New on Gulf's shopping list: Foreigners' farmland (IHT)

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New on Gulf's shopping list: Foreigners' farmland
The Associated Press
Monday, November 17, 2008
NAHEL, United Arab Emirates: In the dunes around this sun-scorched desert village, where camels still plod along dusty roads an hour south of Dubai's skyscrapers, farmers are making the wasteland bloom.
Row upon row of bell peppers grow plump in a temperature-controlled greenhouse. Lilies and roses bud nearby, and strawberries are on their way, all thanks to sophisticated water-saving irrigation.
Yet even high-tech establishments like the Mirak Agricultural Services farms here and elsewhere in this riverless country will never feed the region's rapidly growing population. It is that realization that is persuading wealthy Gulf Arabs to look far beyond their shores for more fertile acreage - tens of thousands of hectares, in some cases.
There are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough water. Lush urban landscaping and ambitious agricultural projects here and in Saudi Arabia, which once spent so much on farm subsidies that it exported surplus wheat, are quickly draining aquifers, including some that are millennia old and cannot be refilled.
That stark reality, and rising food prices, is sending the region's leaders scrambling to lock up even more long-term food supplies abroad. And where once the region was content to spend its petrodollars on food sold on the open market, Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.
The prime ministers of Qatar and Kuwait traveled separately to Cambodia this year to discuss securing paddy land for rice-growing. Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, visited Kazakhstan in central Asia, where agricultural investments were on the agenda.
Dubai World, a sprawling conglomerate controlled by that emirate's government, last month said it was creating a new subsidiary targeting global investments in a wide range of commodities, including food.
Plans are also accelerating in the private sector.
The Saudi Binladin Group, for example, is considering investing more than $4 billion to grow food in Indonesia, said Salim Segaf al-Jufri, the Indonesian ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Under the proposed project, the company would produce basmati rice in Sulawesi, Papua and western Java.
Most such talks are continuing in private. Of those companies that could be reached for comment, none made officials available to discuss their investments in detail. That may be because many of the deals are being hatched in volatile countries, such as Pakistan and Sudan, that have serious domestic food concerns of their own. The idea of shipping off homegrown crops to feed rich foreigners could stir dissent.
"These are countries that come with a lot of political baggage," said Eckart Woertz, program manager for economics at the Gulf Research Center, which estimates the Gulf's conventional water resources will be gone within three decades. "People riot when they don't get food."
Experts say the agriculture investments could be a win-win situation. The Gulf gains food security, while poorer developing countries benefit from added jobs and improved technology.
But there are concerns, too.
The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf, has warned that foreign land acquisition and long-term leasing schemes, if done poorly, risk "creating a neocolonial pact" and "unacceptable work conditions for agricultural workers."
Even so, some countries are seeking out investment.
Pakistan, already a key source of labor for the Gulf, has been among the most active. This spring, Islamabad helped organize a show in Dubai aimed at increasing investment in the country's agricultural and dairy industries.
Huma Fakhar, managing partner at MAP Services Group, a market research and trade consultant which sponsored the event, said Pakistan was a logical choice for Gulf investment.
Fakhar said an investor from Abu Dhabi, whom she declined to name, last year bought about 16,000 hectares, or 40,000 acres, of farmland in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Two UAE firms, Emirates Investments Group and Abraaj Capital, have also expressed interest in investing directly in Pakistani agriculture, she said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/asia/gulf.php



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Israel slams assaults on Palestinian olive harvest (IHT)

