For the past several years, Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT), in collaboration with other peasant and anti-imperialist movements, the Roots for Equity, Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PAN AP), and the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), has been celebrating March 29th as the International Day of Landless People. The aim of commemorating this day is to highlight the struggles of small and landless peasants for food sovereignty and genuine agrarian reforms worldwide. It also includes exposing the oppression, coercion, and exploitation by multinational corporations and the imperialist countries representing them, as well as the governments of Third World countries.

Currently, the world, especially Pakistan, is in the grip of a severe economic and environmental crisis. Millions of people, especially the working class, are suffering from extreme poverty, unemployment, and hunger. Even in such a dire conditions, imperialist countries, especially the United States continue to worsen the situation through institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. At the same time, they are pushing the situation further downwards. Simultaneously, they are engaged in environmental destruction, looting, and occupying land, water, oceans, forests, minerals, and other natural resources through war and militarization. The Zionist Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian land at the behest of the U.S. is one such example.

The people of Pakistan, particularly rural communities, are victims of these conditions. In Mansehra and other districts, local populations are being denied access to forests. In Peshawar, land is being taken from local communities under the guise of development projects. In the name of “Green Initiatives,” thousands of acres of land in Punjab and Sindh have been allocated for corporate agriculture. The path has already been paved for multinational corporations to take over the dairy and livestock sector, which includes banning open and fresh milk and promoting companies’ packaged milk. Additionally, genetically modified seeds are being promoted, which guarantee huge profits for seed giant companies. Similarly, huge corporations like PepsiCo have been given thousands of acres of land to produce potatoes, displacing small and landless farmers who are now forced to work as low-wage laborers. The potato seed on this land is owned by the corporation itself.

The digitalization of the food system, exemplified by the “Kissan Card”, represents a dangerous shift toward free market policies, allowing not only agrochemical corporations but also to financial and IT corporations to take over agriculture production.

The increase in sugarcane production is a serious concern since it has pushed landless peasants into the throes of severe hunger and poverty. It also been used for agro-fuel production as a false solution to climate change.  Due to the cultivation of sugarcane, important food crops like wheat are being greatly affected. The profit driven motives of corporations and imperialist agents are fully supported by the feudal class of the country.

The people, already struggling for survival, and now the ruling elite has announced the construction of six new canals from the Indus River. The province of Sindh, especially Lower Sindh, is already a victim of un-just water distribution; the construction of the newly announced canal will further aggravate the situation, leading to large-scale protests against it.

Another grim development for the people suffering from hunger and landlessness is the federal government’s decision to abolish the minimum support price of wheat for 2024-2025 under the IMF conditionality. This policy will be devastating for small and landless farmers. Many farmers argue that even the previous year’s support prices set by the government were insufficient to cover their cost of production, but now handing over the price determination to the free market will break their backs. Turning a blind eye to these extremely negative impacts on millions of farmers is another ruthless policy.

It is evident that the government is implementing neo-liberal policies instead of protecting the interests of farmers, especially small and landless farmers, agricultural workers, fisherfolk, rural women, youth, and children. This has resulted in mass destruction of the working class.

PKMT remains firmly committed to fight for the rights of small and landless peasants and the working class. We will continue the struggle for food sovereignty, advocating for just and equitable distribution of land while ensuring the right to save and plant local and indigenous seeds, rejecting corporate control in food and agriculture. We stand in solidarity with the working class and will expose feudal, capitalist, and corporate land grab while promoting systems that empower local communities to control and manage land, forests, mountains, seas, and other natural resources.

Release by: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT)

We, peasants, farmers, farmworkers, Indigenous Peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, herders, rural women, rural youth and children, along with our organizations, coalitions, networks, and allies in civil society organizations, reaffirm the anti-imperialist position and the centrality of the peasant struggle for land, food, and justice in achieving sustainable agriculture and food for all. 

We recognize that the clear onslaught of imperialism in its many forms in the Global South, has caused immense poverty, hunger, has displaced millions of rural poor from their homes and communities, and has impeded their development as nations.  

