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A VISITING land expert has warned against falling for the “dominant model” of land grabbing, which sees small-scale farmers replaced by agri-businesses that are in many cases less productive.
Mr Robin Palmer, who has worked on land issues for more than 35 years as both an academic and for British NGO Oxfam, said last week that population pressures and the increasing consumption of meat and dairy products in developing countries were often used to justify plantation farming, with peasant farmers and traditional pastoralists dismissed as “romantic nonsense”.
“In the context of global land grabbing … this is the dominant model,” he told The Myanmar Times in Yangon on February 21. “It’s curious because land has been a source of conflict in many places yet despite that governments are giving it away.”
Aside from the social consequences, Mr Palmer, who has worked in Africa, Asia and Latin America, said there was also little evidence that plantation farms were more efficient or productive than smallholdings. This was reinforced at the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing at the University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies in April 2011, which featured more than 100 papers on land issues...