Reuters
Monday, October 20, 2008
JERUSALEM: Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak condemned Monday "assaults by hooligans" disrupting Palestinian olive picking in the occupied West Bank, but said Israeli security could not protect the harvesters everywhere.
Israel has deployed forces in a "supreme effort" to let the harvest proceed despite attacks by Jewish settlers in some olive groves this month, Barak told Israel's Army Radio.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told reporters Sunday that the disruption of the harvest was "a dangerous Israeli escalation." He pledged to fund the plantings of a million trees to make the rocky West Bank terrain greener.
Asked about Abbas's remarks, Barak said "the assaults by hooligans in the area ... deserve condemnation."
"But there are hundreds of sites where the olive harvest takes place and it isn't possible to be everywhere," Barak added. He also urged Palestinians to coordinate with Israeli security forces to ensure they could harvest olives safely.
Olives are an important cash crop for thousands of Palestinians among the three million Palestinians living in the territory captured by Israel in a 1967 war.
About 300,000 Jews live in settlements built by Israel in the territory, an issue that has bedevilled Western-backed peace talks for decades. Palestinians say settlements rob them of land they need for a viable state.
Israeli soldiers intervened to chase away dozens of settlers who assaulted olive harvesters near the West Bank town of Qalqilya Sunday, Palestinian witnesses said.
But another harvest near the West Bank town of Hebron was called off Saturday after several settlers assaulted two photographers and a foreign peace activist. Police restored order by forcing everyone to leave the area.
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar (IHT)

A worker returning from the fields in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Many people here are stateless, unrecognized by the government because they are Muslim. (International Herald Tribune)

With cyclone aid comes an imbalance in Myanmar
By The International Herald Tribune
Monday, October 20, 2008
SITTWE, Myanmar: In some spots, the road that leads to Kobi Ramau's village looks as if it has more potholes than pavement.
Not that it matters too much to Ramau, a farmer and father of four: He does not have a car, let alone a bicycle. And Myanmar's military government bans him from traveling outside his district without a permit.
Like the more than 720,000 Muslims who live in Rakhine State, this rain-soaked western corner of Myanmar, Ramau is stateless. His parents and grandparents were born here in British colonial times, but the military government does not recognize him as a citizen.
Ramau's life is an extreme example of the deprivation, hunger and general poverty that many people in this country face. Soldiers expropriated Ramau's land a decade ago and took his 80 buffalo. He is now paid the equivalent of $25 a month by the military to till the land he once owned. "They took everything," he said.
But a few hundred miles southeast, in another low-lying, rice-growing area of Myanmar that was no better off - until recently - a very different picture has emerged.
The cyclone that ravaged Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta five months ago has unexpectedly opened the door to foreign money and foreign aid workers who are leading projects to "rebuild better" the roads, schools, houses and water storage tanks that were destroyed or damaged during the storm.
After initial resistance by Myanmar's junta, dollars are cascading into the Delta on a scale that this country has perhaps never seen.
Britain, the European Union, the United States and Australia - all of which have long been considered the sworn enemies of the ruling junta - have led donors in a fund-raising effort that has so far provided $240 million, or about $100 for every person who survived Cyclone Nargis, an amount that the United Nations hopes to double in the coming months.
Aid workers say that this intensive rebuilding effort in the Delta, where only a small fraction of the country's population lives, has opened up the possibility to expanded humanitarian operations in the country.
But, in the here and now, the assistance to the Delta has created a stark imbalance in the country.