We register our collective objection and resistance to US-led wars and militarism; its expanding corporate and private capture of the world’s resources such as lands and waters, and; the co-optation of climate-recovery solutions for data-mining, data-management, and appropriating resources for such. 

We oppose the US-backed Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Yemenis that continues to expand especially in Gaza despite reaching ceasefire agreements. And we decry its pivot to Asia Pacific, priming the region for war against China with ally states by building its military bases, clinching security agreements and military partnerships that embolden “counter-insurgency” programs, and holding big war exercises. 

We reiterate that imperialist expansion and capture of communities and food systems facilitated through technology, greenwashing, and supposed “carbon-offsetting” practices put market interest first before genuine development. The infrastructure needed for these  so-called “sustainable” and “smarter alternatives” displace  peasants and the rural poor from their land, uses up water resources and critical minerals needed by countries to build industries for their own development. These so-called “green-technologies” are not just directly involved in land grabbing and appropriating prime agricultural lands, forests and Indigenous Peoples’ sacred mountains for commercial and private use, they also rob our people of the right to development and the right to self-determination.  

We condemn governments’ sweeping neoliberal programs that convert land from sites of self-sustaining food production to serving corporate agricultural demand for profit that not only disrupt established farming practices but also displace and further marginalize underserved communities. 

We highlight the cases of rural people fleeing their homes and farms due to militarization in the countryside and how this is precisely coordinated with counterinsurgency campaigns by governments to inhibit peoples’ political expressions. Making use of advanced technology including its massive data gathering to surveil those engaged in agricultural-based labor, governments and its favored giant corporations collaborate in militarizing rural areas that help facilitate land grabs for so-called green projects, mining of critical minerals, and the corporate capture of food systems. It is clear that military expansion and agricultural digitalization go hand-in-hand in rationalizing the profit-driven production rather than collective nutrition and national development.

We clarify our position for technological advancements that genuinely uplift peoples’ lives and fairly distribute the fruit of peoples labor rather than prioritize private profit and becoming a subsidiary market for weapons development for war and mass coercion. In this case, war has even come to weaponize hunger itself. The technological developments of the latter kind must be clearly revealed as destructive, exploitative, and severely damaging to both the people and the environment. 

And lastly, we push and call for international solidarity of rural peoples and peasants with progressive pro-farmers organizations in the Global North to build and strengthen a broad resistance to the corporate driven climate crisis which is being packaged today to push for neoliberal reforms at the state level, as well as to the wars and militarism that ravage rural communities in the Global South. 

In this year’s Day of the Landless, we, the undersigned, reaffirm our commitment to arousing, organizing and mobilizing our ranks and the broad peasant masses as a formidable force against imperialism. Only through our collective efforts and action can we achieve just demands for land, food and justice. 

Our calls: 

Peasants rise for land!

Intensify peasant struggle against imperialist plunder, war and militarism!

Assert our rights to our resources!

Reclaim our food systems! 

#DOTL2025

2024 marks the 9th year since the Asian Peasant Coalition determined the 29th of March as global “Day of the Landless” to be annually commemorated in 2015. And despite the promise of improvement and development from the global north, the condition of landlessness persists and negligible changes have transpired to uplift the dignity and quality of life of the world’s rural people. 

Development aid and intervention are loans from institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, guised as rural and agricultural assistance programs that do nothing more than re-monopolize public lands and resources into state property or giant corporations to make foreign investments easily facilitated. These also push governments to adopt neoliberal policies in the interest of importing capital and exporting cheap agricultural and labor goods from the global south to the north. So long as these remain in effect, economic underdevelopment is maintained in the global south.

While outside political-economic reforms, imperialist-backed land occupation via military aggression and expansion have also become rampant since 2015. The United States has expanded its overseas camps in the Philippines, Japan, Australia, India, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to protect its interests in the Indo-Pacific region with the rise of China’s influence. It has also increased its military presence in West Asia by deploying thousands of troops in its bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, with small posts in Iraq and Syria. In a bid to “fight terrorism,” the US military-industrial complex expands to maintain military hegemony in both regions, provide support to governments’ violent counterinsurgency campaigns, and maintain backward economies. In both these respects, land remains as the most highly valued collateral.

