landless

Lost in Singur

Raj — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:48:21 -0600

The Telegraph of Calcutta (they seem not to have gone along with the name change to 'Kolkata') have an exceptionally powerful story and picture today. It follows up the clash on the struggles between 'development' (Tata Industries wants to build a fleet of cheap cars there) and farming in India.

I've written a bit about the background of one of the biggest fights, in Singur. One element missing from the coverage has been news of the fate of those so poor, they don't even have land for the government to take away from them. The plight of landless labourers, at the bottom of the economic scale in agriculture, and therefore the poorest people on the planet, has often been given short shrift. This important article goes some small way to redressing that. ... read more »

The Promise of Land

Raj — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 02:06:45 -0700

In 1994, Bina Agarwal, a professor at the University of New Delhi, wrote the seminal book on gender and land rights - A Field of One's Own. Last week, the US State Department released a rather distorted version of Agarwal's conclusions. In a release entitled "Women's Lack of Property Rights Linked to Abuse, Experts Say", the State department has reduced the complex web of social and material burdens on women to one simple solution, and one simple right - the right to private property.

Of course, it is an indictment of our planet that women control pitifully little of it - one factoid based, as far as I've been able to find out, on data that's now over 20 years old, is this: women grow more than half the food in the Global South, but own less than 1% of the land there.

But rights to property are one set of rights among many - such as rights to healthcare, to education, to employment. And in Promised Land, a book I've just finished editing, Sofia Monsalve has put the case for women's rights to land in a far broader context.

We Want the Land Back

Raj — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:56:06 -0700

It's absurd and romantic to think that farmers have virtue as a birthright. This may seem an odd thing to say given that Stuffed and Starved is often a hymn to rural struggles. But it's important to remember that not all farmers are the same, and that very little soil is bloodless. Consider recent events in South Africa.

In October this year, an NGO called "Women in Agriculture and Rural Development" (Ward), set up by the South African government, announced in this article that that

"Three-hundred-and-fifty years ago the land was taken by white people. Now that we have a chance we must use it," said one land activist. "We want the land back." ... read more »

Cars vs Farmers in Singur

Raj — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:11:43 -0700

Singur is a fertile and vibrant farming area in the Hoogly district of West Bengal, India. On December 2, it becamethe scene of brutal repression, as armed police beat men, women and children to evict them from their land.

Using a colonial-era land-grabbing law, the Communist government of West Bengal has announced that it will seize the land from the poor, and give it to Tata Motors, in order to build a parts factory.

The government had offered a less fertile area for the company, but Tata rejected it. Ready to keep the industry happy, the government offered Tata a 1250 acre plot of land, home to 11 villages, in Hoogly.

Image from Aid India's coverage. ... read more »

Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST)

Raj — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:00:57 -0700

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members organized in 23 out 27 states. The MST carries out long-overdue land reform in a country mired by unjust land distribution. In Brazil, 1.6% of the landowners control roughly half (46.8%) of the land on which crops could be grown. Just 3% of the population owns two-thirds of all arable lands.

The organisation's Portuguese language website is here and the US-based Friends of the MST can be reached through ... read more »