Jordan is the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to host
the Global Land Forum (GLF); that is a big deal, both in developmental and
political terms. The multi-layered message and vision of this international
event holds great significance for the Kingdom and, in the future, for
Palestine – as it places farmers, rural women, and indigenous farming
communities and people at the heart of domestic agricultural policies.
اضافة اعلان
Mike Taylor,
director of the International Land Coalition (ILC), a global alliance of over
300 civil society and intergovernmental organizations in different parts of the
world, described the event as “an opportunity for Jordan to show the world how
it is building an inclusive and ‘people-centered’ land governance system”.
The quote could
be seen as gently nudging Jordanian decision makers toward empowering small
farmers, who are the real backbone of the country’s food security, as well as
adopting socially equitable and inclusive policies that empower youth and
women.
The truth of the
matter is that the government seems to be more interested in large-scale
industrial agriculture than in small farmers. Last week, Investment Minister
Khairy Amr met with a private-sector delegation from a foreign country and
discussed agriculture, among other “competitive sectors”, as a potential area
for investment, a first for Jordan.
That is why
having an event of this scale (900 participants) and nature in Jordan is a
pivotal moment for the country. It may encourage our decision makers to go back
to the drawing board and reorient our agricultural priorities and policies in a
way that puts humans first.
Notably, the
ninth edition of GLF, held under the title “Toward solutions to climate change
crises”, is organized by the EU, the Ministry of Agriculture of Jordan, and
SEEDS, a local NGO that focuses on youth development, women empowerment, and
the promotion of environmental protection and awareness.
The annual event
is the brainchild of the ILC, whose offices are hosted at the International
Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), also one of GLF’s strategic partners,
and an organization that puts “small-scale farmers at the forefront of food
systems transformation”.
Two global
events; two opposing visions
Two
international conferences opened on the same day, on May 23. Their agendas are
conflicting, to say the least. One is pro-grassroots communities in the farming
sector, while the other is about keeping corporate-centric globalization
attitudes intact.
WEF’s sessions could be described as a desperate attempt to breathe life into globalization, but without any meaningful critique of its role in diminishing generations of agricultural communities all over the world, while aggrandizing long supply chains that are a main cause of climate change.
The land forum
(on the shores of the Dead Sea) gives emphasis to people-centered food security
approaches, strong small-scale farming systems, locally managed ecosystems, and
effective actions against land grabbing,
At the opposite
end of the spectrum, the World Economic Forum (WEF) – held in Davos,
Switzerland – prioritizes large-scale industrial farming that protects the
corporate interest of agricultural multinationals and Big Tech companies,
rather than the local communities.
WEF’s sessions
could be described as a desperate attempt to breathe life into globalization,
but without any meaningful critique of its role in diminishing generations of
agricultural communities all over the world, while aggrandizing long supply
chains that are a main cause of climate change.
On Monday, WEF
highlighted an article on its front-page, titled “Why artificial intelligence
is vital in the race to meet the SDGs”. The article says that agri-tech can
“direct machinery to carry out tasks autonomously”, which removes the human
hand from the agricultural equation. In typical lobbying fashion, the article
also attempts to spin pro-Big Tech attitudes as being good for farmers.
The difference
between the two events is that GLF is powered by grassroots civil society
organizations that care about people, while WEF is a meeting point for
like-minded corporate leaders who are after their narrow interests and steep
annual profit margins.
Globalization
and the erosion of local agricultural communities
Jordan has
suffered for too long from what many like to coin as the country’s chronic
“lack of planning” in the water and agricultural sectors, which has resulted in
the encroachment of urbanization on large swathes of arable lands, among other
adverse effects.
Luckily, GLF is
here to offer the Kingdom an alternative point of view to the often capitalist,
industrialist and artificial intelligence-obsessed approaches – often proposed
by international bodies that rarely put humans or local communities at the
forefront of their policies.
Our decision
makers are known to adopt such policies with a blindfold over their eyes,
resulting in the deeply unfortunate deterioration of Jordan’s once bustling
agricultural sector. In the 1960s, Jordan was known to export its “surplus” of
wheat production to the United Arab Republic (of Syria and Egypt); that is how
grave the decline is.
In India, the
deterioration is even steeper. An anti-globalization movement called the
International Rivers Network (IRN) has stormed the plenary sessions of the
World Bank at the World Water Forum two decades ago to protest the bank’s
deliberate policies of building large-scale dams in historically agricultural
communities, as if in a deliberate move to disregard the livelihoods of the
local communities living there.
The result was
the erosion of generations of farmers, who inherited a burgeoning agricultural
tradition from their ancestors, and turning them into beggars on the streets of
New Delhi. The slums that plague the Indian capital are in fact populated by
the daughters and sons of small farmers who were forced off their lands to
fulfill the World Bank’s aggressive “developmental” policies.
All what the IRN
wanted was for the bank to look for other locations to build those dams, and in
a way that honored the people living on those lands, while protecting their agricultural
heritage and livelihoods.
Land rights, or
what experts call “land tenure”, is a central theme in the ninth edition of
GLF.
Israel is not
part of the global network of land-rights defenders
Researching the
event, it was interesting to see that Jordan has five members in the ILC, while
Palestine has four. Israel, on the other hand, has zero members in the
coalition.
The fact that
the ILC is concerned with the “land rights” of “indigenous people” is probably
a thorny political issue for the occupying regime, which may explain the
absence of members from Israel.
If attitudes
adopted by the ILC become mainstream globally, this will eventually bring
justice to the Palestinians, whose land, water, and agricultural rights are
being violently attacked and robbed by their occupiers on daily basis.
Coalitions like
the ILC are giving voice to grassroots communities and civil society
organizations in a way that counters global trends that put corporates before
people. What we are seeing here today is the unravelling of social and
political injustice at grassroots level.
That is why hosting this event in Jordan is a breath
of fresh air for small-scale local farmers, and may be signaling renewed hope
that Jordan is probably on a path toward honoring our rural communities as the
true guardians of food security.
Ruba Saqr has reported on the environment, worked in the
public sector as a communications officer, and served as managing editor of a
business magazine, spokesperson for a humanitarian INGO, and as head of a PR
agency.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