Today, the most glaring form of landlessness and blatant land grabbing is headlined by the genocide of the Arab peoples in occupied Palestine by the Zionist settler-colonial state of Israel, with no little support from the US. From October 2023 onward, the Israeli state imposed a very rapid escalation of violence and even blockade of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, killing thousands of civilians in the name of Zionism. These brutal atrocities are material and historical developments of Western imperialist aggression initiated by the old imperial power of Britain and today led and facilitated by the US since post-WWII. Palestinian soil is home to local grains and produce that were once able to sustain generations of Arabs but is now a field of imposed famine and destruction, with the tail end of February 2024 marking a bloody massacre of Palestinians collecting flour from a supposed relief aid in Gaza when Israeli forces opened fire. There is not a clearer picture of imperialist aggression as a threat to life than the open genocide of the people in West Asia. What is being systematically applied in Palestine for the full institution of the Zionist Israeli state is a glaring future to what imperialist aggression can do to threaten the sovereignty of other nations in the global south. The Palestinian peoples’ movement on the ground and the clamor of those in the diaspora are more than justifiable anti-imperialist movements all peace-loving peoples must join and support.

The same logic of land grabbing and massive marginalization and displacement, albeit different in method, is being administered in other global south regions and rural communities. With a political economy that is still largely described as feudal and semi-feudal, South and Southeast Asian agrarian countries are easily adopted into global corporate agriculture and land use conversion schemes in the interest of the global north. These schemes are rarely peaceful as they often target defenseless rural communities with no little help from state forces and the military.

In India, several anti-farmers mechanisms are in place that are both political-economic and cultural; Dalit women, for one, are subject to the poorest living and working conditions determined by a backward feudal agrarian economy and the socio-political Caste system in South Asia. These conditions do not only render them landless but powerless in negotiating for better work, pay, and social protection. While in Chennai and Manipur, farmers and indigenous communities are actively displaced and left to scramble for food and shelter by numerous state projects for infrastructure and modernization such as the expansion of the airport at Parandur where 4000 acres of land will be taken away from farmers; on the other hand there is also the targeting of indigenous tribes for eviction to make way for palm oil plantations. Such projects do not account for the rights and liberties of the original rural communities or even the environmental damages it will cost. And so today, hundreds of Dalit women, farmers, and indigenous peoples in India are waging not just a struggle for land, but with it the struggle for social liberation and the democratic right to life, livelihood, and peace. 

In Pakistan, farmers are the first to be affected by the climate crisis coupled with anti-small farmer government policies favoring foreign investments. A shift in temperature targets not only the animals’ health but also the 8 million rural households engaged in livestock. The Pakistani government, despite its recognition of agriculture as a leading economic sector, neglects its own agriculture and relies on the big corporations and foreign capital intervention. This leads to rapid private monopolization of climate adaptation methods, agricultural seeds, inputs, and capital support. The need for the state to prioritize rural development is urgent in Pakistan where today it is in talks with the IMF for the disbursement of the final USD 1.1 billion for its long-term bailout. At the forefront of pushing for resolutions to its own debt crisis is the rural sector of Pakistan which has long figured out that only empowering farmers and genuine rural development can stimulate imaginable recovery. 

The situation in Pakistan is not far from the situation experienced by farmers in Sri Lanka. Last 2022, a huge protest movement that has gone on for months transpired in Sri Lanka wherein various social sectors came out to the streets to protest gross government corruption, intensifying inflation, environmental neglect, human rights abuses, and a deeply felt debt crisis across Sri Lankan society. These interlinked issues are a product of the neoliberal crisis in government in Sri Lanka that has gone on for decades. Again, the people are calling for a rightfully urgent agrarian reform and rural development program to address the immediate public need for food and economic recovery. 