"There's a serious amount of money flowing into this country and it's all for Nargis victims," said Frank Smithuis, head of the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières in Myanmar, which tends to the sick both inside and out of the Delta. "That is great, but it is strange that nobody seems interested in the needs of the rest of the country."
The list of those in need of food and medical attention in Myanmar is long and distressing.
Here in this city overlooking the Bay of Bengal, a half-dozen men have as their only employment an umbrella repair business, fixing battered "made-in-China" models that would be tossed into the trash in neighboring countries.
A household survey carried out in June for UN agencies found a "worsening and alarming economic situation" in villages near the border with Bangladesh. With bad weather last year leading to crop failures, families cut back from three to two meals a day. Only 60 percent of boys and less than half of girls had "normal" body mass - the rest were severely malnourished. And only 12 percent of households had soap.
In northern Myanmar, erstwhile opium farmers who gave up the heroin business in recent years in exchange for promises that they would be given food aid have now returned to planting opium because they are hungry, aid officials say.
Across the country, out of a quarter of a million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, 80,000 are in urgent need of retroviral drugs and only 15,000 will receive them, according to Smithuis. "The others will die," he said.
In Chin State, near the border with India, villagers are suffering what has the ring of a biblical plague. Thousands of rats, attracted to a rare blooming of bamboo flowers, have eaten through rice fields and other crops. Farmers in some villages are now living off of wild tubers in the jungle.
"The rats ate everything," said Pyi Kyaw, a 38-year-old villager who rowed a boat loaded with bamboo and other timber for several days downstream to exchange the wood for large bags of rice. It will take nine days to row back home against the currents, he said.
For years, Western countries were reluctant to provide aid to Myanmar for fear that it would strengthen the grip of the junta and its repressive policies. But the shocking toll of the cyclone, which struck on May 2 and 3 and left an estimated 130,000 people dead or missing, was a watershed moment because Western governments believed that the plight of the victims overrode concerns about ways that the junta might benefit. Today, 26 international aid organizations are operating in one district of the Delta alone.
In past years Myanmar has received tiny levels of aid compared with its neighbors. In 2005, the latest year for which comparable data are available, Myanmar received $3 per person in aid compared with $9 per capita in Bangladesh, $38 in Cambodia, $49 in Laos and $22 in Vietnam.
The quandary for aid organizations is that assistance pledged for the Delta must be spent in the Delta, aid workers say. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency that delivers rice, beans, cooking oil and iodized salt, is fully funded through January for victims of the cyclone. But the organization will have to cut back programs in northern areas of the country because of an immediate shortfall of $11.2 million, partly caused by the increase in global food prices.
"We haven't been able to convince donors to give us money for projects in the northern areas," said Chris Kaye, the head of the Myanmar operations of the World Food Program.
The cyclone has also drained resources away from areas outside the Delta. Trucks, aid personnel and equipment were channeled to the cyclone-hit regions from northern areas of the country. And with a key rice-growing area in the Delta damaged by the storm the government forbade the World Food Program from buying cheaper locally produced rice, fearing food shortages. The United Nations is now forced to buy more expensive foreign rice, further straining budgets.
In perhaps the most stark example of the imbalance between the Delta and the rest of the country, impoverished villagers here along the border with Bangladesh have been forced by the government to donate money for the victims of Cyclone Nargis - a philanthropic gesture, couched as patriotic duty, they can hardly afford.
Ramau, the farmer, seems initially startled when asked what types of things he needs.
"We need so many things," he said, pausing to respond. "We have no money."

