Earth Equity News

Warnings of a Global Land Grab. By Paul Eccleston, Telegraph (UK), July 15, 2008. "The relentless demand for raw materials will lead to the destruction of the world's forests, a new study warns. The rush for fuel, food and wood will result in a global land grab that will leave millions of forest people impoverished and homeless. And it is possible governments and companies will exploit confusion over ownership in rural areas to evict local people and divvy up their land. The warnings come in two reports from U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition of forestry governance and conservation groups. The first report Seeing People Through the Trees [PDF, 64 pp] says by 2030 the world is likely to need 515m more hectares to grow food and biofuels - twice the amount of additional land that will be available. The second From Exclusion to Ownership? [PDF, 64 pp] says that governments in developing countries claim ownership of the majority of forests and have made only limited progress in recognising land rights of the local people. Forests worldwide play a key role in keeping the global climate stable and at the same time acting as a storehouse for carbon emissions but are under constant attack. Deforestation for agriculture and logging accounts for about 25-30 per cent of global CO2 emissions. RRI claims there has been a sharp increase in government allocations of forests to industrial plantations and that the surge in demand for fuel and food is rapidly eating up vast areas of forest in the Amazon and Southeast Asia. It says the fate of forest lands will help determine the severity of climate change, the course of wars and civil conflicts, and the ecological health of the planet."