[OccupyComms] Fwd: [Diggers350] A ‘Land Sovereignty’ Alternative? - Towards a Peoples’ Counter-Enclosure

[Mark Barrett]

http://www.tni.org/paper/land-sovereignty-alternative

6 July 2012
Jennifer Franco
Jun Borras

Dramatic changes around food, climate, energy, and finance in recent
years have pushed questions of land use and land control back onto the
centre stage of development discourse, at the very moment when the same
conditions are spurring an unprecedented rush for land and water across
the globe.

Although it is often overlooked, water also figures heavily in this new
cycle of resource-grabbing, both as a driver of land grabbing for
industrial agriculture, and as a target itself, as in the case of
water-grabbing for hydropower or hydraulic fracturing (aka ‘fracking’),
for example. A fusion of the industrial agro-food and energy complexes
has made land and water key resources in the global capitalist system
again, fuelling in turn a huge renewed process of enclosure known as the
‘global land grab’.

There is a need to come to grips with land issues in a changing global
context and to rethink what may be needed to mobilise effectively in
such a setting. The main frameworks of advocacy that have been employed
by some academics, radical researchers and social movement activists
have some particular limitations in the context of global land grabbing.
Neither land reform nor land tenure security alone are well-equipped to
be frameworks for analysis or action in the current conjuncture. Land
reform remains important, but its limitations as a call to action are
being exposed by the current cycle of land grabbing. Likewise, land
tenure security is important, but alone is not enough, since adverse
incorporation of the rural working poor classes into the
corporate-controlled global food-feed-fuel regime does not necessarily
require moving them off the land.

If, as our analysis suggests, there is a need to transition the people’s
demand for land from ‘land reform’ and ‘land tenure security’ to
something else, then ‘land sovereignty’ as a framework is worth considering.

Agrarian Justice, Land sovereignty
http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/a_land_sovereignty_alternative_.pdf
(677.42 KB)

About the authors
Jennifer Franco

Jennifer Franco is a researcher working on land and rural politics
issues.  After receiving a PhD in politics in 1997 in the US, she began
working with the Philippine solidarity group in the Netherlands, and
with local peasant organizations, rural community organizing and human
rights groups, and research outfits in the Philippines in two regions
faced with extreme landlord resistance to redistributive agrarian
reform. She began working with TNI in the mid-2000s, on several projects
on various topics involving local peasant movement and rural reform
activists, human rights activists, and activist researchers from various
countries and regions. In 2010 she joined the College of Humanities and
Development (COHD) at the China Agricultural University in Beijing as an
adjunct faculty and travels there twice a year to give seminars and work
with junior faculty and MA and PhD students. She has lived in the US,
Philippines, Canada and the Netherlands.
Jun Borras

Saturnino 'Jun' M Borras Jr. is a political activist and academic who
has been deeply involved in rural social movements in the Philippines
and internationally since the early 1980s. Borras was part of the core
organising team that established the international peasant movement La
Via Campesina and has written extensively on land issues and agrarian
movements. Jun is also Adjunct Professor, COHD at China Agricultural
University, Beijing; a Fellow for Food First/Institute for Food and
Development Policy in California and Coordinator for Initiatives in
Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS).


'Woe to those who join house to house and field to field, until there is no
more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. Yahweh
of heaven's armies has sworn in my hearing: "Surely many houses shall be
desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant." Isaiah 5:8-9
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