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China enacts major land reform (IHT)

By Jim Yardley
Sunday, October 19, 2008
BEIJING: Following days of uncertainty, the ruling Communist Party announced a rural reform policy Sunday that for the first time would allow farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that advocates say would bolster lagging incomes in the Chinese countryside.
The new policy, announced by Chinese state media, marks a major economic reform and is also rich in historical resonance, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the land reforms by Deng Xiaoping, which were considered the first critical steps in the policies that have fueled China's rapid economic growth.
For President Hu Jintao, whose tenure has disappointed some reformers, the new policy seems intended to position him as a worthy heir to Deng. "The new measures adopted are seen by economists as a major breakthrough in land reforms initiated by late leader Deng Xiaping 30 years ago," reported Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency.
Currently, Chinese farmers can sell what they produce but are mostly prohibited from transferring their collectively-held land-use rights. Under the new policy, the government will establish markets where farmers can "sub-contract, lease, exchange or swap" land-use rights or join cooperatives. Xinhua reported that giving farmers this latitude would enable them to become more efficient by increasing the size of farms while also providing income that can be used to start new businesses.
The fate of the reform program has been uncertain for the past week. Analysts had expected an announcement last Sunday after the conclusion of an important annual Communist Party planning session. But the communiqué released after the meeting made no mention of land reform, fueling speculation that opponents might have derailed the plan.
Critics had warned that weakening the existing system of collective village ownership could deprive peasants of the security of having a piece of land and possibly lead to millions of landless farmers. But the existing system has become rife with corruption, as local officials and developers have illegally seized farmland for urban expansion while paying minimal compensation to farmers.
Signs that the reforms had been approved began to appear as the week wore on. In Chengdu, a government land market opened last Monday. On Thursday, a leading Communist Party magazine published an article by one of the country's most senior official on rural issues in which he said the party would create a market for transferring land-use rights in the countryside.
Under the current system, farmers are assigned small plots of land. Reform advocates say allowing leasing or transfer would enable the creation of larger, more efficient farms that could increase output. The new program also pledges to uphold "the most stringent farmland protection system" and require that local officials maintain 120 million hectares, or 300 million acres, of farmland, the minimum deemed necessary to feed the world's most populous nation.
Deng's reforms broke up the collective use, if not ownership, of land and created a household registration system that assigned land to individual families to use as they saw fit. Those reforms enabled farm incomes to rise sharply during the early 1980s, even as city dwellers suffered.
But the later creation of an urban real estate market saw an explosion of wealth in the cities that has contributed to a sharp income divide between affluent city dwellers and impoverished peasants. In recent years, rural protests have become increasingly common as disgruntled farmers have demonstrated against illegal land grabs or corrupt local officials. At the same times, tens of millions of farmers have flocked to cities in search of work, leaving plots of land to be tended by their elderly parents.
Reducing the rural-urban income gap has been a major priority for Hu — yet it has continued to widen in recent years as China's has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. On Sunday, Xinhua also announced the party's intention to establish a modern rural financial system to extend more credit and investment into the countryside. Chinese banking regulators have been ordered to establish 40 more rural banking institutions by year's end.
Raising incomes in the countryside is a major part of the government's effort to boost China's domestic consumption at a time when the overall economy is slowing. More than 700 million people are still designated as rural inhabitants, yet their spending is minimal. Economists say that jump-starting the rural economy is one way to offset the possibility of a recession as exports are expected to slow because of the global financial crisis.

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Tata finds a new home for Nano factory (IHT)

Villagers celebrating near the proposed site of the new Nano factory.

Tata Motors will open its factory on what is now a government-owned cow pasture.

(Ajit Solanki/The Associated Press)

Tata finds a new home for Nano factory
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
MUMBAI: The car billed as the cheapest in the world has a new, $416.6 million home.
Tata Motors said Tuesday that it would manufacture the ultra-cheap Nano on what is now a government-owned cow pasture in the western state of Gujarat after two years of increasingly violent protests from farmers forced the company to pull its factory from West Bengal.
"We now have a new home," Ratan Tata said, speaking in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat.
Tata said the new factory would initially produce about 250,000 Nanos and that the company would do its best to launch the 100,000 rupee, or $2,100, car by year's end, as planned - possibly by initiating production at existing factories in Pune and Pantnagar.
He said he did not anticipate that the delay and relocation would cause any "appreciable loss" on the company's books.
The new factory and ancillary vendor park, which Tata says will generate 10,000 jobs, will be housed on 450 hectares, or 1,100 acres, that Anand Agricultural University had been using to graze cattle. The deal will halve the campus's size.
The Gujarat government acquired an additional 20 hectares of land from farmers adjacent to the campus in Sanand, outside Ahmedabad city, for an access road - the deal was completed in just six hours on Monday, said three locals who sold their land.
"I have no problem whatsoever if the government wants land," said Nazirkhan Pathan, who said he sold two acres to the government for 1,100 rupees a square meter, far more than the market price. "After all, it will bring prosperity to the entire state."
Suresh Rangarajan, a Tata spokesman, said the company picked the Gujarat site because the land has been in government hands for a century and work could get started quickly.
He said that seven farmers sold their land to make way for the access road. "They are very forward-looking," he said. "They want investment and development."
Tata's venture in Singur, West Bengal, collapsed Friday after intensifying protests by farmers and opposition party leaders who said the state's governing Communist Party hadn't fairly compensated locals for their property.
The mood in West Bengal was mixed Tuesday evening.
Manik Das, 36, an opposition party activist, vowed to continue protesting until she gets her two acres back. "It does not matter to me whether Tata set up their plant at Gujarat or anywhere else," she said. "I want my land back - not the money."
Bonani Ghosh, 35, had started a canteen for Nano plant workers. "My lifestyle as well as my family's got more comfortable after running this canteen," she said. "With Gujarat being selected for the production of the car, we have no more hope."
It's not yet clear what will happen to the abandoned plant site, but the West Bengal minister of industry, Nirupam Sen, has said that by law the land, which he insists was acquired legally, cannot be returned to farmers.
The Tata dispute was not the first time that West Bengal leaders have faced allegations of using strong-arm tactics to wrench land from poor farmers.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that at least 30 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in Nandigram, West Bengal, after villagers protested last year, eventually forcing the authorities to scrap plans for a shipyard and a petrochemical plant spread over more than 8,900 hectares of farmland.

