Focus Land Grabbing: the recent newsletter of Environment, Conflict and Cooperation is online

In October the dialog and information platform ECC provided by adelphi focuses on land grabbing and reports on the High-Level Forum on Land-Based Foreign Direct Investments in Africa, which was held on 4-5 October in Nairobi, Kenya. Furthermore this newsletter edition deals with climate change security, conflicts sensitive adaptation, water politics in Turkey and the Belo Monte dam.

In the light of the growing demand for food and energy, governmental agencies, private investors, hedge funds and big companies purchase or lease large areas of agricultural land in developing countries in order to grow crops for export purposes. The former Botswanan president, Festus Mogae, describes this phenomenon as “dramatic trends in large acquisitions of land by multinationals for agricultural purposes as they seek to assure food security for industrialized nations”.

The ECC-Newsletter discusses the result of the High-Level Forum on Land-Based Foreign Direct Investments in Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, on 4-5 October and reports on the adoption of the Nairobi Action Plan, which aims to check the negative repercussions of large-scale land-based investments. Besides, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) guidelines on responsible governance of land and other natural resources are subject of a forum by the NGO Miseror.

In addition, this year’s conference of the German dialog and information platform KRIUM focuses on issues concerning food security and conflicts. The conference will take place on 14 November in Berlin.

The ECC- Newsletter 5/2011 is available:
www.ecc-platform.org/ima…