To the east in Southeast Asia, agriculture and rural lands remain concentrated in the hands of landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, and large corporations via agri-business ventures entered by the state. As with land, its productivity is also captured by capitalist and imperialist interests through its cheap raw materials and undervalued rural labor power. In this region, land grabbing takes the form of reforms and government policies which are then state implemented with no little help from the military. Vast areas of land are concentrated for commercial monocropping instead of national sustenance; where Oil Palm is Indonesia and Malaysia’s largest agricultural export and pineapple and banana is to the Philippines’. In all these cases, rural employment is largely made up of agricultural workers that are deprived of rightful access and decisive influence on the use of agricultural land. Therefore anti-feudal and anti-imperialist movements in the region are actively fighting their government’s adoption of prescribed neoliberal policies by the IMF-World Bank when genuine agrarian reform is practical and within reach of the parliament. These movements expose that the interest of their people is not the interest their states are serving. In Thailand, farmers have long been organizing themselves against re-monopolization of land into the state’s hands and for this they are able to wage successful pro-farmer activities and collective cultivation.

In Myanmar, farmers are at the forefront of the democratic struggle for land and peace by waging resistance against the military since 2021. The 2021 Myanmar military junta has escalated aggression in the countryside, victimizing rural communities; and in the cities, anti-junta peaceful protests are quashed and activists are arrested. The 2021 Myanmar military junta, health and food crises brought on by the pandemic Covid-19, and open fascist tendencies of state armed forces are more than enough conditions for the people to fight back. In Myanmar, where 70 per cent of the population are small-scale farmers, the rural peoples account for the active people’s struggle for land and democracy. 

In both these regions, loyalties of governments unmistakably lie where capital flows, forcing the poor and marginalized further into the fringes of society. It is therefore only logical for the people to seize the streets, halt operations, and fight back!

This year, the APC marks the Day of the Landless and makes it clear that the rural peoples’ fight for land is part of a larger peoples’ struggle against imperialism. Chronic landlessness is not a natural phenomenon for the world’s poorest to experience alone but a historical imperialist project waged against the rural sector for military domination and corporate control over the people’s productive resources. 

We thus call on all to support the rural peoples’ movement against imperialism and empower the rural sector by recognizing the deceitful measures at play for the advance of monopoly capital! We fight to win for rural development, sustainable food systems, and genuine lasting peace! 

Rural people, defend our land! Defend our future! Defeat Imperialism!

Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) and Roots for Equity held the first Pakistan Peoples’ Caravan (PPC) on October 18, 2023, in Shikarpur, Sindh, as part of the Global Peoples’ Caravan for Food, Land, and Climate Justice. There are other caravans already organized for other parts of Pakistan in the coming weeks. The caravans will build up to the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) of the UN Climate Change Conference happening in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), from Nov 30 to Dec 12. Similar caravans or actions in various countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other regions are planned throughout October-November 2023.

For Pakistan in general, and for the rural communities of our country in particular, the COP28 provides an excellent platform to draw global attention from the public, mass media, and policymakers to the rural people’s demands to address the interconnected issues of hunger, land and resource grabs, and the climate crisis. Rural people’s movements are rising to confront unprecedented global hunger, displacement, and environmental and climate destruction. They are holding into account imperialism – the global empire of the wealthiest countries’ finance oligarchs and their monopoly corporations. We need to continuously strengthen and expand these movements for truly deep-rooted policy reforms to take place and address the multiple crises plaguing the world’s peoples, including the rural sectors, which are most vulnerable.

Speakers at the Caravan highlighted the plight that small and landless farmers, especially women are facing in context to the extremely high level of inflation, exorbitant cost of agriculture production that is being thrust on them based on the desire for monopoly capital to extract humongous super profits form the most marginalized, vulnerable sector of our society. Rural communities face not only the disastrous effects of neoliberal trade liberalization in food and agriculture but also that of climate imperialism; Pakistan’s monster monsoons of 2022 is one of the prime examples.

In response, rural people movements are rising to meet the challenges before us. We are tackling the unprecedented crises of environmental destruction with staunch determination, global hunger and displacement. Instead of addressing the structural issues underlying these crises and the failure to face them head-on, the UN has allowed monopoly corporations from imperialist countries to exploit the food, hunger, and climate crises to pursue a despicable plan to gain more control over and take advantage of the world’s food systems.   