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China sets plan to settle 470,000 Tibetan herders (IHT)

China sets plan to settle 470,000 Tibetan herders
Reuters
Saturday, October 11, 2008
SHANGHAI: Authorities in the Chinese province of Sichuan plan to spend 5 billion yuan (431 million pounds) to settle 470,000 Tibetan herders in permanent houses, state media said, as part of efforts to promote the development of ethnic Tibetan areas.
Rioting broke out in ethnic Tibetan areas of the southwest province earlier this year after Lhasa, the capital of neighbouring Tibet, was hit by violent protests against Chinese rule.
Over the next four years, the Sichuan government will build brick houses and villages including primary schools, clinics and offices for the Tibetan nomads, Xinhua news agency said in a report on Saturday.
Of 533,000 herders in the province, 219,000 have no fixed residences and 254,000 are living in shanty homes, it added.
Provincial authorities also decided at a meeting on Friday to invite companies to design and make special tents and other goods to modernise the living standards of the herders, Xinhua said.
Xinhua did not detail how authorities would choose the locations of the villages or convince herders to move into them. Some ethnic Tibetans claim China has been trying to destroy their way of life as a people.
After a massive security operation to end this year's unrest, during which 21 people were killed in Lhasa, the Chinese government has announced a range of projects to promote the economic development of ethnic Tibetan areas.
Last month, Xinhua said the government would spend $3.1 billion (765 million pounds) by 2013 on a series of industrial schemes in Tibet, including 10 mining projects and five industrial zones.
($1 = 6.83 yuan)
(Reporting by Andrew Torchia; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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China may draw farms into market economy (IHT)

