Land and Resource Use in the Philippines

CASID 2021 CONFERENCE

After The Mine Has Left: The Case Of Maricalum Mining In Negros Island, Philippines by John Edison Ubaldo, Kellyane Levac, Dominique Caouette The municipality of Sipalay in Southern Negros Island, Philippines is copper deposit haven. Interest in the copper deposits came as early as the 1930s but nothing materialized until a mining company started operating in the 1950s. Residents who lived to witness the glorious days of the mines would recall how “wealthy” their community was as household income would…

Philippine referendum to give minority Muslims control over land, resources (2019)

BANGKOK, Jan 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nearly three million minority Muslims in southern Philippines voted on Monday in a referendum on autonomy, a move that is aimed at ending decades of deadly conflict and granting them greater control over their land and natural resources. Residents in Mindanao region are being asked if they back a plan by separatists and the government to create a self-administered area known as Bangsamoro, or “nation of Moros”, the name Spanish colonialists gave to…

Why We Oppose the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (2010)

In recent years a new development has emerged, commonly known as “the global land grab.” With this new development, it has increasingly been acknowledged that large-scale investments in agricultural lands can have negative impacts in terms of human rights, social cohesion, sustainable food production, household food security and environmental protection for the receiving/host country. Declaring a concern to mitigate the negative impacts of such investments, various international institutions and national governments have called for guidelines, codes of conduct or principles to govern these investments….

Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing: an editorial introduction (2011)

Over the past several years, the convergence of global crises in food, energy, finance, and the environment has driven a dramatic revaluation of land ownership. Powerful transnational and national economic actors from corporations to national governments and private equity funds have searched for ‘empty’ land often in distant countries that can serve as sites for fuel and food production in the event of future price spikes. This is occurring globally, but there is a clear North–South dynamic that echoes the land grabs that underwrote…

The Agrarian Roots of Contemporary Violent Conflict in Mindanao, Southern Philippines (2011)

The decades-old conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines, is often framed as a Muslim– Christian conflict and reinterpreted as such within the US-led global war on terror, with the Muslim secessionist movement standing accused of providing a hub for international jihad. In the meantime, global economic integration has made it easier to ignore the agrarian roots of violent conflict in Mindanao, enabling national and sub-national actors, including the international community and the Muslim or Moro separatists, to dismiss the issue of agrarian justice. We…

The politics of agrofuels and mega-land and water deals: insights from the ProCana case, Mozambique (2011)

This paper examines the politics of large-scale commercial biofuels production and mega-land–water deals, with special reference to the dynamics of changes in land/water use and property rights and how these impact on the lives and livelihoods of the socio-economically marginalised rural sectors in the countryside. The main argument is that the assumption about existing, available marginal lands is fundamentally flawed. It is demonstrated by examining the ProCana sugar cane ethanol plantation in Gaza province in Mozambique. Authors: Saturnino M. Borras Jr., David Fig and…

The Philippines: predatory regime, growing authoritarian features (2009)

Over the past decade, and especially over the past few years, political corruption, fraud and violence in the Philippines have reached such alarming levels that many Filipinos have grown despondent, even cynical, about their country’s political system. Exploring the suitability of the concepts of ‘predatory state’ and ‘patrimonial oligarchic state’ to the Philippines, I find that the regime rather than the state is the more appropriate unit of analysis. I argue that the predatory regime, controlled by a rapacious elite, that held sway during…

The New Geopolitics of Food (2011)

In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between a $2 loaf of bread and a loaf costing maybe $2.10. If, however, you live in New Delhi, those skyrocketing costs really matter: A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to hand-grind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true with rice. If the world price…

The new farm owners: Corporate investors lead the rush for control over overseas farmland (2009)

With all the talk about “food security,” and distorted media statements like “South Korea leases half of Madagascar’s land,” it may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today’s global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations. So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies are the ones…

The Moro Conflict: Landlessness and Misdirected State Policies (2004)

The conflict in the southern Philippines is becoming increasingly complex, and untangling the knots for a greater understanding of the problem is no easy task. Yet underlying the many manifestations of a complex conflict is a straightforward political-economic explanation. This study represents a step toward a more systematic inquiry into the problem by developing a political-economic explanation of the conflict. It starts from two observations: first, the geographic areas in the southern Philippines where there is a significant if not a majority presence of…

Latest Posts