While governments and institutions are forever promising to support the most vulnerable peasants amidst the ongoing climate crisis, many of the proposed climate solutions and promises are entirely false; in the first place the fossil fuel addiction of the imperialist countries is responsible for some of the worst calamities that rural people face across Pakistan, and the renewable energy solutions are also being used by monopoly capital to further exploit our communities and are resulting in further land and water conflicts across rural communities, leading to the displacement of these communities and the disruption of their way of life, while funneling public resources and shaping policies to fit into the corporate agenda.

We must not allow imperialist powers and interests to manipulate the climate, food and development agenda at the expense of the peoples’ rights and interests. If we want genuine sustainable development, are serious about achieving zero hunger, and are committed to taking real climate action to save our planet, we must expose and oppose these profit-motivated schemes.

We must break the chain of imperialist plunder through (1) breaking the domination of imperialism over global governance, (2) breaking TNC control over our food systems, and (3) breaking away from fossil fuel-hungry food systems.

We must shift the future through (1) shifting the bias of policymaking toward the peoples’ rights and aspirations, (2) shifting the control over lands and natural resources, and (3) shifting financing toward genuinely radical food systems transformation. 

We must work tirelessly to strengthen and expand our movements, pushing for fundamental, lasting policy reforms to address the numerous crises afflicting rural peoples and all working people worldwide.

Released by: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT)

The Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT) and Roots for Equity in collaboration with Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), Pesticide Action Network (PAN AP) are marking the “World Hunger Day’ on October 16, 2023 – a day which is considered to be World Food Day. A peasant gathering (JALSA) has been organized in Ghotki, Sindh.

According to a recent report by UNICEF and the World Bank, about 333 million children (one in every six children) worldwide live in extreme poverty, while 62 million children in South Asia are living in extreme poverty. The World Food Programme estimates that 345 million people worldwide suffer from severe hunger, while according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the number of people suffering from hunger in the world in 2022 was between 691 million and 783 million. According to a recent UN statement, another 745 million people could suffer from severe hunger this year. Apparently, we are in the 21st century, and it seems that high technological advances are also taking place, but the world is facing increasing hunger, with rural women being the most disadvantaged, who are not only suffering from hunger and malnutrition but also deprived of proper employment and ownership of their personal land, especially agricultural land.

Given that Pakistan has been ranked 99th out of 129 nations in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) report, where the level of hunger has been described as serious; food agencies such as World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), believe that more than eight million people are expected to experience “high levels of acute food insecurity.”

The situation has not been created in just a day – it is the consistent promotion of neoliberal policies that have pushed for trade liberalization in food and agriculture that have resulted in such a dire situation.

The intense land concentration, with just 5% feudal families having control over 67% of land is of course also a critical reason behind not only rising hunger but the intense indebtedness of the country. The small number of elite who govern our country has pushed it into an abyss of debt and pauperization; at the moment Pakistan has a debt of $85 billion which has resulted in a severe economic crisis forcing austerity measures on the people. The government has been begging for aid from different sources, and since beggars cannot be choosers agricultural land is being offered for lease to foreign entities. The government has created entities such as the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) that have an extraordinary presence of the armed forces. The SIFC is paying particular attention to privatization and investment, especially in food and agriculture, and will result in massive food exports. In addition, there is now land also being leased for corporate farming, with corporations being given priority over farmers, especially small and landless farmers. This is only going to have further grave consequences for rural communities, the bedrock of our society.

As a result of the IMF conditionalities, the prices of fuel have risen astronomically making it difficult for small farmers to continue food production. The rising debt of the farming community will end in exacerbating landlessness in the country.

The solution lies in not putting the country up for sale but in building self-reliance in food agriculture and national industry. Corporations and foreign direct investment will only leach the country of its resources, while reaping rich profits off our land and labor. It is critical at this juncture that we adopt food sovereignty as the base for our food and agriculture policy, with center space given to small and landless farmers, especially women in policy development and implementing. There is no doubt that by making just and equitable land distribution a priority can help the country to break the shackles of debt and pauperization, and also help in establishing a national industry.