China may draw farms into market economy
By Edward Wong
Saturday, October 11, 2008
BEIJING: Chinese leaders are expected to allow peasants to buy or sell land-use rights for the first time, a step that could draw hundreds of millions of farmers more firmly into the city-centered market economy.
The new policy, which is being discussed this weekend by Communist Party leaders and could be announced within days, would be the biggest economic reform in many years and would mark another significant departure from the system of collective ownership and state control that China built after the 1949 revolution.
Party leaders began reviewing a draft of proposed rural land reform laws on Thursday at their annual planning session, now under way. Policy changes are expected to be announced after the session ends on Sunday, scholars and government advisers say.
The most important change would allow China's peasantry, which by official count includes about 800 million people, to sell land-use contracts to other farmers or to agricultural companies. Some economists say this shift would lead to more efficient land use and allow much larger farms to be established.
The Chinese leadership has long insisted that the country must remain self-sufficient in the production of staple foods, and is highly unlikely to allow farmers to sell land-use rights for nonagricultural development. But if a market for trading farmland developed as expected, peasants could gain a new source of cash income that could help revitalize the stagnant rural economy.
"If all the speculations are true, if senior leadership is going to lift all the restrictions out the door, I'd say this is a great positive," said Keliang Zhu, a lawyer with the China research division of the Rural Development Institute, a Seattle-based organization that has pushed for land rights for the rural poor. "It'll free up the dead capital and allow all this wealth to materialize."
Zhu added that the change would give China "huge momentum in terms of agricultural development."
Chinese leaders are alarmed by the prospect of a deep recession in leading export markets at a time when their own economy, after a long streak of double-digit growth, is slowing. Officials are eager to stoke new consumer activity at home, and one potentially enormous but barely tapped source of demand is the peasant population, which has been largely excluded from the raging growth in cities.
Average income in rural areas lags far behind the average in cities, giving China one of the starkest income gaps in the world, according to government estimates.
Many farmers work on tiny, state-allocated plots of land for a small fraction of the year, investing little in agriculture. While they are entitled to 30-year land-use contracts, the state retains ownership of rural land, and local officials often seize or reallocate it to suit their development priorities.
Rural land disputes are perhaps the biggest source of social unrest in China. Protests and riots in rural areas number in the thousands each year, according to national police estimates. They are often incited by allegations of corruption and illegal land seizures.
Many farmers leave the land to seek work in cities, but they are still classified as farmers under the country's population control policies and tend to work in low-wage factory or construction jobs on a seasonal basis.
Advocates for land reform say the proposed changes would create more asset wealth for farmers and increase land security, which would in turn encourage peasants to invest in farming and increase productivity.
A law enacted in 2002 allows limited land-use trades between individual farmers, but does not permit unrestricted trade between farmers and companies, straight sales of land-use rights or the option to use the land as collateral to obtain a loan, Zhu said.
The major state news organizations reported Friday that rural land reform was at the top of the agenda for the plenary session. China Daily, the country's official English-language newspaper, said, "The meeting is expected to make it easier for farmers to lease or transfer the management rights of their land, measures that have become necessary as many farmers move to cities as migrant workers."
Private ownership of land is not allowed under the Constitution, and rural land is still effectively controlled by township- and village-level leaders. Officials characterize the proposed policy changes as allowing the farmers to lease or trade their 30-year land-use contracts to individuals or companies.
The issue remains a delicate one. Many party traditionalists strongly favor collective land ownership. They have argued that China's economy is still not robust enough to absorb hundreds of millions of rural laborers full time. They also defend the system of allocating small plots of land to all rural families as guaranteeing farmers at least a subsistence income.
But repeated efforts to enliven the rural economy without freeing up land have failed, and proponents of moving toward partial privatization appear to have the upper hand.
One point under discussion is whether land contracts should be extended to 70 years from 30 years, scholars say, a move that would give farmers more security and presumably increase the value of their land-use rights.
Chinese leaders have been carefully preparing the public for a major announcement.
On Sept. 30, President Hu Jintao, who is also the secretary general of the Communist Party, made a well-publicized visit to Xiaogang village in Anhui Province, the site in 1978 of a bold experiment in rejecting Maoist-era land collectivization. Since then, the village has been held up as a symbol of rural land reform.
Hu said at the time that farmers would soon be allowed to transfer their land contracts.
"Not only will the current land contract relationship be kept stable and unchanged over time, greater and protected land contract and management rights will be given to the peasants," Hu said, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. "Furthermore, if the peasants wish to, they will be allowed to transfer the land contract and management rights in various ways and to develop management on an appropriate scale."
Some farmers are already informally leasing out their land-use contracts. After Hu's visit to Xiaogang, China Daily reported glowingly that one farmer who took part in the risky experiment in 1978, Yan Jinchang, had recently joined about 10 other households in renting 44 acres of land to a Shanghai company. In 2006, the company built a pig farm on the land.
Yan, 65, was made the pig farm's manager. "We raise special pigs that produce lean pork," Yan said, according to The China Daily. "Our meat sells well in Shanghai, and we are profitable."
From dynastic times onward, control of farmland has always been a central part of the relationship between Chinese rulers and the common people. Rulers are keenly aware of the fact that peasant rebellions related to land use and taxes have overthrown kingdoms throughout Chinese history.
Mao forced farmers into collectives, a move that turned out to be disastrous. In 1978, before the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping officially announced the start of his bold Reform and Open policy, 18 families in Xiaogang, including Yan's, quietly decided to divide up communal farmland for personal use. It was the precursor to the land-use contract system that the government later enacted.
But since then, rural land reform has failed to keep pace with urban land reform, which partly explains while farmers have failed to capitalize on the economic gains of the past few decades. China allows urban residents to trade or sell their land-use contracts freely. That right has allowed people to profit from city property in ways that farmers have not legally been able to do.
There is speculation that Hu has chosen the party's planning session this year to announce the rural reforms in order to link himself in the public eye with Deng, whose initial economic reforms were unveiled 30 years ago this month.
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

