In the first quarter of 2012, as many as 2,5 million hectares were sold by local communities to large Chinese, Brazilian, French, English, Danish, Swedish, North American, Qatari and Thai multinational companies. If we consider the period from 2007 to 2011, in the areas of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Australia and Oceania, the sales or expropriations took place for reasons that statistics classify as "food" (52%), the cultivation of crops for the production of bio-fuels (20%) and, finally, breeding (8%). The sub-Saharan area is the one most affected by this irruption of the capitalist market: land purchases accounted for 54% of all world transactions, explicitly connoting the role played in this phenomenon by China, which clearly aims to dominate the African continent. Oceania follows at a long distance, with 9,5% and South America, with 9,4%. In short, an enormous phenomenon which for the first time in history the FAO, the United Nations organization for agriculture and food, has faced due to the significant implications it has on the diets of the poorest peoples on the planet.
FAO's moral sanction
The 124 countries that are part of the Committee on World Food Security have unanimously adopted a resolution aiming to achieve a kind of "comprehensive regulation of globalization" regarding land transactions. The agreement was signed on Friday 11 May in Rome. They have been two years of negotiation, discussion and fierce search for an agreement. The drafted document should regulate the transactions not only of arable land, but also of forests and fishing areas in the world. It all started with the heated protests of the poorest populations on the planet and those most tied to natural resources for their livelihoods. For about a decade, they have seen the pressure gradually increase to make them abandon their lands for a meager compensation, or even through acts of real expropriation, not being able to oppose legal resistance to the expropriators, not possessing written documentation of possession. The rules of an ancestral, agnatic and secular community law clashed and clash with the mercantile exchange typical of the capitalist monetary economy, which destroys unwritten and customary rights with often unheard-of violence. From now on, both the States and the companies that do not respect these archaic and unwritten rights, as well as the cultural customs of the populations that are bordering on the expropriated lands, will be sanctioned. Only morally, however, because the rules adopted are voluntary and not compulsive. In fact, there are no sanctions other than moral ones; but this is already, despite all the limitations, a great result because for the first time 124 States have signed a document which calls for a correct reputational behavior of economic actors thanks to respect for customary law, inviting them to consult, inform and negotiate with the populations local, with the assistance of technicians from FAO and its committees.
A historic agreement
It will be objected that many nations have signed the agreement because no sanctions are envisaged. But this is only partially true: in court the agreement can be used as an element of strong defense of the rights of the offended populations. Certainly they will have to organize themselves and give themselves a political-juridical representation. You will be able to in this way build registers of landed property in every corner of the earth and thus create a civil society capable of enforcing the rules of trade regulated by law and not by violence. The era of unrestrained brutality that dominated land transactions both in distant parts of the world and in areas closer to us is over. A long journey towards written law is about to end. This is why the Rome agreement is historic and it is symbolically relevant that it was signed in the homeland of all property rights: the Roman one.
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