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Friday, April 19, 2013

The European Land-Grab

Vast tracts of land in Europe are being "grabbed" by large companies, speculators, wealthy foreign buyers and pension funds in a similar way to in developing countries, according to a major new report.

Chinese corporations, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth and hedge funds, as well as Russian oligarchs and giant agribusiness have all stepped up land acquisitions in the past decade in a process that the report says and concentrating agriculture and land wealth in few hands. Chinese companies have moved into Bulgaria on a large scale and Middle Eastern companies are now major producers in Romania.

Half of all farmland in the EU is now concentrated in the 3% of large farms that are more than 100 hectares (247 acres) in size. In some EU countries, land ownership is as unequal as it is in Brazil, Colombia and the Philippines.

Britain has some of the highest concentrations of land ownership anywhere in the world, with 70 % of land reportedly owned by less than 1% of the population.

In Ukraine, 10 giant agro-holdings now control about 2.8m hectares. One oligarch alone controls more than 500,000 hectares.

In Germany, 1.2m land holdings in 1966-67 shrank to just 299,100 farms by 2010. Of these, the land area covered by farms of less than two hectares shrank from 123,670 hectares in 1990 to just 20,110 in 2007.

In Andalusia, Spain, the number of farms has dropped by more than two-thirds to under 1m in 2007. In 2010, 2% of landowners owned half of the land. In Spain, 75% of all the subsidies were taken by just 16% of the largest farmers.

In Italy, 33,000 farms now cover 11m hectares. In Italy in 2011, 0.29% of farms accessed 18% of total CAP incentives, and 0.0001 of these, or 150 farms, cornered 6% of all subsidies.

In Hungary in 2009, 8.6% of farms cornered 72% of all agricultural subsidies.

In France more than 60,000 hectares of agricultural land are lost each year to make space for roads, supermarkets and urban growth.

"Land needs to be seen again as a public good. We must reduce the commodification of land and instead promote public management of this common resource on which we all depend," said Jeanne Verlinden of the European Co-ordination Via Campesina.

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