Let us fight for Food Sovereignty, for Climate Justice, for National Sovereignty!

Released by: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT);

Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek along with peasant movements, food sovereignty advocates, and supporters of genuine agrarian reform around the world, mark this year’s Day of the Landless enraged by the renewed push of big corporations, the rich governments representing them, and the governments of poor countries subservient to foreign and private capital of their land grabbing in the name of development and so called climate friendly schemes in the pretext of climate change mitigation and sustainable food systems.

It is shameful that even during the Covid19 pandemic, instead of promoting and implementing policies that would promote sustainable food system, the United Nations directly supported and worked with mega business platforms and corporations to promote industrial-chemical methods of agricultural production that suit the very actors responsible for unsustainable food production directly responsible for the present climate crisis, that has even in the past few months reached alarming heights.

The major infrastructure projects such as the case of Northern Bypass, corporate farming systems including those being used in the dairy and livestock sector are responsible for eviction of small and landless farmers from their communities. Instead of promoting small farmers and landless farmers who practice traditional sustainable methods of agricultural production, our government is allowing free market forces to take over land, livestock, food production and processes as well as markets. A key example is the Pure Food Authority to take away control of the fresh milk sector from small producers and give control to huge corporations such as Nestle and Friesland Campina. Corporations like Pepsi Co are producing potatoes on more than 20,000 acres of land that is resulting in more and more agricultural workers to work on hunger wages. Digitalization of the food production system, an example being of the Pakistan Kissan Card is a dangerous element of trade liberalization that will allow further encroachment of not only agro-chemial corporations but also financial and IT corporations to control our agriculture. Critical food crops such as wheat production is being affected immensely. At the same time, increasing sugarcane production, a key biofuel crop, is also a contributor to drastic loss of livelihood for landless agricultural works pushing landless women to carry out backbreaking work in sugarcane harvesting just to access fodder for their animals.  These profit-seeking corporations are being fully facilitated by our state mechanism much of which is controlled by feudal lords.

The imperialist international financial system, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has imposed grotesque conditionalities based on which the small farmers, the landless, the women and children of the working classes face crippling poverty and hunger. The extremely high cost of agricultural production is leading to pauperization of small farmers, many facing eviction and being forced to sell their already meagre landholding.

Additionally, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to deepen the contradictions between the land and resource grabbers — the monopoly capitalists, finance oligarchs, local compradors, landlords, and bureaucrats — and the farmers, farmworkers, fishers, indigenous people, rural women and youth, and other rural sectors. Covid19 pandemic has led to new levels of global poverty and hunger that primarily impact rural peoples. Aggravating this are the wars and conflicts perpetrated by the competing interests of big global powers. The war in Ukraine that is being driven by the US-Russia rivalry, for instance, is exacerbating the already very dire situation of global hunger and food insecurity. Under the worsening socio-economic conditions of billions worldwide due to structural social inequalities the ruling classes are increasingly resorting fascist and dictatorial measures to maintain their power amid massive social unrests. 

PKMT stands firm in its fight for the rights of small and landless farmers, for the entire working class. We will continue to fight for food sovereignty, strengthen our solidarity with the masses and expose and fight all forms of feudal encroachments and corporate grab, while promoting sustainable food systems based on the people’s rights to land and resources and a healthy planet.

• Stop land grabs!
• Stop the fascist attacks and human rights violations against rural peoples!
• Advance just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems!
• Genuine agrarian reform now!

Release by: Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek & Roots for Equity

While AIIB asserted that it is a multilateral bank for the longest time, recent pronouncements show that it is ultimately a financing institution of the BRI with over 7,000 China-funded projects that focus on transportation, maritime navigation, energy, and trade spanning more than 60 countries in the Global South.

As a multilateral lender, AIIB has been consistently behind most of the BRI projects – as a co-funder or as a key lender. This will surely accelerate as AIIB President Jin Liqun declared to focus more on the bank’s own portfolio and sees the bank as a “twin engine” with BRI.^[i] More than 60 out of the 87 member countries of the AIIB are part of the BRI. As it is, AIIB is currently bankrolling China’s expansionist lending strategy that ultimately impacts the most vulnerable in the Global South – the rural peoples.