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Stakes high for South African land reform (IHT)

Thursday, October 9, 2008
By Muchena Zigomo
For those seeking to redistribute South Africa's rich farmland among landless, poor blacks, there is an uncomfortably close reminder of the dangers of getting this sensitive task wrong: Zimbabwe.
More than a decade after the end of apartheid, poor blacks in South Africa are still waiting for farms promised to them by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which sees land redistribution as a cornerstone of black majority rule.
Farmers' groups say the delays are slowing investment in agriculture, stunting the sector's growth and hampering efforts to improve the lives of poor blacks, millions of whom still live in grim townships lacking basic services.
"It's a big issue, very serious, in other countries people have even died over these issues," said Motsepe Matlala, president of the National African Farmers' Union.
In Zimbabwe, about a dozen white farmers were shot dead and many others were beaten as war veterans violently seized white-owned commercial farms in 2000 as part of President Robert Mugabe's policy of land redistribution.
Critics say this policy ruined farming as many of the landless blacks had little or no experience in agriculture.
South Africa's target is ambitious: to hand over 30 percent of commercial farmland to blacks by 2014. With just six years to go, only 4 percent has been redistributed.
In August, the government shelved a controversial land bill, which would have given authorities wider powers to seize white-owned farms, after civic and farmers' groups branded it unconstitutional and a threat to farm investment.
Since then, Africa's biggest economy has been rocked by a political earthquake. The ANC forced former president Thabo Mbeki to resign last month, replacing him with Kgalema Motlanthe, who is expected to step down after elections in April.
ANC leader Jacob Zuma is expected to win that vote, and some critics of the land bill fear it will be reintroduced when he takes office. Zuma has said land reform has so far failed to combat rural poverty or promote rural development.
Analysts say the powerful COSATU trade union federation, which is allied to the ANC and the South African Communist Party and has called for speedy land reforms, may have more influence with Zuma than with Mbeki.
The question of land ownership in Africa is ever more pertinent as the continent finds favour among foreign investors seeking to buy up relatively cheap land to answer a growing need for food and energy security.
Governments and large investment funds are scouring the continent from dusty Sudan in the north to Zambia, seeking agricultural projects for investment, although the global financial crisis may slow the flow of funds in the near-term.
STUMBLING BLOCKS
South Africa has about 13 million hectares of arable land, producing about $50 million of farm goods each year. About 9 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, and it contributes just over 2 percent to gross domestic product.
"Agriculture is key to South Africa's development and obviously there would be an urgent need to deal with all the issues that will put the sector onto a high growth scenario path," said John Purchase, chief executive of the Agricultural Business Chamber.
"That includes the land reform programme and the sector's strategic plan, among other issues."
The government has long said the programme to give land back to people dispossessed under apartheid will be done in an orderly, legal and transparent manner.
"We have not moved in the way that the injured parties, the blacks, would have wanted us to move," Matlala said. "But we do appreciate that those who own the land may not let go of it willingly."
Many white farmers fear the kind of violence seen in Zimbabwe, while government officials say redistribution is being held up by soaring land costs that make it expensive to buy land from white owners under willing-buyer, willing-seller deals.
They also accuse white farmers of deliberately inflating prices, while landowners blame bureaucratic shortcomings for the slow progress in redistribution.
A Department of Agriculture website projected it would cost 94 billion rand ($10.3 billion) to transfer 30 percent of the land by 2014.
"The exorbitant and forever increasing land prices in South Africa continue to be the biggest challenge and impediment for both land redistribution and restitution," said Thozi Gwanya, director-general in the department of land affairs.
The government says it has bought agricultural land at an average cost of 4,000 rand per hectare. "And that average is increasing rapidly," Gwanya said.
The average cost for land used to grow sugar cane is about 55,000 rand per hectare, macadamia about 60,000 rand per hectare and vineyards about 100,000 rand per hectare.
NO QUICK FIX
Lourie Bosman, president of farmers' umbrella group AgriSA says the government needs to be more "level-headed" in its approach to the land reform issue.
"They must take it easy," he said. "There is a political outcry about land, but there is no quick fix to this problem."
There have already been protests. Residents of a small community in Ventersdorp, in the North West province, marched in early October to protest the slow pace of resettlement.
The leaders of the demonstration threatened to invade a piece of land in the area if their grievances were not met.
AgriSA has urged the state to consider other options including focussing more on partnerships between emerging black farmers and the white commercial farmers. Some white farmers have already begun training a new generation of black farmers.
"Some of these people are getting back land which they lost more than 50 years ago. They haven't been farming for all that time and they will need help," Matlala, of the National African Farmers' Union said.
Some white farmers blame the government for the delays in redistribution, saying they will sell if the price is right.
"It's a lie to say farmers are delaying the process," Bosman said. "We have more land in the open market than the government can buy."
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/09/africa/OUKWD-UK-AFRICA-LAND-SAFRICA.php

