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Just hours before Gloria Arroyo, the Philippine president, gave her last address on the state of the nation, the politician Rafael Mariano introduced a resolution calling for an immediate inquiry into what he calls the “great foreign land grab” in the poor South East Asian nation of 90 million people.

“The rising number of land-lease arrangements the country has entered into with foreign agribusiness corporations involving hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland will only worsen landlessness in this country,” the mild-mannered Mr Mariano, who represents peasant farmers, said on Monday.

“The increasing trend of global corporate land grabbing in this country is a direct affront to our national patrimony and undermines the Filipino farmers struggle for genuine land reform.

“It is the height of stupidity for our country to bargain our lands for the sake of other nation’s food security, while being dependent on importation for our very own food security needs.”

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Farmer Kim Seok-man checks the melons he grows inside a greenhouse and the string used to hold the fruit in place in Yanggu County, Gangwon. By Kim Do-hoon
Kim Seok-man and his wife, Kim Chun-ja, work up a sweat as they check the melons they grow inside a large greenhouse in Yanggu, Gangwon. They are concerned that the string used to hold the fruit in place might not be strong enough to support the melons’ weight.

Kim said his melons are already 10 centimeters (4 inches) in diameter but he expects them to grow five more centimeters by the end this month.

“We are standing 300 meters [984.2 feet] above sea level and we never imagined we could grow melons because temperatures fall in the night,” Kim said.

Kim is witnessing a phenomenon fueled by climate change. Fruit that was mostly raised in the southern regions of the Korean Peninsula and other tropical regions in the world is now grown in the central regions of the peninsula because of the warmer weather.

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The net income per capita of China’s rural residents in the first half of this year increased 8.1 percent year-on-year, said the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in a statement posted on its Web site Friday.

A report surveying 68,000 rural households in the country’s 31 provinces shows farmers’ net income per capita in the first quarter reached 2,733 yuan ($400.12) per year, according to the NBS.

Farmers’ salary income per capita, which mainly includes a farmer’s earnings from working in a local or urban enterprises, reached 954 yuan per year, up 8.4 percent year-on-year.

Farmers’ cash income from selling agriculture products per capita grew 4.1 percent year-on-year to 1,124 yuan, said the report.

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TOKYO, JAPAN: A plant established in Shikaoicho in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido in March 2007 to produce biogas from livestock excreta is now the largest production facility of its kind in the nation.

The Hokkaido government built the plant at a cost of about 1.7 billion yen on about four hectares of land surrounded by wheat fields and ranches located about three kilometers east of the center of the town.

The plant is operated by a union comprising the town government and local dairy farmers.

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The Korea-EU free trade agreement, if it crystallizes as officials hope it will, should open a vast consumer market to Korean exporters – and bring cheaper imports to local store shelves.

The European Union market, consisting of 27 member countries with a combined population of 490 million and an annual GDP of $16.6 trillion, is Korea’s second-largest trade partner. Last year, Korea enjoyed a trade surplus with the EU of $18.4 billion.

Removal of the EU’s average tariff of about 4.2 percent on Korean goods is likely to provide great business opportunities and better margins for Korean exporters, many analysts say. The Korea Institute for International Economic Policy recently estimated Korea’s gross domestic product would expand by up to 3.08 percent a year thanks to an EU FTA.

Read more at Joong Ang Daily

VietNamNet Bridge – A research institute’s report on the impacts of the global economic crisis on Vietnamese farmers says that over 60 percent are strongly affected. The institute’s director argues that farmers need protection against land conversions and help in innovating.

The Institute of Policy and Strategy (IPSARD) is a research arm of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Its Agricultural Development Centre director, Dr. Vu Trong Binh, told Tuoi Tre Daily that the state must protect farmers better against the market’s ‘attacking arrows.’

“When we did our research,” Binh said, “we saw that almost all export items in the rural area, especially luxury products like cashews, handicrafts, even seafood products have strongly recessed. A lot of cultivated land is left fallow. There has been a more than 20 percent reduction of investment in agriculture.”

Read more at Vietnam Bridge

Foreign companies get permission to occupy and clear acres of land to grow rubber trees. But often take away the wood without creating rubber plantations. Thus they take from poor farmers what little they have to survive.

The Laotian authorities allow businesses to cut whole hectares of forest to create rubber trees plantations. But the poor peasants of the Mekong region are often left without compensation for the forests and lands that they cultivated and that were their only source of livelihood.

The farmers denounce that companies have only taken away hectares of wood without giving anything in return. Louna, village chief in Viengsai, in the southern province of Attapeu, told the Inter Press Service that in 2008 tractors and mechanical shovels arrived, felling entire forests and evicting poor farmers from the land they cultivated. The village protested to the authorities, but received no reply. Now many farmers are even deprived of the land to grow rice to eat.

In the zone around 60 hectares of rubber tree plantations were created, but they were not well cultivated, and for the most part have perished.

Read more at Sphero News

Global food supply concerns have revived fears of foreigners seeking to do farming in Thailand. Some farmers worry they could end up being little more than serfs.

Samian Hongto, a 60-year old rice farmer, feels intimidated whenever he hears talk about foreigners being interested in getting into agriculture in Thailand.

The owner of 30 rai in Song Phi Nong, Suphan Buri, one of the country’s largest rice production areas, worries that his children and grandchildren could end up being just the workers in fields owned by cash-rich foreigners, should they really be allowed to enter the farm and livestock business.

Mr Samian’s fear has grounds, as he and his neighbours have from time time been approached by Thai brokers seeking to buy or rent plots to produce rice for foreigners.

“We’re afraid Thais would become just the workers on our own land someday,” says Mr Samian. “As workers, we probably get paid handsomely in the beginning, but later on, we’re afraid of being exploited by those well-heeled employers.”

Mounting insecurity over the world’s food supply, especially of staples such as wheat, maize, barley and rice, has sent many food importing nations and food-based companies in search of farmland abroad to plant their own food crops.

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Indonesia has the second largest area of coffee plantations in the world but due to low yields it only ends up as the fifth largest producer after Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, and India, a researcher said.

Surip Mawardi, a researcher from the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), said last week that Indonesia’s coffee plantation area totaled 1.3 million hectares but its production was still less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“It’s very low compared to Vietnam’s annual production of 1,540 kilograms per hectare, Colombia’s 1,220 kilograms, and Brazil’s 1,000 kilograms.

“That’s why Vietnam is up from fifth largest producer to second largest, while Indonesia is down to fifth from third largest producer in the world,” he said.

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Agricultural extension, which refers to activities relating to the dissemination of agricultural information and technical guidance on farming, has had its golden and gloomy eras in Indonesian history.

Agricultural extension practices move forward in line with dynamic social, political and economic development processes. At the time when agricultural development was a top national priority, agricultural extension was dynamically improved. On the contrary, when agricultural development has been a low priority, agricultural extension remained gloomy and stagnant.

Regardless of the controversial impacts of the green revolution on socioeconomic and environmental resources, the historical fact is that the golden era of agricultural extension in Indonesia was the green revolution program. Agricultural extension has played pivotal role in increasing production of rice, Indonesia’s staple food crop.
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