Last month in Hong Kong, PCFS together with the Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN) conducted a forum on China’s BRI and its impact on the rural peoples.  Discussions and accounts of the participants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America regions paint a dismal picture of the BRI projects’ impacts to rural peoples and the right to food sovereignty. Numerous cases of rights violations such as displacement, landgrabbing, harassment, corrosion of traditions, and aggravation of fragility in regions have been reported.

A threat to the right to land. Without adequate environmental and social assessment in the regions and countries, AIIB has been co-funding multiple BRI projects that are opaque and inaccessible to the public. As mentioned above, these include megadams, large roads, ports, and energy plants that often result in landgrabbing and displacement.

Today, China is the fastest growing landgrabber in the world. With over 5.6 million concluded deals and 12.7 million in the past decade alone,^[ii] the BRI is fast becoming one of the key drivers of rural peoples ruin in the Global South.

In Cambodia alone, around 370,000 hectares under 42 ELCs have been granted to Chinese companies, including the 36,000-hectare sugarcane plantation of Guangdong Hengfu Sugar Group Co., Ltd. in the province of Preah Vihear. Thousands of farmers and Indigenous Kuy peoples are being displaced to produce sugar for export.

In the Philippines, the China government funded New Centennial Water Source-Kaliwa Dam Project in Quezon worth USD 374 million. It was pitched to be funded by the AIIB, and is set to displace thousands of farmers and Indigenous Peoples while tens of thousands more affected.

A threat to the right to food. Securing China’s position in the global agricultural trade is at the heart of the numerous BRI projects in agriculture. In a span of 14 years, China has invested USD 98 billion in agriculture^[iii] – 75% of which were in the last five years.^[iv] According to a study by GRAIN , China has “gone on massive shopping sprees, buying up operations in global production chains like pork in the US and soybeans in Brazil, and gaining greater control over the global seed industry by taking on majority ownership of the Swiss-based seed giant Syngenta.”^[v]

These agricultural land deals include large agro-industrial parks in Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Kazakhstan, and Laos. The pressure of Chinese imports in Brazil’s soybeans is one of the key drivers of the catalyzed destruction of the Amazon forest and the ejection of farmers and Indigenous Peoples in the region.

In Sri Lanka, the BRI Colombo Financial District, which AIIB funds some of the periphery projects,^[vi] has dramatically reduced fishers’ access to their waters and decimated their fish catch. Beach erosion from offshore sand extraction for the reclamation project is displacing whole villages of fisherfolk.

The large-scale acquisition of farmlands and establishment of agro-industrial parks in Kazakhstan is a threat to the regional food sovereignty. Central Asia largely relies on the said area for grain and grain production. With China buying and controlling the agricultural production and supply chain in the region, rural hunger and malnutrition will not be abated.

A threat to biodiversity. According to World Wildlife Fund Hong Kong, China’s BRI will affect hundreds of already threatened animal species. This includes endangered tigers, giant pandas, saiga antelope, and much of the biologically richest real estate on the planet – some 1,800 important bird areas, key biodiversity areas, global biodiversity hotspots and global 200 eco-region.

The push of China’s BRI, with the full backing of the AIIB, will continue to adversely impact the rural peoples of the Global South. We call on the members of the AIIB to investigate and pursue the impacts of the projects funded by the multilateral bank. We call on the members and networks of the PCFS to actively engage their governments on AIIB funded project and demand for transparency and accountability. Finally, we reiterate our call that decisions and plans on infrastructure should be founded on the right of rural communities to decide their needs and development priorities. ###

• ^[i] https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/18/35/125/1557557982955.html
• ^[ii] Landmatrix (as calculated April 2019)
• ^[iii] https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/
• ^[iv] Ibid
• ^[v] https://www.grain.org/en/article/6133-the-belt-and-road-initiative-chinese-agribusiness-going-global
• ^[vi] https://www.aiib.org/en/news-events/news/2019/20190404_002.html