to do subsistence farming on their own land for food are now being forced to work on cotton, coffee and palm oil plantations for large concerns. She said these plantations do not feed people.
She also rejected the idea that large-scale production needs to replace small-scale, subsistence farming in order to make sure there’s enough food for everyone. "If production were the issue, then there wouldn’t be 500,000 hungry people today in the United States," she said.
The Oakland Institute terms itself an independent policy think tank whose mission is to increase public participation and promote fair debate on critical social, economic and environmental issues in national and international forums.
More information about the World Bank conference on land and poverty can be found on the organization’s website at www.worldbank.org and to find out more about the event from the Oakland Institute’s perspective, go to www.oaklandinstitute.org
