Multinationals Maximise Profits - Thousands Of Communities Displaced

An international peasant workshop billed “Global Landgrabbing, Genuine Land Reform and Human Rights” concluded that lands in underdeveloped countries are being grabbed, at an alarming rate, by multinational corporations to maximize profits, thereby displacing thousands of communities and denying peasants their right to the land they till.

By GERRY ALBERT CORPUZ
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – Foreign activists who took part in an international peasant workshop billed “Global Landgrabbing, Genuine Land Reform and Human Rights,” held in Manila on July 19 to 21 are alarmed over the spate of government-sanctioned landgrabbing cases in the Philippines and other underdeveloped countries involving multinational corporations.

The workshop on global landgrabbing was attended by 41 participants representing people’s movements and international solidarity groups from 10 countries: the USA, Peru, Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Indonesia, India, Canada, Tanzania, and host country the Philippines.Workshop organizer Angie Ipong of UMA said the three speakers RahmatAjiguna, secretary general of AGRA or the Alliance for Agrarian Reform Movement in Indonesia (Indonesia), MoosaAzmi of Asian Bridge (India) and Rafael Mariano, national chairperson of KMP presented cases and the impact of global landgrabbing in their respective countries and how this neo-liberal globalization policy has summarily denied and violated, in sweeping and escalating fashion, the peasants’ quest for genuine land reform, agrarian justice and human rights.

Impact of global landgrabbing.

The organizers and participants to the international workshop agreed on the following impact of global landgrabbing to farmers and rural people: 

• Wholesale denial of peasant rights to genuine land reform, agrarian justice and social emancipation 

• Global landgrabbing and resource grab exacerbate the century old problem of landlessness, agricultural backwardness and rural maldevelopment in underdeveloped countries. 

• It promotes red carpet massacre of peasant and rural peoples’ livelihood and put the resources and the environment in corporate control and mercy of transnational exploiters in cahoots with their puppets and minions in the government 

• Global landgrabbing intensifies the export oriented, import dependent character of the economy of underdeveloped countries further reducing the working people into modern-day slaves of the empire, while their resources are divided among members of the foreign monopoly syndicate and their respective cartels and thrusts

• Global landgrabbing destroys the people’s environment, violates the people’s national patrimony and sovereignty

• Global land grabbing promotes mass murder of the sovereign rights of the working people to food and decent life 

• Global landgrabbing is a global menace arising from neo-liberal globalization and the desperate act of the US and the rest of the ruling criminal monopolies across the world to resolve the lingering crisis of global capitalism by passing the burden to the people of underdeveloped economies.

• Global landgrabbing is being met by peasants’ and people’s resistance. The legitimate struggle for land, justice and human rights is also met with state violence. Massive deployment of reactionary and puppet troops are done in global landgrabbing areas. 

• They (local armed forces) act as security agents of global landgrabbers, militarizing communities and terrorizing peasants and the people in the name of landgrabbing and resource grab and for the sake of imperialist plunder.

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Source: Bulatlat