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A major crisis for the Bolivian president (IHT)

Bolivian farmers who support President Evo Morales fought Saturday against those who called for more autonomy from his government. (Bruno Domingos/Reuters)

LA PAZ: President Evo Morales is facing the most acute crisis of his presidency as deaths from violence in rebellious northern Bolivia increased to almost 30 over the weekend. Supporters of Morales said that the death toll could rise with dozens of people caught up in the violence and still unaccounted for.
Relative calm returned to the northern department of Pando on Sunday after Morales declared martial law there and troops dispatched from La Paz seized the airport and other facilities in Cobija, the departmental capital. But the threat of unrest persists in other parts of Bolivia, and political leaders in the tropical lowlands bordering on Brazil said they would resume protests if killings in Pando continued.
Morales said that the violence was a massacre carried out partly by "Peruvian and Brazilian mercenaries" hired by the governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández, who went into hiding to avoid arrest. In comments to local radio, Fernández denied that accusation, asserting that the deaths resulted from clashes between anti-government protesters and the president's supporters.
On Sunday, Juan Ramón Quintana, a top aide to Morales, told a local radio station that Fernández had been arrested, The Associated Press reported.
The violence points to renewed tension over Morales's attempts to redistribute petroleum royalties and to overhaul the constitution to speed land reform and create a separate legal system for Bolivia's indigenous majority. Most of Bolivia's natural gas and food is produced in the eastern lowlands, and those departmental governments have chafed at the president's proposals.


The polarization of the country intensified in August after Morales won 67 percent approval in a nationwide referendum over his policies, reflecting intense support for him in the rural highlands and in large cities like La Paz and Cochabamba. But governors in the eastern departments who urge greater political and economic autonomy from Morales's government were reaffirmed in their posts with similar margins.
"You have a conflict between a constitutional national power and a de facto regional power that can only be resolved by constitutional force," said Heinz Dieterich, a political analyst base din Mexico who writes widely on leftist movements in Latin America. "If Evo does not use the judiciary and the military, there is no way he can govern."


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/15/america/bolivia.php











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